Will “adequate yearly progress” morph into “college- and career-ready” in the next ESEA reauth? (Politics K-12)
Can graduation rates help future college-goers — especially minority students — make better decisions about where to attend school? Ed Trust says yes. (Education Trust)
Remember the competitive spirit unleashed from being graded on “the curve” back in your schooldays? Well now the [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'College Graduation Rates'
QUICK Hits
Waiting for Sputnik
In the course of presenting a very interesting paper on international college rankings at an accountability conference I co-hosted yesterday, Ben Wildavsky made an observation that I strongly endorse: international competition in higher education isn’t a zero-sum game. In fact, I think there’s a good argument that America would be better off if we no [...]
QUICK Hits
Is it okay for teachers to sell their lesson plans online? Joanne Jacobs doesn’t see why not. (Joanne Jacobs)
What do you do if you’re in your last year as Governor and there’s no money for a big education initiative? TN Governor Bredesen isn’t scaling back on his ambition, only his timeline. (TN Commercial Appeal)
Could [...]
Inches, Meters, and Miles, Oh My!
Matthew K. Tabor takes to his blog to write an impassioned response to a piece I wrote, backed up by over 250,000 student records on the class of 1999, arguing the SAT and ACT mattered little in college admissions. His evidence? He The New York Daily News found a student who gasp! graduated high school [...]
Crossing the Finish Line: College Dropouts
Crossing the Finish Line, an impressive new book by former Princeton president William Bowen, former Macalaster College president Michael McPherson, and Matthew Chingos, relied on two massive databases on the entering class of 1999–one on 96,000 first-time freshmen and 30,000 entering transfer students at 21 flagship universities and the other on 108,000 freshmen and 42,000 [...]
A Question for Secretary Duncan
The Chicago Tribune is reporting that Chicago State University is in danger of losing accreditation, “because of ‘remarkably poor’ graduation and retention rates, as well as tumultuous leadership and finances.”
The article goes on to note that “the Higher Learning Commission cites several ‘grave’ concerns regarding the future of the South Side school that serves roughly [...]
Money for Nothing: The Private College Position
The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act yesterday on a largely party-line vote. While most of the attention has been focused on the dramatic overhaul of the federal student loan program and large new investments in Pell grants, community colleges, and early childhood education, there are some additional provisions [...]
Can you Get Seniors to Work Harder?
Many high school students headed to college tend to check out during their senior year, especially the second half of their senior year. By that time, they have applied for colleges and will either get accepted or not based on the work that they have already done, but the work that they do in their [...]
A Brand New Day for Federal Higher Education Funding
President Obama’s FY 2010 Budget Proposal includes the following:
Focuses on College Completion. It is not enough for the Nation to enroll more students in college; we also need to graduate more students from college. A few States and institutions have begun to experiment with these approaches, but there is much more they can do. The [...]
Obama’s Bold Goals for Higher Education
In his speech last night, President Obama said, “By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. That is a goal we can meet.” Not long afterward, a friend emailed to ask if I though this was realistic. Answer: it depends, as these things often do, on exactly [...]
No Cheese for You
Last week, the New York Times reported on the particularly hard hit historically black colleges and universities (HBCU’s) are taking in the current economic downturn. As the article notes, these institutions serve, often as a central part of their mission, a disproportionately large number of low-income students who are the first in their family to [...]
Nowhere To Go But Up
Readers who don’t live in the DC metropolitan area may not know that, in addition to numerous national private universities like Georgetown, George Washington, Howard, Catholic, and American, we the perenially disenfranchised residents of the nation’s capital also have jurisdiction over a single public institution, the University of the District of Columbia. Formed some thirty [...]
Flatline
Despite piles of research showing what works in raising retention and graduation rates, more emphasis on the need for college graduates, and new instruments to measure student engagement, ACT published data yesterday showing we still lose about a quarter of college students after one year and only manage to graduate about half of our students [...]
Too Much Information?
Higher education policy disputes in Washington, DC are generally about information. As a rule, the federal government doesn’t (and shouldn’t) regulate how universities conduct their academic affairs. So most new federal initiatives consist of lawmakers asking questions: How many of your students graduate? How much money do you spend? On what? And so on. For [...]
Not-So-Great Expectations
Higher education is haunted by a formula, which goes something like this: P/R=G.
The P stands for student preparation, broadly defined — the combination of innate ability and elementary-school and secondary-school preparation that students bring to college. Imagine those attributes normalized on a scale going from 0 to 1, with 1 describing the smartest, most well-educated [...]
The Minority College Graduation Rate Gap
Over the last five years or so, there’s a been a huge push among private foundations and public policymakers to focus on the problem of high school graduation. Only half of minority students graduate on time, we are told, a national disgrace. And it’s true. Yet far less attention is paid to the fact that [...]
Pearlstein is Right
Steven Pearlstein, that is, the Washington Post business columnist. You can learn most of what you need to know about why higher education costs so much and what to do about it by reading his two columns on the subject this week (here and here). Today’s piece focuses on University of Maryland Chancellor Brit Kerwan:
Kirwan’s [...]
Grad Rates: Woo!
My alma mater’s loss to Georgetown Friday was pretty heartbreaking, but I’m pleased to note, via Kevin, that we smoke them in the grad rate department. When I was a young Commodore in the late 1990s and frequently watched our football and basketball teams getting trounced by the rest of the SEC (note: nothing sucks [...]
March Graduation Rate Madness
The 2007 NCAA Men’s basketball tournament bracket has been announced. While nobody knows for sure who’s going to win, a few things are certain. There will be thrilling upsets, bitter defeats, and Cinderella stories. Jim Valvano’s mantra, “survive and advance,” will be invoked roughly once every 47 seconds over the three-week period. Seth Davis will [...]
Graduation Rates in Context
The new NCES report (“Placing College Graduation Rates in Context”) is worth taking a look at. While, as they note, there are major limitations to the Department of Education’s graduation rate calculations, the range in graduation rates among similar institutions is striking (and sounds vaguely familiar…). And, they found Black and Hispanic students succeeding most [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/05/10 | Andrew Rotherham's reaction to New York as a Race to the Top finalist is mentioned on National Journal.
03/04/10 | Andrew Rotherham defends the U.S. Senate's filibuster rule in a column for the New York Daily News.
03/04/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on college tuition increases in a CNN article.
03/02/10 | Chad Aldeman's False Fronts report generated a news article in Inside Higher Ed.
03/02/10 | Kevin Carey guestblogs about college accreditation on Higher Ed Watch.
03/02/10 | Chad Aldeman's False Fronts report generated a news article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.