Here is a great piece for data lovers on Washington State higher education.
http://www.effwa.org/files/pdf/Higher.pdf
One of my my favorites over 30% of the adult population of our state has at least an undergraduate college degree but currently of 100 freshman who complete Freshman year of high school about 70 graduate from high school and 30.4 are College continuers but only 14 become college graduates within 10 years of completing freshman year of high school.
Good thing Microsoft, Boeing and other employers bring college graduates in from out of state or out of the country so our Washington adult population is slightly above 30% college graduates. There is also a portion of the population that takes more time to either begin or complete college.
I must say that there are many jobs in the local economy that do not require a college education. I find the idea that all high school graduates should be college ready an extremely strange idea.
"All seniors, college ready a strange idea."
ReplyDeleteStrange when you consider half of all college-bound seniors (about 20% of high school enrollees) are not ready for college. Roughly 1/3's of state college enrollees don't graduate. About the same percentage drop out of high school.
If you are not prepared for college, don't waste your time. Attend a community college or vocational school first. The military might be an option - it worked for me.
I prefer this as a goal:
100% of college-bound seniors will be college-ready.
Excellent idea that the College Bound be college ready.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly if not college-ready do something else and get a plan or skills to proceed with your life rather than wasting your time and money.
Look at our Community Colleges and the number of students in remedial classes. No fancy statistical study needed here .. just look at the number of sub 100 sections of math taught and compare them with the number of 100+ level math classes taught.
Our high schools are not doing the job but this can not be fixed at the high school level as it is a k-12 problem.
I am teaching at a school that has just reorganized itself as a k-12 school under one principal rather than under two or three principals as in the past. We have around 400 students. We can attempt to fix our problems with k-12 thinking rather than Band-Aids.
Our first step in math with be to work from the bottom and the top.
At the high school level we need to prepare students to perform better at the Community College level both on placement tests and performance.
Overall we need to improve students' arithmetic skills to enable acquisition of better algebraic skills and thinking.
We are NMAP focused.