Everybody's Business

What do students look like who delay college? As reported in Inside Higher Ed, students who delay college are:

six times more likely to come from families in the bottom 20 percent of socioeconomic distribution (as compared to the top 20 percent, the contrast used in all the study’s conclusions); whereas 31 percent of students in the bottom quintile delayed college, only 5 percent of those in the top quintile did so. And while the lowest-income students took an average of 13 months off, the highest-income gappers took only 4.5 months off, on average.

What’s more, studies show that more time off also increases time-to-degree — and lessens the likelihood of college completion. (One study mentioned in the report found that students who delayed enrollment for a year were 64 percent less likely to complete a bachelor’s degree.)

Why do students drop out?  A Michigan State study learned from over 1,100 students at 10 colleges that:

College students who consider dropping out are particularly sensitive to a handful of critical events including depression and loss of financial aid, according to a study led by Michigan State University scholars.

What are effective ways to help students pay for college? According to a report by Exelencia,

effective strategies include campus-based work-study programs, guaranteed need-based scholarships, and emergency loans and installment/payment plans for them.

Providing evidence of student learning, from the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment.

Literature delaying college

Vets rate the new GI bill.  From a summary at Inside Higher Ed,

lengthy hold times on VA hotlines, inconsistent credit transfer policies within institutions, delayed payments from the VA and a fundamental lack of clarity about what the checks that the VA sends are even intended to cover.

There are bright spots, however. Veterans were particularly pleased, for instance, with the bill’s coverage of expenses beyond tuition, including living allowances and book stipends. About one-quarter of respondents also said the new GI Bill had driven their decision to enroll in higher education.

Border universities deal with violence from Mexico

Making a case for strategic rather than across the board budget cuts

California upholds law saying some undocumented students can receive in-state tuition

Support, Uncategorized border, budget, budget cuts, support, undocumented students, veterans

The 2010 edition of the College Pays series was released this week.  The Executive Summary highlights these benefits of a college education, among others:

• People with a college degree have a higher employment rate and higher wages and are more likely than non-college grads to have health insurance and a pension plan.
• College grads spend more hours volunteering and enjoy better health.
• College grads then to be more educationally engaged with their children.

The report also noted that access to higher education by underrepresented groups is still an issue.

Uncategorized

From The iConnected Parent: Staying Close to Your Kids in College (and Beyond) While Letting Them Grow Up (Free Press), Barbara K. Hofer and Abigail Sullivan Moore:

• Using the cell phone to provide wake up calls for their kids or to remind them of an upcoming test or paper.
• Asking for copies of a student’s syllabuses in order to provide reminders about due dates.
• Expecting to hear from their child every day. (And calling the college in a panic if they don’t.)
• Using their child’s e-mail to register their child for classes and conduct other college business.
• Editing their child’s college papers and assignments by email.
• Responding to a child’s complaint about a professor by contacting the professor.
• Become overly involved in the ups and downs of a child’s social or romantic life.
• Reading a child’s Facebook site constantly and asking personal questions or making judgments about the content.
• Getting involved in a child’s ordinary roommate conflicts by contacting the roommate, the roommate’s parents, resident adviser, or other college housing official.

From an article in Inside Higher Ed.

Families communication, families, parents, support

A new statement of principles adopted by higher education leaders from 17 countries to assess the quality of graduate education and research training includes student services in its primary objective:

The primary objective of quality assessment is to ensure and improve the quality of (post)-graduate training and student learning and professional development. Evaluation must go beyond the assessment of research quality to address topics such as:

• Admission criteria and recruitment
• Student Learning Outcomes, including transferable skills
• Mentoring and supervising structures
• Infrastructure for (post)-graduate student training
• Quality of student experience
• Measures of completion and attrition
• Career placement both inside and outside academe

The agreement was reached at the Fourth Annual Strategic Leaders Global Summit, Sept. 13-15 in Brisbane, Australia.

Assessment admissions, assessment, Career Services, mentoring, student services

The Chronicle of Higher Education just released an article that discusses a report by the University of Southern California’s Center for Urban Education’s research regarding the need to increase the number of Latino students with degrees in science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Findings: Since community colleges educate the majority of Latino students in the US, it makes sense to strengthen transfer access in order to see more Latinos complete a bachelor’s degress in a STEM field.

PRIMOS access, STEM, success, support, transfer

University of Texas considers requiring students complete their degree in 10-semesters to deal with a shortage of space for students.

How the new credit card regulations will affect college students, and yet more on this topic.

What happens when video essays for college admissions are posted online.

A Temple University experiment addresses student issues such as minimal or irregular sleep and unusual work
schedules that make
weight control difficult.

According to a study reported in Inside Higher Ed, high school counselors are not giving students effective help in enrolling in college.

The number of institutes classified as Hispanic Serving is increasing and includes a surprising number of private colleges.

PRIMOS counselors, credit cards, families, financial literacy, graduation rates, HSI, PRIMOS

Press Release: WASHINGTON, DC — New Mexico and seven other states will join with the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) to use the world’s best instructional systems and examinations to dramatically increase the number of students who leave high school ready to succeed in college. Students who show they are ready to do college level work will be able to get their diploma and enroll in college as early as the end of their sophomore year in high school.

In February, NCEE President Marc Tucker announced that Connecticut, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont will work with NCEE through a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to improve the performance of high school students by adopting powerful instructional systems that actually set the international standards.

“By introducing these Board Examination Systems in pilot high schools in these states as early as the 2011-2012 school year, we will begin a process that will ultimately prepare dramatically more students for college success and greatly reduce the high number of students who now take remedial courses in college,” said Tucker.

NCEE has a long track record of analyzing and benchmarking the highest performing education systems around the world. Over the years, it has found that in countries where
the majority of students perform at high levels, two factors stand out. One is that teachers are recruited from the top-third of college students, and the other is that Board Examination Systems are used to
drive learning to high levels.

Board Examination Systems currently are in place in Australia, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Scotland, Singapore, parts of Canada and
Germany, and other countries and they typically consist of a core program of courses, a well-designed syllabus, instructional materials matched to the syllabus, high-quality exams also matched to the syllabus and professional development for teachers.

NCEE first introduced the Board Examination idea in its groundbreaking report, Tough Choices or Tough Times, in late 2006. The report received wide acclaim, and was the cover
feature of TIME magazine and praised broadly by educators and the media.

In addition to the eight states being announced today, in 2009, the nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, and two leading business groups, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers got behind the recommendations made in the Tough Choices report.

“The NCEE Board Examination Proposal can be the very foundation of transforming our high schools into successful places for all of our students,” said John Wilson, executive director of the National Education Association. “The National Education Association will support any of our state affiliates who wish to collaborate and partner with their state
education agencies in assuring these pilots programs provide all students a pathway to college and a career.”

“Because these programs, the best the world has to offer, are currently available, these states will be able to leap to the front of the pack without having to spend the millions of dollars and years of effort it takes to develop world-class systems from scratch,” noted Tucker. “Once these systems are in place, these states will be able to go a long way toward closing the gap between their performance and the performance of the countries with the most successful education systems.”

Ten to twenty schools in each of the eight states will begin to pilot the system in the 2011-2012 school year. This new effort, laid out today, will be guided by a Governing Board
and a Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) and be involved in making decisions including approving the five Board Examination programs identified by NCEE for use in their states’ high schools, ensuring that each of the Board Examination programs meet or exceed the Common Core Standards as they become available, establishing cut-scores for the
lower division (grades 9 and 10) exams so that states will know that students meeting those scores are ready to enroll in any open-admissions college in their state without remediation, and approving the method the project will use to create a common reporting
scale across the three lower division Board Examination programs. By offering high schools a variety of programs that each cover the core subjects and are set to the level of cognitive demand needed for success in college, high schools will be able to choose those
instructional approaches that best suit their students’ needs and faculty’s interests.

“To oversee the technical work and ensure it meets the highest standards of quality, we have pulled together a multidisciplinary Technical Advisory Committee made up of
some of the best minds in the country and beyond with a broad range of expertise and experiences,” said Tucker. The TAC will be co-chaired by Howard Everson, professor and senior research fellow at City University of New York, and James Pellegrino, distinguished professor of education and co-director, Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago. (NOTE: TAC full membership listed on attachment.)

“The Board Examination Consortium announced today by the National Center on Education and the Economy represents a bold, imaginative effort to design and implement a large-scale assessment system that will promote student achievement by building upon world-class standards of teaching, learning, and educational measurement. This initiative offers a unique opportunity to think differently about the design of standardized tests and link curriculum, instruction and assessment in new and innovative ways,” said Dr. Everson. Board examination systems typically include formative assessments teachers
can use to track student progress during the year, and some make it possible to include student work on major assignments in the final course grade, as well as their scores on their final exams. Participating states will approve up to five Board Examination programs
for use in their states and invite high schools to pilot one or more of those programs at the 9th and 10th grade and one or more at the 11th and 12th grade levels.

The five Board Examination programs already identified by NCEE include ACT’s  QualityCore, the Cambridge International Examination’s International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) and their AICE program, the College Board’s Advanced Placement program, the International Baccalaureate Diploma program, and Pearson/Edexcel’s IGCSE and A-level programs. Students from these eight states who volunteer to participate will take the exams at the end of 10th grade, and should they pass, be given a high school diploma and opportunity to enroll the next fall as a full-time
student at any two-or-four year open admissions post-secondary institution in the state without having to take remedial courses, if they choose to do so.

Today, nearly half of the students in community colleges take one or more remedial courses and many are never able to complete developmental courses and move on to credit-level courses to complete their college degree.

Students who pass these examinations at the end of their sophomore year may also choose to remain in high school and take a program of study designed to prepare them for entrance into a selective college. Any student who does not pass the lower division high school exams on their first try will be offered a customized program designed to help them succeed on their next attempt. The goal of the Board Examination Project is to prepare the vast majority of American high school students for college without first having to take remedial courses.

“NCEE’s program offers the states a way to leap to the best instructional practices in the world; to provide a powerful system of support to struggling students, to our most able students and everyone in between; to motivate our high school students to take tough courses and study hard in school. It can work in urban centers and in rural states like
ours. In an age of constrained resources, it offers the states an opportunity to take advantage of enormous investments in time and money made by others, to stand on the shoulders of the countries that have developed the most successful instructional systems in the world,” said Susan Gendron, Maine’s commissioner of education and chair of the Board Examination Project’s Governing Board.

Work is underway to submit a proposal to the U.S. Department of Education for its Race
to the Top Assessment Program to support the project’s work to bring the world’s best assessment systems to U.S. schools.

PRIMOS access, assessment, new mexico, preparedness

Interest in majoring in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is increasing, but completion rates are lower than students who start out in non-STEM fields, according to a recent study from the UCLA Higher Education Research INstitute. The problem is even worse for minority students.

From a report in Inside Higher Ed.

PRIMOS access, graduation rates, PRIMOS, STEM

Although the number of students taking AP course is up, so are faulire rates in a study of pass rates and race from 2001-2009.

From an Inside Higher Ed article.

PRIMOS access, families, Preparation, PRIMOS, success