by jervisfm on 6/5/14, 10:37 PM with 144 comments
by incision on 6/5/14, 11:51 PM
'The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t.'
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'But the disadvantaged students who had experienced the belonging and mind-set messages did significantly better: 86 percent of them had completed 12 credits or more by Christmas. They had cut the gap between themselves and the advantaged students in half.'
Basically, straightforward encouragement and promotion of a sense of belonging has a significant effect toward equalizing the health, academic performance and graduation rates of economically disadvantaged kids of the same aptitude as wealthier peers.
by tlb on 6/5/14, 11:40 PM
by cperciva on 6/6/14, 12:48 AM
I find this very interesting in light of studies I've seen in Canada and Europe: Those studies all found that parental income was irrelevant after regressing for the overwhelming effect of parental education. Poor kids of well-educated parents were far more likely to graduate than rich kids of uneducated parents.
Of course, this would reinforce the story being told even more: Parents with college degrees encourage and expect their progeny to attend and graduate from college, while parents without that higher education do not provide an analogous proof of possibility.
by kosei on 6/6/14, 1:10 AM
More than 40 percent of American students who start at four-year colleges haven’t earned a degree after six years. If you include community-college students in the tabulation, the dropout rate is more than half, worse than any other country except Hungary.
It is astonishing that 2/5 of American students can be saddled with huge debts without having generated the means to repay that debt (increased wages through a college degree).
by ericclemmons on 6/6/14, 12:07 AM
Things seemed easy in high school, so I thought I knew what I was doing, until I realized that University is serious business academically.
With friends failing out right and left, I forced myself to attend paid tutoring sessions (worth it) and meet others who had study groups.
In the end, it worked out after years of making up for that one mistaken semester, but I had to buckle down on my own because of the fear of telling my parents how bad I performed...
by roymurdock on 6/6/14, 12:19 AM
Perhaps instead of an SAT or an ACT, there should be a test where different colleges contribute questions that are representative of intro level classes at the school. Questions would progress from relatively easy (large state school questions) to more complex, esoteric questions that would show up for the more selective, private school caliber students.
This would overcome an important informational friction: high school students don't see college-level test questions until they're enrolled and sitting in class, with the test in front of them. If you are going to make a $200k investment, you should have as much information as possible about your chances of success before signing on the dotted line.
by digita88 on 6/6/14, 3:53 AM
by ykumar6 on 6/5/14, 11:47 PM
"But here’s the key — none of them know that they’re in the bottom quartile.” The first rule of the Dashboard, in other words, is that you never talk about the Dashboard."
by com2kid on 6/6/14, 12:07 AM
Surely one potential solution would be to remove the social stigma of attending a community college? I am proud that I went to a CC with professors that cared about their students, class sizes in the 20s, and office hours that extended throughout the day.
I had brilliant professors across multiple subjects, the common thread running throughout my entire community college experience was that each and every professor who worked there was there because they loved to teach and spread their joy of their field to students.
The other obvious issue is poor study skills taught in HS. I tell students in HS that if they get one thing out of HS, which is otherwise a large waste of time, it should be to learn how to study.
by mballantyne on 6/6/14, 2:33 AM
https://labs.la.utexas.edu/adrg/files/2013/12/REVIEW-OF-EDUC...
Positive feelings of belonging and capability seem to be a surprisingly powerful form of race and class based privilege.
by nshepperd on 6/6/14, 2:28 AM
I hope they controlled for the admission criteria here. Otherwise, the obvious reason to see a correlation like this is that more selective colleges select students who are better at studying for tests (and therefore more likely to graduate).
by marcell on 6/5/14, 11:59 PM
by frozenport on 6/6/14, 2:56 AM
by glifchits on 6/6/14, 1:45 AM
The distribution of grades ... didn’t follow the nice sweeping bell curve you
might expect. Instead, they fell into what he calls a “bimodal distribution.”by jmz92 on 6/5/14, 11:51 PM
by millermp12 on 6/6/14, 1:00 AM
b) still smells like Lysenko-ism
by donjuanica on 6/5/14, 11:11 PM
by pnt12 on 6/5/14, 11:37 PM
by neil1 on 6/6/14, 12:06 AM
by thaumasiotes on 6/5/14, 11:15 PM
At some point, you wonder: what if we gave the same level of support to the qualified students?