From the 3rd grade to the 11th grade, Jorge Martinez walked out of his front door each day hating the prospect of going to school. For most of those days, Martinez, now 17, was a target of bullies. But that was only half of it. There was discord at home. He says he was lazy and unmotivated, preferring to spend his time in front of the television,…

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…

The Washington state operating budget requires the Higher Education Coordinating Board (HECB) to set biennial performance targets for each public baccalaureate institution and to review each institution's performance annually thereafter. This report compares 2003-04 academic year performance against those targets, as well as against baseline data…

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…

This series tracks the performance of Chicago, Illinois, public high school students from 1993 to 2000 using data from the last 2 years of Phase 1 reform as a baseline for looking at the first 5 years of Phase 2. This report tracks changes in high school enrollment and explores possible causes. Analyses of data from various sources show that the…

This school report follows Vivaldi students in two ways. First, it tracks for five year members of the eighth-grade class of 1997 who enrolled in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) high schools or Academic Preparatory Centers (APCs). Second, it follows members of the eighth grade classes of 1997 to 2001 for one year to show their achievement during…

This report provides a broad overview of postsecondary opportunity and achievement in the state of Washington, posing three questions: (1) who is ready for postsecondary education? (2) who begins postsecondary education? and (3) who completes postsecondary education? Data are from the administrative records of Washington's public high schools,…

National studies of students, and studies that compare institutions, have identified many predictors of students' graduation rates, including socioeconomic status and admission selectivity. When there predictive variables are applied to data from an individual school, it may be found that they have less predictive power. This paper presents a…

A recent report shows that the National Collegiate Athletic Association is making progress on improving the academic performance of athletes, but it is doing so at a cost to black players who get athletic scholarships. More athletes graduate; fewer of them are black. (SLD)

Enhancing student persistence and effectively managing financial resources present important challenges to higher education. Surprisingly, existing student persistence and attrition models offer little insight into the potential links between institutional expenditures and student persistence. This study examines the impact of institutional…