Listen Up People! Born a loser--You die a loser!

Applying to College
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According to a recent article poor performance in high school spells the end for us! (yes this group includes me) So get off this board and resign yourself to years of employment in fast food and manual labor, because it’s over people! I guess it’s lucky noone told my third boss out of high school (a job I got at 19) whose currently paying me 30K per year, and willing to front the bill for a portion of my education! I quess I might as well leave school and my 4.0, give up all dreams of medschool, and begin having the babies in the double-wide now!

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Spring 2004

It’s Time To Tell the Kids: If You Don’t Do Well in High School, You Won’t Do Well in College (or on the Job)

By James E. Rosenbaum

…Today, nearly all high school seniors believe that they are going to college–and that bad grades won’t stop them. They are right: With the dramatic increase in open admissions colleges, it is true that they can go.

But as I report in my recent book Beyond College for All, students who perform poorly in high school probably won’t graduate from college–many won’t even make it beyond remedial courses. High enrollment rates and low graduation rates are well-known facts of life in most open admissions and less selective colleges (both two- and four-year). The tight connection between high school preparation (in terms of both the rigor of courses taken and grades received) and college completion are well known to statisticians, researchers, and policymakers who follow such matters.

But research suggests that students still do not understand this connection. Consider the following: Seventy-one percent of the class of 1982 planned to get a college degree. Ten years later, 63.9 percent of those with A averages had attained an A.A. degree or higher, but only 13.9 percent of those with C averages (or lower) had done so (Rosenbaum, 1998, 2001). …

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<p>James E. Rosenbaum is professor of sociology, education, and social policy at Northwestern University and a faculty fellow with the university's Institute for Policy Research. He is author of Beyond College for All: Career Paths for the Forgotten Half and Crossing the Class and Color Lines: From Public Housing to White Suburbia.</p>