Tennessee offers an interesting context. The Tennessee Promise now provides free community college to high school graduates. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UT) recently won the Trailblazer Award from the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities for improvements in retention and graduation rates. The picture is brighter than the Atlantic makes it seem.
At UT we’ve found that no single factor predicts struggle or success. There seem to be four big pieces to the puzzle: #resources, #preparation, #ability, and #grit.
Parental educational attainment is one of a “bundle” of #resource issues that impact student success. A regression analysis done by UT economics professors, found that students whose father have a four-year or graduate degree have a 5% boost in their chance of retaining from first to second year. The effect of a mother's education is about three percentage points.
Other #resources matter, too. The percentage of students who are eligible for free and reduced lunch in the high school a student attended matters almost as much as parental education. If two students are identical in all other respects, but one attended a school with 5% economically disadvantaged students and the other a school with 55% disadvantaged students, the latter would typically be predicted to have more than a 7% lower probability of first-year retention.
#Preparation during high school matters as well. A student who receives at least one credit on an Advanced Placement exam increases his or her estimated retention probability by about 6%. Parents of first-generation students might be more inclined to encourage an after-school job rather than an extra-work class that would lead to AP credits. But the AP course is more likely to prepare the student for the rigors of college study.
In the UT study, the strongest single predictor of students’ success is high school grade point average with a single point in core GPA increasing retention probability by almost 14%. GPA is not a perfect measure of #ability, but even in an era of grade inflation, students who earn the good grades in high school are also most likely to stay in college after their first year.
#Grit is also important, but hard to measure. My father and my husband were both first-generation students. They lived through grinding poverty during the depression. But they had rich high school experiences that tantalized their native intellects. The GI Bill sent them to college. They had the grit to graduate and they went on to successful careers in science and journalism respectively.
Those of us who are in the second-generation and beyond are privileged. From that position of privilege, we need to work to increase the #resource base and enhance the #preparation of students who have both the #ability and the #grit to succeed in college.
#Preparation during high school matters as well. A student who receives at least one credit on an Advanced Placement exam increases his or her estimated retention probability by about 6%. Parents of first-generation students might be more inclined to encourage an after-school job rather than an extra-work class that would lead to AP credits. But the AP course is more likely to prepare the student for the rigors of college study.
In the UT study, the strongest single predictor of students’ success is high school grade point average with a single point in core GPA increasing retention probability by almost 14%. GPA is not a perfect measure of #ability, but even in an era of grade inflation, students who earn the good grades in high school are also most likely to stay in college after their first year.
#Grit is also important, but hard to measure. My father and my husband were both first-generation students. They lived through grinding poverty during the depression. But they had rich high school experiences that tantalized their native intellects. The GI Bill sent them to college. They had the grit to graduate and they went on to successful careers in science and journalism respectively.
Those of us who are in the second-generation and beyond are privileged. From that position of privilege, we need to work to increase the #resource base and enhance the #preparation of students who have both the #ability and the #grit to succeed in college.
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