<p>Which</a> High School Students Are Most Likely to Graduate From College? - Yahoo! News</p>
<p>The thread title is a bit misleading- the article is about chances of graduating, not about who does the best, ie has the best grades et al, in college. </p>
<p>The big message seems to be find a school that is a good fit and have better than a B (3.0) HS gpa if you want to graduate- things in a student’s control (you can’t pick your finances or HS). I found the remarks about choosing a school with an academic peer group revealing. Those who go to schools where most students are beneath them academically are not as successful as those who start with their academic peers- eg don’t go to a community college to save money the first two years if you are a top student. This makes sense.</p>
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<p>I disagree. The study also finds that bright students who are the first in their families to go to college and those from lower income backgrounds are less likely to finish. These are exactly the type of students who attend cc’s in large numbers so it may not necessarily be due to the cc’s. As for transferring credits, my 3 siblings and I all attended cc, all transferred, all completed AT LEAST a bachelors degree and and transferred every credit received in cc. We were careful to talk to the cc guidance counselors and to avoided remedial or vocational type classes.</p>
<p>This is the third thread on this. Time for a moderator merge?</p>
<p>The article deals with statistics, you are dealing with anecdotes. The probability of finishing college is greater for top students if they start at the good fit 4 year college, this does not mean it is impossible to do so by starting at other places. A student with top grades/test scores that reflect top ability is more likely to be bored with the lesser school’s pace, be it CC or 4 year college and not find a peer group to sustain motivation- hence the higher dropout rates than for students who start with material and peers at their level. The warning is that going to a CC to save money may derail plans instead of aiding them. Also note the “top” student category.</p>
<p>I could definitely understand why students who start off with their academic peers do better. I went to community college and have transferred to umich, and my friend who is about on the same level as me went straight to Eastern Mich. Community college was much more challenging for me in terms of staying focused than umich seems to be so far, because everyone is challenged and it’s just expected that you will do well, nobody is sliding through and REALLY getting away with it-- I have always performed outstandingly when it was just the expectation that EVERYONE would work hard and do well, I remember feeling a major difference when I took my first AP class in high school for the same reason. The teacher put a lot of pressure on us to perform the first day, but we were all up to the challenge. I’m not sure why but the attitude of my peers seems to affect my focus a lot, and I am really loving the environment here and how easy it is for me to get work done even if there is ten times more of it to do. At CC many students were just blowing it off and getting by, and to be honest I was quite a lot as well, I just got lucky in that my grades were still okay. </p>
<p>Meanwhile my friend at Eastern is doing pretty well there but is miserable and doesn’t put forth nearly the effort he would have here for his grades, so I wonder what it is actually doing for him besides getting him a degree. I could see a lot of students dropping out under those circumstances, or since they aren’t trying at all for the grades taking it too far and flunking out.</p>
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<p>Good point. However, I am also pointing out that simply saying cc students tend not to finish ignores other factors which may effect whether the student finishes college.</p>
<p>I believe the authors compared students from similar socio-economic backgrounds, when speaking of the effect of peer differences in college. They didn’t simply compare CC students to “elite” college students.</p>
<p>^^
I just re-read the article and see nothing that indicates that the authors of the study took that into consideration</p>
<p>FallGirl, the authors are big deals, and crusaders for doing more for lower-income students. The overarching theme of their analysis is that we aren’t doing enough to help lower-income students succeed. It would be silly of them, and counterproductive, if they compared graduation rates for four-year students vs, two-plus-two students, and stated a firm conclusion that community colleges are not the best option, without correcting for the very factors they care most about. That would be like saying that the best way to help poor people is for them to be rich people.</p>
<p>Notice, too, that the response from the Community College folks isn’t that the research is illegitimate. It’s “we know we have to do a better job” and “part of it is the four-year colleges’ fault”. Clearly they agree that there’s a problem, and it extends beyond the fact that their students are poorer and less well prepared on average.</p>
<p>Without seeing the study, I wonder about the CC conclusion. Generally, one of the major reasons students go the CC route is finances. If those families are more sensitive to financial pressures, and insufficient $$ is a common reason to drop out of school, then I think it follows that regardless of academic ability, you’d have greater dropout rates from CC than from four year schools. It’s very difficult to parse out all the factors, but just controlling for perceived academic ability certainly wouldn’t wash.</p>
<p>This also may be a factor in the safety school conclusion. Generally, these “top students” will have gotten greater merit aid at a lower tier school, and they chose it in great part because of finances (keep in mind that I mean comparing sensitivity to finances and not necessarily financial resources). When $$ becomes more scarce, such families may value money over education moreso than those who chose the higher level, more expensive school. They are less willing to make a financial sacrifice as evidenced by their initial college selection.</p>
<p>I still believe that cc is a good option for a lot of students. The article does not present it as such.</p>
<p>It’s interesting – it looks like that Yahoo article may have significantly mischaracterized what the book says.</p>
<p>Here’s what the Inside Higher Education review said about the community college chapter: </p>
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<p>This has to be looked at in the context of other parts of the book, where Bowen and McPherson present a lot of evidence to show that similarly situated students (in terms of income, test scores, high school performance, and race/immigration status) are more likely to graduate if they attend more challenging institutions. The authors believe that expectations and peer-group influence have a very important effect. The “problem” (such as it is) with community colleges is that students who intend to get a bachelor’s degree fall by the wayside before they transfer to complete it, not that they do worse once they successfully transfer. But the net result is that, of students who go to community college intending to transfer eventually and get a bachelor’s degree, relatively few succeed – meaningfully fewer than their peers who started at four-year institutions, even the least challenging ones.</p>
<p>Community college is a great idea in general and a terrible idea for a top student. The mind stagnates when it’s not challenged, and if you’re the only 4.0 GPA/2400 SAT student at Mid-Central Vocational Tech, you ain’t gonna be challenged.</p>
<p>The problem I have with this tome is that it’s correlation and not causation. I believe some UC data indicate that juco transfers graduate with a higher mean gpa than those that start as Frosh…</p>
<p>^ Well, duh! That’s because juco transfers to UCs don’t get to be juco transfers to UCs unless they have GPAs that are probably above the mean GPAs for people who have completed two years of the UC. Certainly the mean GPA for juco transfers at the transfer point ought to be substantially higher than the mean GPA for continuing students, who don’t get kicked out unless their GPAs are waaaaaay lower than anything a juco transfer would have. Even if their juco grades don’t figure into their UC GPAs, I think most students do better in the second half of their college careers than the first. The continuing students will have their bad years included in their GPAs, and the juco students will be kids who didn’t HAVE bad years yet.</p>
<p>Talk about correlation vs. causation! Or putting the rabbit in the hat.</p>
<p>My understanding is that Bowen/McPherson is based on extensive regression analyses of huge databases of students who graduated from high school in 1999 in five or six states. They did a lot of work to make their analysis rigorous, and to isolate factors that they wanted to look at. I wouldn’t dismiss it cavalierly.</p>
<p>Not being dismissive at all. And given the pedigree of the authors, I just assume its extensive, and well documented data. </p>
<p>But, it’s that I don’t find the data particularly useful – kinda my impression of Avery’s revealed preference “study”. IMO, valuable information would be ‘WHY?’, as in what is it about kids with top stats that enter a juco and don’t matriculate onward to a four-year college. </p>
<p>For example, </p>
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<p>Heck, I coulda guessed it correctly if you bought me a cuppa joe. And the reason I woulda guessed correctly is that just like kids who successfully matriculate to a UC from a juco, kids who matriculate to a 4-year instead of a juco have something else going on over their peers…</p>
<p>But Why is it so? What is it?</p>