College Success Vs. College Admission
Posted: December 28th, 2010 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 15 Comments »
In an essay called My Charter School Fear: Bad Scorecard, a remarkably handsome guy points out a big challenge in No Excuses charter school world.
Another key data point we have is “college admissions.” Again, many good charters hover near 100%.
What is the true college completion rate? We don’t know. The data is hard to come by. I’m guessing, at the end of the day, 50%? 60%?
Via JoanneJacobs.com, there’s a Hechinger Report story today which poses a similar question.
What happens when a high school graduate from the inner-city gets a full financial aid package?
(I.e., not an academic scholarship for being top in high school class, but just for getting over a reasonably low bar of GPA)?
Already, 1,250 Kalamazoo Public Schools (KPS) graduates (pictured above), or 81 percent of those eligible, have taken advantage of free or vastly reduced tuition to any public college or university in Michigan, which costs the anonymous donors about $20 million a year in tuition fees. Students pay their own fees, books, room and board. Just 54 percent of the first recipients are either still in college or have graduated.
The article also examines some similar programs.
In Denver, half of the 199 students in the first class eligible for that city’s promise-style program came back for their fourth year of college, said Rana Tarkenton, director of student services at the Denver Scholarship Foundation.
So why is the college persistence lower than desired? Those interviewed point to the 2 “usual” culprits. I think there’s a 3rd one that is actually the biggest.
Culprit 1: Money
“I think that the reason why so many students have dropped out is because although tuition and fees are paid for, room and board is not,” said Kalamazoo Promise student Bobo. “These students still have to worry about books, computers and many other expenses.”
Definitely true of our grads. However, it’s rare that our grads who drop out for financial reasons are excelling academically at the time. I.e., we have few stories of B+ GPA and then out of $.
So it’s not clear to me that $ is the key driver.
Culprit 2: Time Management/Study Skills.
“The hardest adjustment for me is being able to manage my time, and being able to study effectively,” Bobo said. “In high school, I was able to pass through without studying too much. In college, you cannot get good grades without taking notes and studying every night for each class and reading your books thoroughly.
You must work hard. I’ve been told that college was harder than high school, but you never know what they mean until you’re here.”
“Time Management” includes creating a calendar of tasks (no longer provided by high school teacher) and having the discipline to follow it (no longer being nagged/encouraged by high school teacher).
“Study Effectively” includes sorting through lots of class notes and readings to prepare for a midterm or final that might simply be 2 or 3 essay questions.
We surface these issues in a big way by requiring our high school seniors to take Boston University classes (thank you BU), mostly intro level social sciences and humanities. First midterm? Kids don’t know what hit ‘em.
Advanced Placement courses have a similar effect (though the kids are already gone for the summer when the results come in — unlike with college midterms and first semester finals).
Culprit 3: Ability to “Deal With” Dense Nonfiction Texts
This is a mix of 3 things.
a. Vocabulary
b. Prior knowledge
c. Persistence at a particular “slow-pace” type of reading
Here you might re-read a passage several times to derive meaning. This is similar to the way law students read a case, or Talmudic scholars like my brother Shlomo read a parsha (the week’s Torah portion). A parsha might have about 2,000 words. That’s the week’s work. A typical newspaper opinion story is perhaps 700 words; a Malcolm Gladwell New Yorker story might be 7,000 words.
The only way to prepare kids for a dense, boring, college text like this is to try to attack all 3 aspects in high school.
So does MATCH do a good job with a, b, and c? What does MATCH specifically due to target these areas? I worry that their (generally poor) SAT verbal scores are predictors of a future struggle with dense nonfiction texts.
Also, does MATCH keep track of college acceptance v. college completion? What are the stats?
Finally, besides having students take actual college courses, how else can the transition from high school study skills to college study skills be made easier?
BTW, I agree that #3 is huge. Maybe not the main culprit, but certainly one of them.
I think we’re at about 75% college persistence or completion.
In a previous post, I described how a new company, Beyond 12, will help schools (including ours) with both a) tracking the data and b) comparing the data.
Who do we compare to?
The Boston Private Industry Council published a study of all Boston district kids, and found a college graduation rate of about 35%, which was about 80% for exam schools and 6% for open-admission schools.
I hope to compare to similar charters around the country so we can learn whose mix of a, b, and c (plus probably a “d” and an “e”) works best — then copy that.
A Harvard doctoral student once looked at a very small sample of college persistence in Boston charters, and our school was about 20% higher than others.
I agree on SAT, as it’s mostly “3a” per above (vocabulary test). While our kids are highest of about 50 urban high schools in Massachusetts, they’re lower compared to suburban SAT takers (although it’s not apples to apples, since non college bound kids in those schools don’t take SATs, while all our kids take SATs).
I love this — since one of my big hang-ups about the no-excuses schools with which I’ve worked is that, once removed from the school’s culture, I see a lot of kids who lack the intrinsic motivation to continue to excel/succeed, and/or the skills necessary to move from mastery of basics to the kind of synthesize and extension that is required to excel at a college/grad-school/professional level.
I think #1 and #2 are more easily surmountable that people think. A lot of middle-class students work in college and get by without full financial support. I remember balancing pretty significant workweeks with pretty heavy course-loads, and, actually, I found that several hours a day of changing adult diapers or waiting on customers keep me less histrionic about my college workload than I would have been otherwise. Similarly, working with alt-cert graduate students here in New York, I have a new appreciation for the number of people who manage to get through a BA program without being able to manage their time.
I have found a comparatively smaller number of students of any economic class who are able to survive, let alone excel in, a college setting without being able to read well. And I think the kind of ideas that really transform students and provide the meat of a solid college education can’t really be taken apart, tested, and internalized without the particular set of reading and thinking skills that, for example, the SAT verbal is designed to test.
I think anything that can be done to help students learn to read *well* — well enough to break 600 on the SAT verbal, NOT just well enough to pass the state tests (which I feel are totally counterproductive, at least here in New York) — is pretty much worth the price of a full financial aid package. I would argue that students who don’t read well get significantly less value out of college regardless of the school they go to, because they’re basically just skimming the surface of any given course — even, I think, a science or math course. The problem solving skills in physics are more like the skills used in analyzing a written argument or explanation than those used in a basic MCAS math problem.
I’ll also say that the other thing that was helpful in powering through college, was that college was presented to me as a privilege, rather than the natural order of things. If I was overwhelmed by schoolwork, the options with which I was familiar were manual labor or $8-an-hour service work. Not unusual – but, for me, knowing this was a motivating factor: I never really messed up in school because I knew there wasn’t anyone who was going to stop me from giving up – a really different experience than the one that MATCH works so hard to create.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to re-create in my own students the sense of agency I experienced in taking responsibility for my education — without, you know, actually running the risk that they will end up calling my bluff. That, I think, may be almost as big a challenge as the skills gap you mention in #3. You want kids to work like it’s all up to them — but, of course, you don’t want kids actually to be left to their own devices, since the actual yield of successes for that MO is relatively low.
Amanda: good thoughts.
Thorny question of when you “stop pushing” kids — even when it means, based on your previous experience and based on data, that they will likely give up on themselves (or as you aptly put it, calling your bluff).
It’s why I believe a useful public policy would be to essentially treat high school funding as an individual “School Savings Account.”
I.e., that way, you could “responsibly” allow a kid to “call your bluff.” She drops out. Perhaps works for a few years in the $8/hour service job.
Then maybe RETURN to school with both the sense of motivation you seek, and 2 to 3 years of funding * $15,000 per year.
Right now the reason you don’t want your bluff called is you know if you stop pushing and she fails, she’s statistically likely to have a LIFETIME of $8/hour work.
Too often a lack of intrinsic motivation is a direct result of students’ connecting in any relevant manner to the subject area material being offered.
If culprit #3 is the most notable reason the lowe level of persistence, then we cannot wait until high school to attack, prior knowledge, vocabulary or reading. In order for students to have “college opportunity,” students exiting grade 8 must already have in place a secure level of prior knowledge, an expansive vocabulary and an ability to read dense text.
Moving from mastery of basics to the kind of synthesize and extension necessary for success in college is a shared responsibility. This must be joint venture of K – 8 and 9 – 12 schools. In K – 8 schools where rigor is offered as a reward rather than a guarantee, too few students will even master the basics. Students in K – 8 settings where rigor is a guarantee, students matriculate to high school with the necessary intrinsic motivation intact to succeed in the most challenging of academic environments.
We cannot wait and hope that high schools will do the job that should have been accomplished long before that. Think of what could be additionally accomplished with the 200+ hours of tutorial time available to students at MATCH if they arrived with those skills intact.
Also, you have to choose the correct course of study that you’re interested in if not actually passionate about. You have to understand how your studies are connected to a career and other goals. You need to choose the correct school for that course of study.
That’s the problem with focusing on “college” as the end rather than developing the students’ passions and personal ambitions.
Also, the data that Big Picture has collected on the number of students accepted to college who never even show up is interesting. In particular a lot of students money problems are not “I don’t have enough money for school,” so much as “My family doesn’t have enough money period,” “I have to take care of my grandmother,” etc.
Mike,
My version of your blog post would have included a broader focus on what researchers (incl. Cliff Adelman, Bridgespan, below) refer to as “rigorous academic prep” and a clear statement about the relative effect sizes for each of the “culprits” you identify.
Bottom line: the single strongest predictor of degree completion (in terms of increased odds) is rigorous academic preparation in high school. Dense nonfiction texts is part of a much larger story.
Adelman:
http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/toolboxrevisit/index.html
Bridgespan: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/learning/Documents/analysis-barriers-college-access-completion.pdf
Thanks for well thought out responses to my questions.
Jennifer Hines, the chief people and program officer at YES Prep, wrote me with this interesting nugget (added with her permission):
I would offer up a fourth reason that many of our students don’t persist in college, based on what we’ve seen with our kiddos at YES Prep: social isolation.
We have an incredible college counseling team that works with students through both junior and senior years to help students make the most appropriate choices based on past academic work and intended major and on paper the vast majority of students who matriculate look like “good fits.”
Not to say that all our kids are academically solid — we do struggle mightily with writing and with non-fiction reading, and our kids generally don’t fare so well in science coursework in college. But many of our students who do not persist at all, or who transfer from their original school back to college in Houston, do so because they just didn’t want to tough it out away from home.
In alumni surveys that we’ve done, the vast majority of our students talk about feeling academically prepared for college-level work (which is actually somewhat scary – I had a student once whom I knew was a struggling writer in her senior year who went off to college and earned A’s in freshman comp when I knew that the quality of her prose and the underlying thoughts were not even close to A-level work…but that’s a topic for another day).
Our overall college persistence numbers, kids who’ve either graduated from college or are still enrolled, is 82%.
Where we’ve seen real traction, though, is in sending our kids to colleges in cohorts. Our persistence rate for those students is well over 90%. There’s something about having students in college you know, kids from your same background, even if you weren’t BFFs in high school, to help provide social support through the first couple of years away from home.
I wonder: can you fake a cohort?
That is — there are 40 high schools in Boston. Many are small.
From a kid’s point of view, the most likely scenario is that exactly 1 kid from your high school will go to any 1 particular college. So a natural cohort might not emerge.
But can you do a mini Posse Foundation like induction and just get, say, 7 Boston seniors together from 7 different high schools for just a couple meet-and-greets in May/June and create a partial cohort effect?
Or is that simply way too lame, and therefore no real help?
At Feinstein High School, a neighborhood high school in Providence, they sent 20-25 kids out of a graduating class of 70-80 to the URI Talent Development program every year, which included a summer induction program.
It wasn’t a formal arrangement between the schools, it just grew because the FHS kids were successful there, and led to FHS having the highest rate of college acceptance and retention of neighborhood high schools in the city.
On the other hand, nobody knew about it, because as far as the people at the school were concerned they were just doing their jobs, up until last year when the school was closed by the city/state/feds for being “persistently low-performing.”
[...] The difference between starting and finishing college might be skills to read boring texts. (Mike Goldstein) [...]
As a high school history teacher in a New York City public school, I assure you that you are on the right track with numbers 2 and 3 (I agree with 1, but am more uniquely qualified to comment on 2 and 3). Getting kids into a college mode — where they are responsible for their own work, are juggling various courses, are doing library research and are writing and revising papers as opposed to just engaged in some rote nightly homework exercise — is the essential thing successful secondary school does. My biggest challenge is probably getting kids to read difficult non-fiction texts. I teach American History to 11th graders and we read a lot of Supreme Court cases because not only do they frame the debates of American History, but students universally tell me that after they learn to read a case, other things like New York Times articles are much easier for them to read. The trick is getting them to think that reading Gibbons v. Ogden is important because it directly relates to whether they are going to have access to health care. My joke with the students is that I’m preparing them to be able to hold a conversation at an intelligent adult cocktail party. If we did that for poor kids, they would be able to compete a lot more effectively with the Exeter/Dalton/Scarsdale crowd.
Mike,
I wonder if the there would be any way to extend your faux-Posse idea into the summer, so that kids didn’t just meet in Spring, but participated together in some sort of college-prep “boot camp” over the summer – something that could have the dual purpose of building their skills for fall. Maybe a college-level course combined with tutoring at Summer Academy for a stipend, or completing some kind of service project a la Americorps?
I found my experience in college and grad school to be extremely isolating. However, my time as a MATCH corps, where most of the corps came from really different backgrounds from mine, to be less so, because we were working together on a shared goal that overwhelmed us all, with deliberate efforts on the director’s part to get us to look together each other for support with out specific challenges. Having even one colleague from MATCH in NYC when I came made the move feel possible.
So offhand, I dont’t think an official introduction and meet and greet would work, necessarily – but a accomplishing a shared goal together, being part of something, really might. And a full summer with access to a mini-cohort of rising college freshman would give staff ample opportunities to work the kind of matic, and develop the kind of healthy sense of exceptionalism, at which schools like MATCH / KIPP / HSA and programs like Prep for Prep excel.
…. in graph two : WAS less so. And, later, OUR challenges. And in the last sentence, MAGIC.
And, addendum: under no circumstances should iPads be any part of package deal for said summer scholars. (Remember when editing one’s thoughtswas as easy as scrolling up and changing fragments to sentences?)