For decades, college access programs have aimed to improve college readiness and enrollment rates, particularly for underrepresented populations. Though several published reports have produced comprehensive inventories of college access programs (Gandara, 2001; Perna, 2002; Tierney, Bailey, Constantine, Finkelstein, & Hurd, 2009), no systematic…

Essential to tracking student success at community colleges is the availability of solid data and commonly defined metrics that go beyond measuring the traditional (and limited) enrollment and graduation rates that these colleges report to the federal government. In particular, what is needed are metrics that illuminate what happens to students…

When Superintendent Denise Juneau took office in 2009, there were 2,423 students who dropped out of school, and Montana had a dropout rate of 5.1 percent. Inspired by the early successes of the Graduation Matters Missoula initiative, Superintendent Juneau launched Graduation Matters Montana in 2010. Graduation Matters Montana is a statewide effort…

The goal of "college-for-all" in the United States has been pursued in an environment of rising tuition, stagnant grant aid and already strapped family budgets with the gap filled by college loans. College students are thus facing increasing levels of debt as they seek to develop their human capital and improve their career options. Debt…

In the United States, seven thousand students drop out of school every day (Alliance for Excellence Education, 2010); that is more than one million per year (Balfanz & Bridgeland, 2014). Administrators, former educators and private entities have taken an interest in the dropout epidemic and have developed numerous dropout prevention and…

This article summarises the practical requirements for new science A-levels in biology, chemistry and physics for first teaching from September 2015. It discusses the background to how the new approach was reached and how OCR has seen this taking shape in our assessment models. The opportunities presented by this new approach to practical…

Our contribution attempts to review basic vocational education programmes in Spain over the past 25 years. We intend to compare the evolution of these programmes in terms of conception and conditions of delivery in order to find out how different they are as skill-formation and remedial systems, as well as analysing how different political views…

Financial aid and student success are interrelated and essential components of strategic enrollment management. From an economic perspective, by reducing the price students pay, financial aid affects student demand for education. However, financial aid also has nonmonetary effects. For example, students receiving institutional scholarships may…

High schools play a vital role in achieving and reflecting American ideals and culture. They provide the foundation for the country's economic, social, and political systems as well as the impetus for its scientific progress and technological superiority. The purpose of this study was to explore the challenges facing high schools' leadership in…

This article describes the collaborative evolution of the Midwest Center for Information Technology (MCIT)--which is a consortium of 10 different community colleges across the four states of Nebraska, Iowa, North Dakota, and South Dakota--that was established to improve information technology (IT) education across the region. MCIT has been funded…

Today, community colleges are challenged to maintain their historical identity of open access while increasing student success. This challenge is particularly salient in the context of performance-based funding models. These models create student achievements, which determine institutional levels of state funding. Therefore, these new student…

Prompted by changing demographics, economic pressures, and global competition, Texas and members of the Southern Regional Education Board adopted policies to boost minority enrollment and success in higher education around the turn of the century. This study draws upon IPEDS graduation rate data for a benchmark year, 2002, and for 2006 through…

Public schools in the United States operate under state accountability systems that vary by state and are meant to measure individual school performance against criteria determined by state policymakers. The purpose of these systems is to hold each school accountable for increasing student performance. However, it has become clear that a single…

There is broad consensus that our nation must increase the number of low-income and first-generation students who enroll in and complete college, yet many academically capable low-income students enroll in nonselective four-year and two-year colleges where graduation rates are low and where they are less likely to succeed; others fail to enroll at…

ACTA's report "The Cost of Chaos in the Curriculum" reveals that the vast array of course choices given to college students is a cause of exploding costs and poor academic outcomes. And a bloated undergraduate curriculum is particularly detrimental to the success of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. The report documents how…