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Post-Secondary Outcomes of Newark Public School Graduates (2004-2011): College Matriculation, Persistence & Graduation
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This article examines the extent to which indicators of the college-going climate of urban high schools are associated with students’ application to, enrollment in, and choice among four-year colleges. The investigators examine two mechanisms by which high schools may shape college enrollment among low-income students in an urban school system: (1) by ensuring whether seniors who aspire to a four-year college degree take the steps to apply to and enroll in a four-year college, and (2) by influencing whether students enroll in colleges with selectivity levels at or above the kinds of colleges they are qualified to attend (a “college match”). We investigate different approaches to measuring college-going climate and develop new indicators. Findings suggest that qualifications and college aspirations will not necessarily translate into four-year college enrollment if urban high schools do not develop organizational norms and structures that guide students effectively through the college application process. Urban students who attend high schools where there is a pattern of four-year college-going, where teachers report high expectations and strong supports for college attendance, and where there is high participation in financial aid application are more likely to plan to attend, apply to, be accepted into, and enroll in a four-year college that matches their qualifications.
In April 2006, the Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR) released a report on college enrollment, preparation, and completion by students in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). This was the first endeavor in the nation to use data from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) to track the progress of a large district's students following their high school graduation. College graduation rates of CPS alumni who completed high school in 1998 and 1999 were reported. Using the updated data, the overall college graduation rate for CPS alumni increases from 35 percent to 45 percent. This is primarily due to the revised graduation rate for Urbana, although other factors also contribute to the increase, including: (1) small increases in the graduation rates at other schools with updated student records; (2) the removal of Carbondale from these statistics; and (3) the participation of several additional colleges in the NSC, including DePaul University which has a graduation rate of 76 percent. The aggregate statistic of the percentage of students who begin high school in CPS and earn a four-year college degree by their mid-twenties increases just slightly--from 6 to 8 percent. Even with the revised data, the six colleges most attended by CPS alumni still show graduation rates that are below average. Only 41 percent of students at the most popular four-year institutions graduated within six years, compared to 49 percent of in-state students at less popular institutions, and 56 percent of students who chose out-of-state colleges. (Contains 5 figures.)
There are many approaches to solving the problem of underrepresentation of some racial and ethnic groups and women in scientific and technical disciplines. Here, the authors evaluate the association of a summer bridge program with the graduation rate of underrepresented minority (URM) students at a selective technical university. They demonstrate that this 5-week program prior to the fall of the 1st year contains elements reported as vital for successful student retention. Using multivariable survival analysis, they show that for URM students entering as fall-semester freshmen, relative to their nonparticipating peers, participation in this accelerated summer bridge program is associated with higher likelihood of graduation. The longitudinal panel data include more than 2,200 URM students.
This greatly expanded second edition of Survival Analysis- A Self-learning Text provides a highly readable description of state-of-the-art methods of analysis of survival/event-history data. This text is suitable for researchers and statisticians working in the medical and other life sciences as well as statisticians in academia who teach introductory and second-level courses on survival analysis. The second edition continues to use the unique "lecture-book" format of the first (1996) edition with the addition of three new chapters on advanced topics:
Chapter 7: Parametric Models
Chapter 8: Recurrent events
Chapter 9: Competing Risks.
Also, the Computer Appendix has been revised to provide step-by-step instructions for using the computer packages STATA (Version 7.0), SAS (Version 8.2), and SPSS (version 11.5) to carry out the procedures presented in the main text.
The original six chapters have been modified slightly
to expand and clarify aspects of survival analysis in response to suggestions by students, colleagues and reviewers, and
to add theoretical background, particularly regarding the formulation of the (partial) likelihood functions for proportional hazards, stratified, and extended Cox regression models
David Kleinbaum is Professor of Epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Kleinbaum is internationally known for innovative textbooks and teaching on epidemiological methods, multiple linear regression, logistic regression, and survival analysis. He has provided extensive worldwide short-course training in over 150 short courses on statistical and epidemiological methods. He is also the author of ActivEpi (2002), an interactive computer-based instructional text on fundamentals of epidemiology, which has been used in a variety of educational environments including distance learning.
Mitchel Klein is Research Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health (EOH) and the Department of Epidemiology, also at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. Dr. Klein is also co-author with Dr. Kleinbaum of the second edition of Logistic Regression- A Self-Learning Text (2002). He has regularly taught epidemiologic methods courses at Emory to graduate students in public health and in clinical medicine. He is responsible for the epidemiologic methods training of physicians enrolled in Emory’s Master of Science in Clinical Research Program, and has collaborated with Dr. Kleinbaum both nationally and internationally in teaching several short courses on various topics in epidemiologic methods.
The United States has long been a model for accessible, affordable education, as exemplified by the country's public universities. And yet less than 60 percent of the students entering American universities today are graduating. Why is this happening, and what can be done? Crossing the Finish Line provides the most detailed exploration ever of college completion at America's public universities. This groundbreaking book sheds light on such serious issues as dropout rates linked to race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Probing graduation rates at twenty-one flagship public universities and four statewide systems of public higher education, the authors focus on the progress of students in the entering class of 1999--from entry to graduation, transfer, or withdrawal. They examine the effects of parental education, family income, race and gender, high school grades, test scores, financial aid, and characteristics of universities attended (especially their selectivity). The conclusions are compelling: minority students and students from poor families have markedly lower graduation rates--and take longer to earn degrees--even when other variables are taken into account. Noting the strong performance of transfer students and the effects of financial constraints on student retention, the authors call for improved transfer and financial aid policies, and suggest ways of improving the sorting processes that match students to institutions.
Doctoral completion rates are an indicator of successful doctoral programmes and of a region’s potential of highly skilled
workforce. The Human Resources in Research – Flanders (HRRF) database contains data of all academic staff appointments, doctoral
student registrations, and doctoral degrees of all Flemish universities from 1990 onwards. Previous research has identified
the following factors as affecting successfully completing the PhD: cohort, scientific discipline, type of scholarship or
appointment, gender, age, and nationality. We present a competing risk analysis of factors determining PhD completion and
drop-out. This event history technique allows for determining the relative impact of each of these characteristics on the
level of success/failure and time to degree. It predicts at what time periods the ‘time to degree’ and ‘time till drop out’
is most likely to occur, and why some individuals experience the event earlier than others. Our results show that scientific
discipline and funding situation are the most important factors predicting success in obtaining the doctorate degree.
We show that the vast majority of very high-achieving students who are low-income do not apply to any selective college or university. This is despite the fact that selective institutions would often cost them less, owing to generous financial aid, than the resource-poor two-year and non-selective four-year institutions to which they actually apply. Moreover, high-achieving, low-income students who do apply to selective institutions are admitted and graduate at high rates. We demonstrate that these low-income students' application behavior differs greatly from that of their high-income counterparts who have similar achievement. The latter group generally follows the advice to apply to a few "par" colleges, a few "reach" colleges, and a couple of "safety" schools. We separate the low-income, high-achieving students into those whose application behavior is similar to that of their high-income counterparts ("achievement-typical" behavior) and those whose apply to no selective institutions ("income-typical" behavior). We show that income-typical students do not come from families or neighborhoods that are more disadvantaged than those of achievement-typical students. However, in contrast to the achievement-typical students, the income-typical students come from districts too small to support selective public high schools, are not in a critical mass of fellow high achievers, and are unlikely to encounter a teacher or schoolmate from an older cohort who attended a selective college. We demonstrate that widely-used policies–college admissions staff recruiting, college campus visits, college access programs–are likely to be ineffective with income-typical students, and we suggest policies that will be effective must depend less on geographic concentration of high achievers.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
In this paper, we examine the antecedents and consequences of timing in the transition from high school to college. Using
the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88), we find that 16 percent of high school graduates postpone enrollment
by seven months or more after completing high school. Delayers tend to have some common characteristics: they come from families
with few socioeconomic resources, they have performed poorly on standardized tests, they have dropped out of school, and they
have exited high school with a GED. We find that even after controlling for these academic and socioeconomic characteristics,
students who delay postsecondary enrollment have lower odds of bachelor degree completion. Additionally, we find that delayers
are more likely than on-time enrollees to attend less than four-year institutions and to transition to other roles such as
spouses or parents before entering college. Controlling for institutional context and life course contingencies, however,
does not completely explain the negative relationship between delayed enrollment and degree completion.