Paper Provides Guidance For Research On College Transition

  Policy and discussion on the transition from secondary school to college has exploded in the last decade. But how can we figure out what works and why policy is growing across the states? A new paper by Michael McLendon at Vanderbilt and Donald Heller at Penn State is an outstanding review of much research to date. But their real objective is to provide concepts, data bases, and methods to understand policy diffusion and impact in the 50 states. This is the best compilation I have seen for scholars of state policy, and enumerates the needed data. But this kind of large scale research is difficult to implement as the authors stress.

 See Educational Policy, volume 23, No.2 , March 2009. On line at http://online.sagepub.com