On-Time College Graduation: A School/University Collaborative Study
September 1, 2008 |
Using High-Quality Data to Evaluate High School Antecedents of On-Time College Graduation: A School/University Collaborative Study
by R. Martin Reardon and Sandra Fritton (September 2008)
In the face of international comparisons showing the lower level of academic skills of students in the United States, high schools have been criticized for not adequately preparing their graduates for the academic demands of college life. This is occurring at a time when the impact of global competition has heightened the importance of maintaining an educated workforce capable of sustaining the economy. Academic remediation at the college level is expensive, and its effectiveness is open to question. The ability to evaluate the antecedents of on-time college graduation using high-quality data offers school divisions the opportunity to initiate conversations about how to enhance the skills of their graduates. A service which tracks students who enter any one of a large number of colleges after high school, and follows them through to graduation provides a much more comprehensive picture than was previously available to high school divisions of how the ever-increasing numbers of their graduates fare at college. This paper discusses the analysis of such data from two school division members of a school/university collaborative research organization.
