Posts published in January, 2010

Student Success Programs May Provide More Benefit Than Costs

Student success” programs of various types – learning communities, first-year experience programs and the like – have proliferated on college campuses, driven by the reality that it’s easier to keep current students than recruit new ones. The programs are popular, but are open to scrutiny about their effectiveness – and cost effectiveness. A new report suggests that a majority of the programs have produced gains in retention that went a long way toward offsetting their costs. Most of the others did not have the necessary statistics to complete the analysis. (Inside Higher Ed, 01/06/10)

But there are cases where it is a lot less expensive to recruit a new student than provide services to a struggling college student. For example, many community colleges have more students who want to attend than there are classes or teachers.

New Report Provides Guidance For Improving Transition From Secondary Scchool to College

The National Center  For Public policy And Higher Education has just released a new report, now available on the Web site:

http://www.highereducation.org/reports/ssc/index.shtml

States, Schools, And Colleges: Policies to Improve Student Readiness for College and Strengthen Coordination Between Schools and Colleges (November 2009, #09-2). The authors examine what has been tried and learned about state policy leadership in bridging the divide between K-12 schools and postsecondary education. It includes a  nationwide survey and case studies of state p-16 council effectiveness ,and an overall roadmap for state policy concerning college readiness.  Authors include David Spence, Michael Usdan, Michael Kirst, Nancy Shulock, and Erin Walsh

Many Criticisms of State Common Core Curriculum Standards

NGA and CCSSO are using the public comments to inform the final version of the college- and career-readiness standards. To that end, a summary of the public feedback NGA and CCSSO received is available at: http://www.corestandards.org/Files/CorePublicFeedback.pdf 

  46 states are participating in this effort and it is part of the Obama Race To The Top. This phase focuses upon content standards for college and career readiness.