Better colleges failing to lure talented poor, By David Leonhardt, March 16, 2013, New York Times: “Most low-income students who have top test scores and grades do not even apply to the nation’s best colleges, according to a new analysis of every high school student who took the SAT in a recent year. The pattern contributes to widening economic inequality and low levels of mobility in this country, economists say, because college graduates earn so much more on average than nongraduates do. Low-income students who excel in high school often do not graduate from the less selective colleges they attend…”
Tag: College degrees
Early College Programs
- Pathway from poverty: Pioneering program helps low-income children get degrees, IBM jobs, By Celia Baker and Mercedes White, February 9, 2013, Deseret News: “By the time Trudon Exter walks through the metal detectors at the front doors of Brooklyn’s Paul Robeson High School, he’s been commuting for more than two hours. To get to school by 8 a.m. from his home in Queens, he rides two buses and a subway through some of New York City’s toughest neighborhoods. Trudon, 14, is a little small for his age and carries an enormous backpack stuffed with school supplies, snacks and a change of clothes for gym class. There are fleeting moments when he wishes he was back in Queens in his neighborhood school’s ninth-grade class with his old friends and not in Brooklyn. But some of his friends have already given up on high school. As he walks the three blocks between the subway and the school he sees kids about his age stumbling out of the neighborhood’s abandoned row houses. He wants something better. To help kids like Trudon reach their goals, a college in New York City has teamed up with IBM to create an innovative program that fuses high school and community college under one roof…”
- A path forward: Finishing high school with college degree, By Benjamin Wood, February 9, 2013, Deseret News: “In May, Travis Butterfield will earn his associate degree from Salt Lake Community College with credits to spare, a milestone on his path to a planned career in reconstructive surgery. Assuming, of course, that he graduates from high school first. ‘I still need to finish high school gym,’ he said. ‘It’s the only thing holding me back from graduating.’ Butterfield is a senior at ITINERIS Early College High School, a charter school located on the Jordan campus of Salt Lake Community College. There, Butterfield and his classmates split their time between courses at ITINERIS and college classes across the parking lot at the college, earning their way to a high school diploma and an associate degree simultaneously…”
- Talented teens get a head start on college life, By Mará Rose Williams, February 10, 2013, Kansas City Star: “Danielle Doerr spent her morning studying calculus and conducting nanostructure research here on the campus of Northwest Missouri State University. Now, in the afternoon, she sits in the lobby of her dorm wearing headphones, soaking up lectures on quantum physics and neuroscience by Massachusett Institute of Technology professors…”
College Graduation Gap – Kentucky
College graduation gap widens for low-income Kentuckians, By Linda B. Blackford, July 9, 2012, Lexington Herald-Leader: “More Kentuckians are getting college degrees, but a troubling trend has emerged in who receives them. According to a new report, the gap between graduation rates for low-income college students and moderate- to high-income students jumped 8 percentage points between 2008 and 2010. In those two years, the graduation rate of low-income Kentucky students fell from 46 percent to 35 percent, according to an annual accountability report from the Council on Postsecondary Education. In comparison, the graduation rate of moderate- to high-income students dropped four percentage points, from 57 percent to 53 percent. The gap between graduation rates for rich and poor students increased from 10 percentage points to 18. The gap is connected to a bad economy, higher tuition rates and less state aid, and it’s a big problem, according to one expert on the economy and higher education. . .”