The voucher system in Denmark combines unrestricted generous subsidies with substantial autonomy of private schools as to schedule and teaching methods. This has produced a private school sector with a wide variety of school types. This paper uses data on eight cohorts of students (over 510,000 individuals) to compare educational attainment in…

What challenges do political science educators face teaching in the Hispanic-serving classroom? How do they adapt their teaching styles and strategies when confronting these challenges? This preliminary study explores these and related questions through a survey conducted of political science instructors at colleges and universities across Texas.…

The primary purpose of the study was to identify successful electronic and manufacturing engineering programs at two-year colleges that Northeast Community College (a pseudonym) programs can be benched marked against. The project examined two-year college programs for increased enrollment and the number of graduates for the academic years 2000 to…

The transition into high school is a critical point in the educational pipeline, and ninth-grade can be characterized as one of its leakiest junctures. This policy brief examines how some states and districts are currently easing the transition into high school for students. It focuses on five key challenges that states, districts and schools…

This article considers the practical, conceptual, and empirical foundations of an early identification and intervention system for middle-grades schools to combat student disengagement and increase graduation rates in our nation's cities. Many students in urban schools become disengaged at the start of the middle grades, which greatly reduces the…

This study assessed the impact of a first-year experience course on the academic performance, persistence, and graduation rates of first-semester college students enrolled at a public research university in fall 1998. Two groups of first-year college students were matched according to their gender, race, SAT score, high school GPA, and intended…

The road to a college degree is often littered with potholes of self-doubt, and sometimes those are deep enough to discourage even the most ambitious students. If the transition from high school to college were easy, the average six-year graduation rate at four-year institutions in the United States would probably be higher than 63 percent. To…

Year Twelve retention rates have a number of well-known deficiencies that prevent proper comparisons of school completion between school systems. This paper compares secondary school completion rates across Australian states and territories from 1989 to 2002 and adjusts "official" 2002 retention rates to take account of the acknowledged…

While Chapman University's six-year graduation rate has been increasing steadily in the last few years, the institution continues to seek better ways to retain its students. Accordingly, our attention has focused on trying to identify freshman students who are more likely to be retained and those who are likely to depart college prior to degree…

Data mining of IPEDS data is used to develop models that calculate predicted graduation rates for two- and four-year institutions. (Contains 7 tables and 5 figures.)

In looking at recent graduation rates reported by states, Latinos should be proud. For the 2002-03 school year, North Carolina reported a 94% graduation rate for Latinos, while New Mexico claimed an 89% rate, and Indiana, an 85% rate. Unfortunately, these numbers are not only deceptive, they are, according to the Education Trust, wrong. Under the…

Amid growing criticism of public universities, there is little discussion of what appropriate institutional evaluation would entail. Six-year graduation rates are commonly used, and public bachelors granting institutions have lower rates than private institutions, but with the growth in non-traditional college attendance, these can be misleading.…

What steps are needed to be taken to rebuild public investment in America's higher education? In this article, the author offers three actions which he believes the US higher education community must collectively embrace and suggests that the higher education community should also learn to speak with a common voice. To help put that idea into…

According to a February 9, 2006 "New York Times" story headlined, "Panel Explores Standard Tests for Colleges," a new accountability era is descending upon a resistant higher education domain. The story describes the deliberations of a Bush-appointed commission considering imposition of standardized tests on college students. Ten days earlier, the…

State Education Agencies (SEAs) lead the charge for effective change, impact, and sustainability in the adoption and implementation of programs and practices that promote school completion. Steps taken by state and local education agencies to decrease dropout include (a) collection, analysis, and public reporting of "dropout" rates and related…