Fewer Options, More Structure May Improve College Completion

Fewer choices may actually result in improved student outcomes
Complete College America President Stan Jones is an advocate of fewer post-secondary program options, more course structure, and shorter time frames for degree completion. A New York Times article describes his standpoint: “too much choice and flexibility provides little more than the freedom to fail.”
nytimes.com

Pell Grants Fuels Increase In Community College Enrollment

The availability of more Pell Grant money has translated into higher enrollment at community colleges. A study found that the number of Pell Grants increased 56% from 2008-09 to 2009-10 and the total dollars increased 76%. Full-time student enrollment increased 14%, while overall enrollment jumped about 9%. The report shows that 70% of full-time community college students received Pell Grants in 2009, up from 51% the year before. But this increase may not continue becasue Congress seems likely to cut Pell grants in the next budget.

Secondary Students Take Harder Courses, But What Is the Impact?

Released on April 13 by the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), America’s High School Graduates, the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) High School Transcript Study, finds that the percentage of high school graduates completing a “rigorous” curriculum, which includes higher-level math and science courses, increased from 5 percent in 1990 to 13 percent in 2009. At the same time, the percentage of students who took less than a standard curriculum of at least four credits of English and three each in social studies, mathematics, and science, declined from 60 percent in 1990 to 25 percent in 2009.

 I am baffled why remediation rates and college completion rates have not improved given this impressive increase in college prep course completion in secondary school.

A Critical Look At Federal Outreach Programs- Trio and Gear Up

  There is very little evaluative work on these billion dollar longstanding programs , but our guest blogger takes a hard look at them.

Watson Scott Swail, CEO, Educational Policy Institute/EPI International

In the mid-1960s, as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the creation of the Higher Education Act of 1965, the Federal TRIO programs were created, originally consisting of Talent Search, Upward Bound, and Student Support Services. Together, these three programs targeted low-income students, many of whom were and are minority students. Talent Search and Upward Bound focus on middle and high school, while Student Support Services operates at the postsecondary level to help students stay in college.

The TRIO programs, since expanded to include offshoots of the original programs (e.g., Veterans Upward Bound Program), provide direct services to students. The typical TRIO program is run through a higher education institution, but Talent Search and Upward Bound services are provided at the local school level and SSS at the host institution. Perhaps one of the greatest challenges of TRIO is its inability to change how institutions deal with students, especially at the secondary school level. More on this later.

Fast forward thirty years: Congress reauthorizes the Higher Education Act and includes a new program called Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs. Thankfully, we just call it GEAR UP. GEAR UP does many of things that Upward Bound and Talent Search do (e.g., academic preparation; FAFSA completion, etc.), but the intent was for it to do what TRIO does not: push systemic reform in public schools. READ MORE…

3 Year College Idea Gets Impetus In Ohio

Governor John Kasich has ordered Ohio’s four-year universities to prepare pathways to three-year degrees. As part of the governor’s commitment to make college more affordable, his budget proposal requires universities to prepare plans to offer three-year undergraduate degrees for 10% of their programs by 2012 and for 60% by 2014. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, 04/03/11)

Wealth Trumps Income In Determining College Access

Guest blogger:  Su Jin Jez

As covered by the Chronicle of Higher Ed, my paper titled “The Differential Impact of Wealth vs. Income in the College-Going Process” finds that wealth and income affect the college choice process differently, with wealth consistently being more significant in predicting who enrolls in college, and the type of college they attend – even after controlling for student differences in academic achievement, habitus, social capital, and cultural capital.

Policy makers looking to level the playing field and make college more accessible to all American’s must address wealth’s impact on the college-going process, instead of merely focusing on issues of income.  Public policy has had an emphasis on promoting college access (e.g., affirmative action, financial aid, federally-funded TRIO programs), and we may be seeing the results of these efforts as high wealth students’ are no more likely to apply to college than low wealth students after we consider things like parents’ and students’ educational expectations and parents’ educational attainment. 

But while these policies may be getting lower wealth students to apply to college, we do not see the same results for college attendance.  Wealthy students are significantly more likely to attend college, attend four-year colleges, and, especially, attend most and highly selective colleges than less wealthy students, even after controlling for a variety of background characteristics.  Policymaking focused on income would miss much of these disparities, as income’s impact on college attendance is largely explained by students’ upbringing.

What might we do to address the persistent wealth disparities in college attendance, especially selective college attendance?  K-12 and higher education institutions must think more critically about how wealth affects the college-going process – and beyond the characteristics I aim to control for in this study, like academic achievement, and parent, student, and peer expectations.  The most effective policies in reducing wealth disparities in college attendance will likely require K-12 and higher education institutions to work together.  Together, they must analyze why lower wealth students expect to attend college, apply to college, but then do not attend – and it is not due the usual factors that are discussed, like lower levels of academic achievement, parental support, or even peer influence.  They must then work to ensure that processes and structures are institutionalized to support a frictionless pathway to higher education and an open system of communication to ensure that this alignment is responsive to changing student needs.

Su Jin Jez is an assistant Professor  at California State University , Sacramento

Chronicle of Higher Education article available at:
http://chronicle.com/article/Wealth-Trumps-Income-in/127044/

Full study available at:

http://webpages.csus.edu/~jezs/

Huge Class Sizes In California Threaten College Readiness

Even before the negotiations collapsed concerning tax extensions, California’s class sizes were ballooning. Now we are exacerbating class size increases, but there is no research to predict or understand future implications. Class size studies have focused on ranges from 30 to 15. Results are contested, but no study has examined the California’s “natural experiment” of moving many classes in K-4 from 20 to 1 to 35-40 to 1 in a few years.

Moreover, almost all research is on grades K-8, but high school classes in social studies for example, are climbing into the 35-40 range in several districts. We are flying blind into an uncertain future. The only cap on class size in California seems to be the square foot size of the classroom.

The latest round of class size reductions came in the 1990’s spurred in part by a well designed random control experiment in Tennessee. But the Tennessee classes were reduced from 25-27 to 15. The greatest impact on Tennessee seemed to be in K-2 grades for disadvantaged children. In 1996, California Governor Pete Wilson sponsored a bill to reduce class sizes to 20 to 1 in grades K-3. This reduction has been eviscerated by the recent state budget cuts, and most districts will probably exceed 30 students in K-4 in the future.

Research on class size impact in secondary grades is very scant across the United States. The secondary grades in California often have class sizes in 30-40 range, but we know little about how the impact varies depending on secondary subjects. For example, now grade 9 English classes are rising from 20- to 37 in Chaffey High School District.  California reduced English class size in grade 9 to 20 pupils, but no definitive evaluation was ever conducted.

Not only are class sizes being increased, but the support personnel for teachers (coaches, aides, curriculum specialists) are gone also. I talked recently with a staff development expert in math who took his promising approach to other states because of California’s huge classes and inadequate infrastructure to support teacher development. I was a part of the team that evaluated the 20 to 1 classes in California from 1996 to 2002. One thing was clear; parents preferred smaller classes even if they some concerns about teacher quality. What will gigantic classes do to parental support for California schools? What types of teachers succeed in very large classes?

 California research organizations need to study the impact of such large classes immediately. They will find little guidance from most current research base that uses 30 to 1 as its ceiling ratio – a class size California will only be able to dream about. Perhaps there are strategies to reallocate limited district and school funds that will reduce class sizes, but research is not clear on how to do this in such a constrained fiscal environment.

Hispanics And Asians Are Key For College Growth

School enrollment projected to continue overall growth
Public and private K-12 student enrollment grew 10% between fall 1994 and fall 2007. K-12 public and nonpublic student enrollment is expected to grow another 6% between 2007 and 2019. Hispanic K-12 public school enrollment is anticipated to jump 36% for Hispanic students, and 31% for Asian/Pacific Islander students.

Source: Hussar, W.J., and Bailey, T.M. (2011). Projections of Education Statistics to 2019 (NCES 2011-017). National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Washington, D.C.

Achieve Finds College Readiness Absent From State Accountability

Achieve’s annual survey of states found that half of the states use at least one of these critical college- and career-ready indicators in their accountability system (see www.achieve.org/ClosingtheExpectationsGap2011 for details). However, for an accountability system to truly reflect the goal of college and career readiness for all students it must use a rich, comprehensive set of indicators in multiple ways, including publicly reporting the data in a meaningful way, setting clear targets for schools to improve, and providing clear incentives and consequences that drive schools to improve performance and meet the established targets.

Despite some progress in states beginning to value college and career readiness in their accountability systems, for nearly half the states, federal accountability and state accountability are one in the same. That is, the state accountability system goes no farther than what the federal government requires. Given that reality, what the federal government requires for accountability matters. Current federal high school accountability, for example, requires state-set proficiency scores on state-developed, end-of-course or comprehensive reading and math tests once in high school and a measurement of graduation rates. This requirement is essentially silent on the level of expectations and certainly does not value or incentivize states that are organizing their education reform efforts around college and career readiness. In fact, current federal requirements – with the mandate of all students be proficient by 2014 and the sanctions for those schools and districts that fall short – may undermine the efforts of leading reform states.

USC Report Urges California To Expand Private Colleges To Meet Enrollment Increase