<p>It supports the basic premise that has been around for a long time that half the kids that start college don’t finish (or at least 6 years post entering). My biggest thrill was not sitting around waiting for fat envelopes when they were teens, it was sitting watching college graduation.</p>
<p>Xiggi, at the risk of being politically incorrect, maybe it is not K-12 education, but rather that some kids just are not meant for college, no matter what the quality of their K-12 education.</p>
<p>Even if he didn’t graduate (and there are many players who have scored below 10 and graduated) it is pretty screwed up he was able to pass.</p>
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<p>And only a portion of being “college ready” has to do with test scores and GPA. Yes you need that foundation but if desire, drive and personal responsibility are missing you have a shaky house of cards. Personally if we only granted access to higher education to people with good high school GPAs and standardized test scores I don’t think the grad rates would change all that much.</p>
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<p>Motivation is often a big part. I knew people who were unfit for college at high school graduation due to lack of motivation with respect to school work (did just barely enough to graduate); they did not try to go to college, but enlisted in the military instead. After their military service, they got motivation, went to community college, transferred to state university, and graduated with bachelor’s degrees.</p>
<p>What I see is that no one has better than a 50% chance of graduating in 4 years—I don’t think that is quite accurate but who knows I guess.</p>
<p>^^Yes, motivation often comes at a later date!</p>
<p>Steve, maybe you are not inputting correctly, but when I try 1200 SATs, with A- for women, 4 year rate goes to 57%. Still depressing, but over 50.</p>
<p>Yes. High GPA, plus high SATs = high graduation rate, even in 4 years. And if you stick a few other factors on top of that (middle-income Asian Jewish girls with trust funds from intact two-highly-educated-parent families who have high self-esteem, like to join clubs, and are not interested in engineering), it may even start to look like the Ivy League.</p>
<p>(I’m not kidding, by the way. All of those factors significantly increase the probability of graduation in four years.)</p>
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<p>I got 76.0% four year graduation rate for:</p>
<p>55% female, 45% male
1% AI, 10% each Asian, black, Latino, 60% white, 4% other, 5% more than one
1500 SAT CR+M
A/A+ HS grades</p>
<p>Even dropping the SAT CR+M to 1120 still leaves the four year graduation rate at 50.6% for this imaginary student demographic.</p>
<p>JHS, that is a very interesting comment about the HBCUs having better graduation rates. Some might say cynically it is lower standards, but I have to wonder if some of it is due to stricter rules, especially regarding overnight visitors in dorms. Many young people go off to college and can not handle the freedom.</p>
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<p>Of course my view is not that no one should go to college but that the lower one’s grades and test scores are, the less sense it makes to go. A student with an SAT CR+M score of 800 will be attending an unselective college with a mediocre reputation and will likely be getting mediocre grades even if he does squeak by and graduate. There are more college-level jobs than there are college graduates, so employers with college-level jobs will prefer better students from more prestigious schools. I don’t think the $1 million earnings bump applies to all graduates. I could be wrong about this, and in other threads I have said colleges should gather and release earnings data by major.</p>
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<p>I’m not sure that is a provable supposition. The vast majority of employers hire within their region or if they hire outside the region only a few jobs…and not always entry level jobs…will have relocation. Also the vast majority of companies that have the financial ability to actually recruit, recruit over and over at the same places where they have been successful previously. Recruiting is often driven by the volume of jobs in a particular functional area to fill and in the largest companies by diversity needs. Of course some of this is industry specific e.g. engineering where some of the best engineering schools are blips on the college awareness radar or Wall Street which has always had a soft spot for NE colleges or the movie industry, entertainment industry or fashion industry. But those are very limited list of industries. If you want to go into the oil and gas industry you might eschew the NE…and so forth. All of which has little to do with whether the student will be successful in completing college immediately following high school and within 6 years. </p>
<p>As far as limiting college to students that perform well in high school, I have mixed feelings. Some of the more successful people may not “perform” in the top 10% in high school. </p>
<p>I think the best determiner of college success is the parent’s gut feelings and the motivation of the 17 or 18 year old. If a student can’t “connect” the amount of work they will need to do in college and the commitment required with the act of applying and going to college they probably aren’t ready. They also need abit of “stick to it-ness” in their personality. If they don’t understand that college is not grade 13, they probably aren’t ready. It doesn’t stop there, kids with college degrees in hand and a modicum of drive will find a job within a reasonable amount of time after graduation.</p>
<p>The 50% grad rate never scared me because I believed that if college wasn’t where they kids wanted to be they would leave and do something else in life. The “gift” we gave them was the opportunity to see it through to whatever conclusion occurred. To not give them the opportunity to attempt this and sieze the opportunity or to not be able to afford to give them the opportunity, in my opinion, is a far sadder outcome. It’s on “them” ultimately and their first real adult hurdle to clear. We always told the kids it was there for them for the taking, but it was on them to take the opportunity.</p>
<p>kayf – As I said, the explicit purpose of the article is to come up with a system of benchmarking graduation rates based on student population characteristics, which may or may not include SAT scores, in order to tell which colleges are doing a better job with at-risk populations. It closes with a discussion of how HBCUs have a meaningfully better four-year graduation rate than one would expect given their student bodies (although the advantage over public universities evens out in the six-year graduation rate). But that is in the context of a frighteningly low four-year graduation rate – around 22%.</p>
<p>Beliavsky – I didn’t mean to imply that you thought no one should go to college, but you say time and again that people with low grades and test scores should not. One of my issues with you is that you don’t suggest any preferable strategies for them.</p>
<p>I also note that the authors of the study emphasize that their calculator works best for large populations, not individuals. Individual experiences vary. If you conclude, on the basis of 4 factors or 40 factors, that Individual A has a 40% chance – i.e., less than likely – of graduating from college in 6 years, obviously that doesn’t mean that Individual A will not graduate from college. Some people like him will graduate in 4 years with flying colors, others will limp through and ultimately succeed, and still others will fail definitively. In the absence of better concrete alternatives, I have a hard time telling Individual A to forget about college just because it’s an uphill battle, since people like him DO succeed. Why shouldn’t he want to be one of the winners?</p>
<p>JHS, I think that the study is a first step. I know of several colleges that identify at-risk kids on the basis of SAT/grades and even before they start, work with them.</p>
<p>Exactly, that dismal completion rate has been around for awhile. The vast majority of parents aren’t going into this process with their eyes shut. For those that are paying there may be a worry or two, but in the end they either support or don’t support a student who is not emotionally ready for college even if they are academically statistically prepared. Their eyes ARE open or they are choosing to shut their eyes. A large ‘chunk’ of the college bound population is going it alone, without parental assistance so ultimately they are bearing the responsibility for their fate. You can’t measure drive and determination and other intangible factors. Clearly doing “well” in high school can be a predictor of sorts, since it often correlates to parental education, financial stability etc., but why exclude drive and determination? Those factors play out throughout life. People don’t get hired or promoted in careers because of one or two factors it’s often a combination of absolute measures and subjective personal characteristics.</p>
<p>I only got 66% for four years…</p>
<p>^^and it’s largely within your ability to be part of that 66%…if you are a student remember that there are people that will disappear from your future campus at Christmas, there are people that will transfer after freshman or sophomore year, there are students that will have family crises or financial problems that may cause them to leave college, there will be students that become ill either physically or mentally that need to drop out…there are many reasons why there might be that 34% who don’t graduate in 4-6 years, so largely whether you walk through graduation is dependent on multiple variables, the most significant variable of course is you and the attitude you take with you to college.</p>
<p>For some people, transfering is a step up, not a negative.</p>
<p>The full spreadsheet is very interesting.</p>
<p>Having a Creativity in the Top10% verses in the Lowest10% actually results in an 4% lower graduation rate.</p>