The work described in this report is part of the national Making Opportunity Affordable (MOA) initiative, and focuses on the presentation of aggregate measures of sector-level trends in revenues and expenditures. This work will be repeated on an annual basis to promote regular use of aggregate measures of spending as part of postsecondary…

Reducing socioeconomic differences in college transfer requires a better understanding of how and why parental education, occupational class, and family income are associated with changing colleges. Building on prior studies of traditional community college transfer we explore relationships between those factors and two types of transfer among…

When North Carolina native Evan Raleigh was in search of the perfect college, he had three things in mind: (1) the strength of the school's academic reputation; (2) the size of the school; and (3) the school's location and proximity to home. He found all three in the form of Wake Forest University. But Raleigh, who received a full academic…

"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) "Profiles in Leadership": Alliance Releases a Collection of Essays from America's Foremost Education…

"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) "Leaving Boys Behind": New Report Finds Higher High School Graduation Rates for Females Across Every Racial…

"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) Senate Committee Reports Education Spending Bill: Senate Appropriations Bill Continues Cuts to Education Funding;…

State exit exams, also known as graduation tests, are tests that student must pass to graduate from high school. These tests are more influential than ever. Accordingly, in 2004, 20 states required students to pass an exit exam to graduate from high school, and six additional states will implement an exit exam by 2009. This affects more than half…

This study traces the academic performance of the entering freshmen class of 1959 at the University of Arizona for 10 years. The objectives were to ascertain how many students succeeded in attaining a college degree at the University and elsewhere and to determine some of the relationships between various measures of scholastic performance and…

Presently, state and federal school accountability efforts require greater attention to performance measures, such as the graduation rate, which serve as key indicators of a school's success in educating its student population. AZLEARNS, Arizona's school accountability system, includes a school classification system based on a set of performance…

This is the second in a series of issue briefs to be written for The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement during 2006. In this issue brief, the author examines what recent research says about high school dropouts and explains the powerful role schools can play in keeping students on track to graduate. The latter includes…

Few people seriously regard students as "products" coming off an educational assembly line, but notions about accountability and quality improvement in higher education are pervaded by manufacturing ideas and metaphors. Because numerical indicators of quality are inevitably expressed by trend lines or statistical control chars of some kind, they…

Community colleges are open-door institutions serving many students with academic, economic, and personal characteristics that can make college completion a challenge. Their graduation rates are low, but community college students do not always have earning a degree as their goal. While individual students may feel that their experience at a…

This report presents the findings of a study designed by the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education to identify the institutional characteristics, practices, and policies that might account for differences in retention and graduation rates among colleges and universities that serve high concentrations of low-income…

As the majority of the graduation class, transfer students are neither being counted into the college graduation rate nor giving entrant institutions positive effect on retention. The study examines 906 students of 2002 transfer cohort in a public four-year institution. The study found the majority of the transfer students were female and white,…

This biweekly newsletter contains news and information about school improvement in the United States. It is designed expressly for parents and families. This issue highlights an announcement, by U.S. Department of Education Secretary Rod Paige, of a contract to the National Institute of Statistical Sciences to convene a group of experts to review…