This 2004 annual report, continues to investigate the complexities of low achievement that evidently leads to the pernicious dropout problem that North Carolina?s American Indian students are experiencing. Although students in grades three through eight are showing gains on the End of Grade tests and high school students have continued to improve…

For too long, education in West Virginia has operated as a series of discrete silos: early childhood programs, elementary schools, middle grades, high schools, vocational and technical programs, two-year community and technical colleges, workforce training, four-year colleges and universities, and graduate education. As students move from one silo…

Over the past several decades, a bachelor's degree has become an increasingly important tool for workers interested in pursuing the jobs of tomorrow. For the thousands of students who begin their college careers at community and technical colleges, transfer is essential in realizing their goal of attaining a bachelor's degree and ensuring they can…

The percentage of public high school graduates entering the University of California (UC) and the California State University (CSU) has increased in the last two years, offsetting the downturn that occurred between 2001 and 2003. In 2005, 9.8% of California public high school graduates entered CSU and 6.4% entered UC. College-going rates for CSU…

Asserting that graduation and stopout are "competing" or correlated events and that they often should be modeled as such, this study demonstrated that factors affecting timely graduation (e.g., financial aid) often have time-varying effects, and that ignoring these time-varying effects can lead to spurious conclusions that may result in…

"And so a lot of times I felt out of place, because you see all white faces. You know I'm the only fly in the buttermilk, so that took some getting used to ..." These words, shared by a black student during an interview for the present study, poignantly reflect the essence of the experience of being a minority student on a predominately white…

This article asserts low graduation rates, a lack of information for those who do graduate, and a perceived hostile environment on some campuses cut the college matriculation rates of African American students, making them an endangered species on some campuses. It discusses the root causes and effects of the low population of African American…

Across the country, official reports of high school students out of school do not always reflect the scope and extent of an urgent but neglected national education problem: The nation's graduation rate is in steady decline. An increasing percentage of adolescents are not graduating from school in four or even five years. A related cause for…

The number of students of color transferring to and completing degrees at four-year, non research-extensive universities continues to increase. However, research-extensive universities struggle with recruiting and retaining students of color. This chapter discusses one initiative developed by a research-extensive university focused on increasing…

In this article, the author discusses the discrepancy in high school dropout rates throughout the U.S. and in national studies because of different measures of the dropout rate. Many states began to use a common dropout definition developed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Not included among the 37 states using the NCES…

Using administrative data from the University of California at San Diego, the author explicitly identifies and studies students admitted under affirmative action programs. On average, these students earned grade point averages (GPAs) 0.30 points lower than those of nonaffirmative students. The difference in graduation rates is larger, with 57% of…

On average the B.Sc. (Eng.) degree programmes in South Africa universities graduate about 50-60 per cent of the students admitted. Generally, the highest dropout occurs in the first year of registration. This article reviews admission and graduation statistics at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and assesses the impact of recent academic…

Shifts in federal financial aid policies over the past two decades have made college attendance increasingly difficult for the nation's poorest students. Furthermore, once these students do enroll, they lag far behind their more economically advantaged peers in graduation rates. Because financial aid increasingly emphasizes loans over grants, many…

With the advent of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), graduation rate accountability has become the educational law of the land, a small part of it at least. Some uncertainty continues to persist around key issues like exactly how to calculate graduation rates and how much weight should be placed on graduation versus test scores when attaching…

Using data from Achieving the Dream: Community College Count, this issue of "Data Notes" is the first of a two-part series investigating the characteristics of late stop-outs--students who accumulate at least 30 credits within the first two years, only to stop out without completing credentials or transferring. Seventy-five percent of…