High school rigor and good advice: Setting up students to succeed

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High school rigor and good advice: Setting up students to succeed We know that around two-thirds of the future jobs in the United States will require some sort of postsecondary education. Job reports show that by 2018, there will be 47 million jobs created by new industries and a retiring workforce(Carnevale, Smith and Strohl 2010). Of these jobs, 33 percent will require at least a bachelor’s degree and 30 percent will require an associate’s degree or some college training (Carnevale, Smith and Strohl 2010). The demand for workers with a college education is growing faster than the supply of graduates. By 2018, we will have produced 3 million fewer college graduates than the labor market demands (Carnevale, Smith and Strohl 2010). President Obama has set a national goal to produce 8 million more graduates by 2020 in order to make the United States the world leader in college attainment. One effective way to get us on the path to reaching this goal is to prevent the students who enter college from leaving before they earn a credential. Results vary between institutions, but overall in 2009 only 57.8 percent of students attending a four-year institution graduated in less than six years (Knapp, Kelly-Reid and Ginder 2012 ). Only 32.9 percent of students attending two-year institutions graduated in three years (Knapp, Kelly-Reid and Ginder 2012 ). If instead 90 percent of our current freshmen persisted to degree, we would produce an additional 3.8 million graduates by 2020 -- enough to meet the labor market’s needs in this decade and nearly halfway to meeting the President’s 2020 goal. Further, if graduation rates for 2-year institutions increased to 60 percent and 90 percent for 4-year institutions, they would produce an additional 6.6 million graduates by 2020—enough to meet the labor market’s needs in this decade as well as the President’s 2020 goal. 1 Main Findings High-level mathematics: Students improved their likelihood of staying on track toward a credential in two- and four-year colleges by 10 to 20 percent if they had taken high school math though precalculus and calculus. Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate courses: Taking an AP/IB course also had a dramatic effect on students’ chance of persisting even when students fail the end-ofcourse AP test. The more of these courses a student took, the higher their persistence rates were. Academic advising: Talking to an academic advisor in college either “sometimes” or “often” significantly improved students’ persistence rates as much as 53 percent. This relationship held true for students in two- and four-year institutions. In all cases, the impact was greatest for low SES students who began high school as low achievers. The logical place to begin is to examine first to second year persistence rates because students are more likely to drop out their first year than any other year of college (NCHEMS 2010). In this report “persistence” refers to first-year students in a two- or four-year institution, and are still in college one year after. This is sometimes called “first-year retention” or “first-year persistence”, and these phrases could be used synonymously in this report. Of all entering first time freshman in 2004, 79 percent returned for the second year of college. The rate is much lower for two-year institution students, with only 64 percent persisting. 2 Keep in mind, students who transfer from one institution to another are still considered “persisting.” However, many individual 2
colleges report much lower persistence rates because of the sizable number of students who transfer following their first year. This report aims to provide a better understanding of which students are not persisting past their first year of college, and what kinds of factors influence this. If state policymakers, post-secondary institutions, school districts, and high schools can implement policies that increase first to second year persistence, we believe it can dramatically increase the amount of students who eventually obtain a post-secondary degree. The main findings in this report point to the highest level of math in high school, taking an AP/IB course, and meeting with college academic advisors as factors that can greatly improve the chances that a student will persist to their second year of college. This report separates four-year from two-year institutions so that we can see the differences in their student populations and persistence. After describing the findings, this report will provide some suggested actions that school districts and policymakers can take to help improve student post-secondary persistence. Defining the Student Groups Used in This Study To better isolate the effects of the high school experience we controlled for the socioeconomic status (SES) and prior academic achievement of the students. This allowed us to compare students with similar SES levels and academic achievement. Although we could not control completely for other potential factors like student motivation, this approach still provides a closer apples to apples comparison of the effects of certain variables. There is a common argument that schools can only do so much to help students succeed because poverty and other factors associated with low SES, as well as the level of academic performance that the student shows are such determinant factors for success. While it is true that these can be related to persistence in college, this report finds that even after taking a student’s SES and prior achievement into account, strategies emerge that high schools can implement to improve persistence. In order to analyze the impact of these high school variables, we grouped the students in this study into several categories. We looked at students with high SES and high prior academic achievement, those with low SES 3 and low prior academic achievement, and those with middle SES and middle prior academic achievement. For the SES measure we use a definition used by the Reasoning for Student Group Rankings We chose to compare students between the 21 st and 80 th percentiles in both SES and 10 th grade standardized scores. There are two reasons for this: First, the number of four-year institution students in the bottom quartile of SES and achievement is very small. Conversely, there are not many two-year institution students in the top quintile of SES and achievement. If we used just the highest and lowest ranked students it would not give as accurate a portrayal of the characteristics of the majority of college students. Second, the student groups in this analysis do not represent the extremes of SES or academic achievement. Any differences between the low and high SES/achievement group is conservative. Surprisingly, this report did not have to compare the extreme top and bottom quintiles of SES/achievement in order to show the dramatic differences in persistence between both groups. 3
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