Although substantial attention has been given to federal strategies for improving college access, too little attention has been given to the impact of state finance strategies on academic preparation and access for prepared students. This report provides the following: (1) a review of prior access studies; (2) a new conceptual model for assessing…

Community colleges are a crucial point of access to higher education for low-income, minority, and other underserved students. These groups are overrepresented (with respect to their share of undergraduate enrollment) in two year and less than two year post secondary institutions. The community college access mission is built on low tuition, …

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…

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…

North Carolina says it graduates 97 percent of its high school students, while Washington state reports it gives diplomas to just 66 percent. But researchers, using methods they believe are more accurate, estimate that the two states' graduation rates are essentially the same, at around 64 percent. Acknowledging that such disparities in data are…

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…

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…

The Black College and University Act defined an historically black college and university (HBCU) as one that existed before 1964 with a historic and contemporary mission of educating blacks while being open to all. An HBCU must either have earned accreditation from a nationally recognized accrediting agency or association or be making reasonable…

This fourth edition of the "ES Review" brings together, in one setting, some of the best work from 2009-10. It features: (1) Teacher Quality (Teachers at Work: Improving Teacher Quality Through School Design (Elena Silva); Understanding Teachers Contracts (Andrew J. Rotherham); How Teachers Unions Lost the Media (Richard Whitmire and…