Kevin Carey, The Education Trust
January 2005
The smart, productive Education Trust has issued a brace of new reports and related "web tools" that invite your attention. One Step From the Finish Line tackles the problem of student attrition during college and "focuses on the unusually high-performing colleges and universities that have much higher graduation rates than their peers - even after taking into account financial resources, student demographics. . . ." In effect, author Kevin Carey and colleagues are beginning to do for college graduation what "effective schools" researchers began two decades ago to do for high-performing K-12 schools. This report highlights a number of such campuses, using various metrics and analytic modes. Included therein are lists of colleges that have significantly improved their completion rates. You can find it here.
One Step is intimately bound up with, and makes extensive analytic use of, EdTrust's spanking new "web tool," known as College Results Online, which you can find here. It's cool but sometimes puzzling. I checked out one small private college that I know and found that its black students are significantly more likely to graduate (in 6 years) than its Asian students, and its Hispanic students (of whom there cannot be many in rural central Ohio) are more apt to complete their bachelors' degrees than its white students. Have a look for yourself.
Choosing to Improve addresses the huge problem of student attrition during college and asks why some campuses have so much more of it than others. In 17 pages, Carey explains four key elements for helping more students across the baccalaureate "finish line": The college needs to focus on getting its students "engaged and connected"; emphasis needs to be placed on the quality of undergraduate instruction; "new data systems" should help administrators and faculty track patterns of student success (and failure) and make needed corrections; and (perhaps obviously) campus leaders must "make student success a top institution-wide priority." To be sure, boosting college graduation rates isn't easy - and we must guard against efforts to do so by easing academic standards. But EdTrust's basic concern is not to be gainsaid: how much is accomplished by busting our educational backsides to get kids into college if they drop out shortly after arriving? Find it here.
