Talent Dividend News

The report holds few surprises for close observers of American education, but rather offers a comprehensive overview of enrollment and attainment from early education through graduate school, as well as information on how students pay for higher education and how they fare later in the job market.

 

More Americans go directly from high school to college than did in the past. In 1975, just over half of high-school graduates went right on to college; in 2011, 68 percent did. But college-going patterns are linked to family income: 82 percent of students from families whose incomes are in the top 20 percent move directly into higher education, while only 52 percent of those with family incomes in the bottom 20 percent do.
 

The study found that colleges serving larger portions of black, Latino and Native American students generally scored worse on measures of student success, like transfer rates to four-year institutions or the numbers of degrees and certificates students earned.

For example, California community colleges with the smallest percentage of students from those minority groups – ranging from 12 to 22 percent of total enrollments – had six-year completion and transfer rates of 57 percent. But those "success" rates were 45 percent at colleges with the largest shares of underrepresented students (49 to 91 percent).

What will it take to reverse this alarming trend? College with student bodies comprised largely of minorities tend to be under-resourced, but the solution is more complex than simply increasing the resources available to these schools. Instead, the Century Foundation recommends a revision of federal funding criteria that creates more accountability. 

Especially at the high school level, where there are differing degrees of familiarity with the improved standards, state and local efforts to implement the standards have not yet achieved their goals. This suggests that not enough teachers are yet ready for the necessary changes in curriculum that are likely to accompany the switch into a classroom environment driven by college- and career-ready standards.

 

Nevertheless, K–12 teachers tend to be generally optimistic about the value and potential effectiveness of college- and career-ready standards. This suggests that most of these teachers support the effort to improve standards and will work to help make it a success in the classroom. 
 

The study found that students motivated by a desire for autonomy and competence tended to earn higher grades and show a greater likelihood of persistence than did other students. (The findings were controlled for academic background and various other factors, and were based on surveys of 2,500 students at a community college and a liberal arts college that were not identified.)

 

Suprasanna Mishra and Steve Gacka might still be in college, but their entrepreneurial careers are well underway with jaw-dropping results. And it's all happening inside Ohio's borders courtesy of a welcoming business community and an array of in-state resources that cater to their professional and personal needs.
 
Mishra and fellow OSU undergrad Dustin Studer founded CapStory, a new social networking platform that puts privacy first, allowing users to create unique groups called "capsules" they access with any cell phone with text capacity. A capsule can share content, but keep it just between members.
 
"Ask anyone that's around my age," says Mishra, "and they will tell you they're getting sick of Facebook, simply because the privacy isn't there."
 
They pitched the idea to CincyTech, which funded CapStory to the tune of $100,000 last year. The boon was no fluke, but a deliberate daisy chain that goes all the way back to Mishra's high school days when he interned for Metro Innovation, which has ties to Cincinnati Innovates. Mishra followed that yellow brick road and ended up with winning $10,000 to develop StageShark, a concert connection platform.

At central Missouri's Columbia College, the hunt for students on the verge of graduating worked so well that the school plans to broaden its efforts to find bachelor's degree candidates who are just one class shy of donning the cap and gown. The private liberal arts college has already awarded nearly 300 retroactive degrees, including one given posthumously to the mother of a deceased former student. Another two dozen students returned to campus to finish up after hearing from the school.

 

"If this was being done nationwide, it could make a difference," said Tery Donelson, Columbia College's assistant vice president for enrollment management.
 

Here's a little known fact: With what the federal government spent on its various and sundry student aid initiatives last year, it could have covered the tuition bill of every student at every public college in the country. Doing so might have required cutting off financial aid at Yale, Amherst, the University of Phoenix, and every other private university. But at this point, that might be a trade worth considering. 

VA has other new programs that focus on helping veterans in college. The VetSuccess on Campus program places experienced vocational rehabilitation counselors on college campuses. They coordinate access to VA benefits while providing counseling to student veterans. The program started in 2011 on eight campuses and last year added 24 more colleges, including Salt Lake Community College (Utah), the Community College of Rhode Island, Kellogg Community College (Michigan), Washtenaw Community College (Michigan), Kalamazoo Valley Community College (Michigan), Tidewater Community College (Virginia) and Central New Mexico Community College. Another 32 colleges were recently invited to join.
 

Dual enrollment, an approach that President Obama lauded in his State of the Union earlier this week, is one of several ways South Texas has tried to boost the college preparedness of high school students, including pre-college counseling, academic camps, early college high schools and scholarship programs. But dual enrollment is the most extensive, and perhaps most appealing to students and their families, as the college waives tuition for participants.
 

Taken together, the high school partnerships have helped drive down remedial placement rates to 17 percent, an extremely low number for a college that serves a largely lower-income, first-generation college population. The remedial placement rate has dropped by 45 percent since 2004, and Shirley A. Reed, the college’s president, credits dual enrollment as being a big part of that improvement.

 

First, the foundation will seek to spur communities, employers, state and local lawmakers, and higher-education leaders to adopt specific goals and actions to increase the number of students who earn postsecondary credentials.

 

Second, Lumina will help colleges and states develop new business and finance models that will lead to higher levels of college attainment.