Senior Year In High School Is Complex But Lacks Impact on College Persistence

  The Consortium for Chicago School Research has been conducting intensive studies of the Chicago public schools senior year of high school through both quantitative and qualitative methods. They are presenting several new papers at AERA in San Diego next week. Here is a preview of one of them by Eliza Moeller and Karen Riddie.

Conclusion

The picture of senior year in the Chicago Public Schools that emerges from this work is confusing. Several findings stand out from this analysis. First, the level of challenge and engagement experienced by students in our qualitative sample is overall quite low, though there is also significant variation in students’ experiences. Second, with the exception of students in the Advanced College Prep category, having a transcript with more advanced courses in senior year does not appear to be related to the level of challenge and engagement a student feels in his or her classes. Third, while English courses appear to provide students with at least one challenging course and math courses can range from very challenging to not challenging at all, Career and Technical Education coursework contributed significantly to students’ perception that senior was the easiest year of high school. Finally, students’ perception of challenge and engagement both within and across their courses senior year appeared to be strongly associated with the school students attended – more so than the coursework they completed.

Though these findings are counter-intuitive in many ways, they may help shed light on the findings from the first paper in this series. Specifically, that analysis concluded that though taking more advanced courses in senior year had a significant impact on students’ access to college, it had less of an impact on college persistence. If it is indeed the case that students who took more advanced coursework did not experience a more challenging senior year, then it may also be the case that these students – though appearing more qualified on paper – did not actually engage in a deeper level of skill-building that would have prepared them better to succeed once enrolled in college. Further analysis is being conducted on these findings, and this will be the subject of an upcoming report by the Consortium on Chicago School Research.

ACT and SAT Not Good Predictors of College Graduation

ACT and SAT have traditionally been used for predicting first year grades and not graduation. But the USA policy conversation has shifted to college completion through president Obama’s leadership. Here is a new blockbuster study soon to be released in a forthcoming book- Crossing The Finish Line by former Princeton president Bill Bowen and Spencer Foundation head Mike McPherson. ACT and SAT 1 reasoning bear almost no relationship to college completion after high school course grades and SAT2 subject tests are taken into account.

High school grades are the best predictor of college graduation. They are followed by AP exams and SAT 2 subject matter tests like world history. Why should so much focus be put on first year grades when college completion is the real goal?? Perhaps admissions officers should rethink their criteria.

Meeting Obams Goals For College Completion Will Be Difficult

Obama wants the USA to be the first in the world in completion of college certificates and degrees by 2020. But there is a steep hill to climb. From 1960 to 1980, the relative supply of college workers rose 3.77 percent per year, but between 1980 and 2005 , it rose just 2 percent a year. This low completion rate has been going on for a long time and is embedded in the way our k-16 institutions operate and are funded. Many things must change at once to make major improvements. However, the new Undersecretary of Education, Martha Kanter has a better grasp of  how to overcome this trend than recent federal officials.

Kanter Appointment Is Good News For College Transiton From Secondary School

Martha Kanter was nominated for Undersecretary of Education. She is the Chancellor of the community college district that is in my  California county. I have spoken with her many times and she really understands the problems of college preparation for broad access postsecondary education. Moreover, she understands the fundamental disjuncture between secondary and higher education that creates poor preparation. Martha taught at the high school level and worked for ETS. She grasps the inadequate signals secondary students get about standards and expectations at the college level. She has crafted specific ideas on how to improve college transition. I think she is the first community college person to hold such a high level position in the Office or Department of Education.  Her perspective will be essential to meeting Obama’s goal of imroving postsecondary persistence and completion.

National Standards Need To Include College Preparation

 The journal Education Next has a fine debate on the desirability and design of national k-12 standards between Chester Finn and Deborah Meier- Spring 2009, www.educationnext.org 

 But neither author addresses how to involve higher education in setting these standards, so we would repeat the mistake in the 1990’s of formulating national standards in isolation of  explicit college considerations. Moreover, the debaters feature common content by Finn and habits of mind like contrasting views by Meier, without emphazing that students need both of these perspectives to succed in college. Finn suggests secondary schools use IB as a national standard, but bringing IB to national scale seems very difficult and probaby unrealistic. Overall, this is a good debate on a topic with growing interest.

The Illusion Of College Financial Aid

Guest blogger Paul Wrubel studies and counsels students on college financial aid. He can be reached at his firm, www.tuitioncoach.com

Again this year, millions of hopeful Americans completed the FAFSA and CSS Profile forms in order to qualify for need-based financial aid.  They paid attention to deadlines and tried to follow the rules out of an innate sense of honesty and a desire to play it straight.  They did their job.

For their troubles, the promised outcomes rarely if ever occurred.  Financial aid awards across the nation reflected a different reality with different rules.  Families at any income and a few dollars left in the bank, were routinely short-sheeted by the colleges’ aid awards.  If a family reporting an income of $65,000 were judged by their financial aid award, you might guess that the family had an income of $90,000 or even more.  For millions of American families the college financial aid system is a cruel hoax.

For years, I have led the chorus to simplify the FAFSA so that families can more readily apply for need-based aid but with every passing year, it is clear that would merely add to the growing chorus of disillusioned Americans.  What real benefit is there to be admitted to a theatre for free if the play is bad?  Simplification of the financial aid paperwork would merely add to the audience of disappointed and increasingly angry college-bound students and their families.  But the illusion runs much deeper than paperwork.

Just this week, I spoke with a family who had submitted precisely the same financial and demographic information to three private colleges, two in Massachusetts and one in Oregon.  Each college received exactly the same numbers.  Two colleges responded with offers that suggested a family contribution of $19,000 and $32,000 while a third proclaimed that the family did not qualify for one cent of aid making their family contribution a whopping $52,000+ or an assumption of an income of around $200,000.  Same numbers, same formula, different outcomes.  Why?

The mechanics of the system aside, the issue is money.  Colleges can’t offer aid if they don’t have the money.  The primary reason for this fiscal deficit is that the federal government and in some cases the state government who may have had a hand in creating the system, have failed to contribute sufficient funds to ensure its ongoing viability.  Federal and state contributions in support of need-based financial aid haven’t begun to keep pace with the realities of inflation or any accepted measure of cost-of-living adjustments.  While college costs for families have risen by more than 100% over the last couple of decades, during that same period the per-pupil influx of public aid has increased only about 20-30%.  Family incomes may have grown by an even smaller increment in that time frame.  The outcome of this scenario leaves the colleges holding the financial aid bag and they simply don’t have the resources to deal with it.  So families try their best to fill in the gap and they usually do so by cashing in their retirement funds or pulling equity out of their homes or taking on more work if they can get it.  All of this, of course, will come back and haunt this nation when it has to come to grips with the long-term fallout, an impoverished generation of senior citizens financially neutered by unexpected college costs, a large and growing population that will be on the retirement public dole for thirty or more years because we as a society failed to adequately support their kids during a mere four years of college.

There is a solution but it will likely have to come from people who are not stakeholders in the current mess.  It won’t come from the bureaucrats who have jobs because of the complexity and the Wizard-of-Oz nature of the current system; it won’t come from Congress because they may have to admit that they had created a monster and Congress rarely acknowledges fallibility; it probably won’t come from colleges because under the present system there are no rules beyond procedural issues and not a scintilla of enforcement oversight relating to meeting the calculated financial needs of families; it won’t come from the usual think-tank suspects who tend to reform embedded systems rather than create new models based upon new paradigms reflecting the lives and realities of actual people; and it won’t come through prayer. It will be the creation of a group of really smart, focused people who can rise above toxicity of politics and their own self-interest, people who care deeply about and understand the value of education and people who have a visceral appreciation of the pressures on families, on colleges and on public fiscal resources and policies.

Whatever we do we had better do it quickly.  Time is not our ally in this matter.  Colleges will begin to close, talent waiting to be developed and refined tends to have a short shelf life, and families will continue to be impoverished by college costs every minute of every single day. The meter is running and the fate of this great democracy may be hanging in the balance.    

K-16 Longitudinal Data Is On A Slow Track

Achieve has published its annual review of state data systems and only 9 states currently have a k-16 longitudinal data system, but 38 are working on it. Many like California have been working on it for over a decade. Much more progress is being made on k-12 data which is a priority for NCLB compliance. Surveys show that even the 9 states who have k-16 data are not using it much for state decision making. You cannot have accountability across education levels without data as a basis. Will the 250 million from the stimulus for education data help?

For an overview of  state data status see SHEEO Network News , February2009, www.sheeo.org

Understanding Placement Exams

Placement exams are the crucial standard  students confront when they enter broad acess postsecondary education, and the pathway to credit-level courses.  Many of  students work many hours while attending postsecondary education.   K-16 connections are inadequate, and prospective students receive weak and confusing signals about necessary academic preparation to pass placement exams.   Secondary school students know they will be admitted if they meet minimum GPA and course requirements, or are over 18, so they often take few academic courses in their senior year.  Consequently, they are not prepared for placement exams. 

Research and information on the content, K-16 alignment, reliability, and necessary preparation for placement exams is scant, and not well publicized to prospective students or secondary schools.  The content and cognitive demands of placement exams are a “dark continent” in terms of the research literature when compared to the SAT or ACT research base.  Students are admitted under one standard, but placed in credit courses or remediation on another standard that is often much higher (e.g. some Algebra II). Secondary school students wrongly believe that their high school graduation requirements are sufficient for postsecondary credit-level work, and rarely know about placement failure that leads to starting college in remedial, non-credit courses.  Students who begin in remedial reading and math courses have a lower probability of finishing their desired academic program (including vocational education certificates).  Remediation is a poor pathway from high school to college, while being able to enter credit-level course leads to better outcomes.

Placement exams have not been part of the K-12 standards movement that has swept across the U.S.  Indeed, the entire K-12 standards movement has lacked participation and buy-in from com college policymakers, because standards policies are made in separate K-12 and higher education orbits that rarely intersect.  While there are some new encouraging developments, however, such as revising SATI, the K-16 dialogue has not extended to placement exams.   Broad access institutions use SAT or ACT for admissions decisions on a very occasional basis.  College Placement exams are extremely diverse with many institutions using academic departmental faculties to devise a local exam.  National products like Accuplacer and Compass have a substantial share of the market.

High School Students: You Cannot Make Up For Poor Preparation In Community College!

Many students think they can loaf through high school and make up for it in college. But at a recent conference the consensus was that if you are two remediation levels below college credit on a community college placement test you have a 12% chance of ever reaching the college level.  Very large percentages are two levels below credit level. High school students need clearer and precise signals on community college credit level standards and placement tests. Often they think the high school exit exam is a good indicator of college readiness, but most state exams are way below college credit cut scores on placement tests.

Studies Of Community Colleges Indicate Students At Higher Risk Of Not Completing

Several studies have indicated that similar students who attend a community college rather than a 4 year college are less likely to complete a 4 year degree. In other words, if you can enroll at a 4year school , it increases you chances of completion. Two studies by Professor Will Doyle at Vanderbilt add to this research base

Doyle, W. R. (2009). The effect of community college enrollment on bachelor’s degree
completion. Economics of Education Review, 28(2):199–206

Abstract: Rouse [Rouse, C. E. (1995). Democratization or diversion—the effect of community-colleges
on educational-attainment. Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 13(2), 217–224] finds
that enrollment in a community college may divert students from attaining a bachelor’s
degree. However, this result may be due to selection bias, as the population of community
college students should be quite different from those who attend 4-year institutions in
terms of both observable and unobservable characteristics. This study uses propensity score
matching to non-parametrically balance a data set from the 1996 Beginning Postsecondary
Students survey in order to overcome issues associated with selection bias. Results from a
Cox proportional hazards model indicate that attendance at a community college lowers
the hazard rate for completing a bachelor’s degree. The results are consistent with previous
studies.

Doyle, W. R. (2009c). Impact of increased academic intensity on transfer rates: An application of
matching estimators to student-unit record data. Research in Higher Education, 50(1):52–72

Abstract The impact of increased academic intensity on transfer rates from community
colleges to 4-year institutions has been estimated only from observational data, with the
possibility of selection bias. This study uses matching estimators to overcome possible
selection bias and estimate the causal impact of increased academic intensity on transfer
rates. Using student unit record data from Tennessee for the years 1995 through 2004,
I find that taking 12 or more credit hours increases the probability of transfer from between
11% and 15%.