COLLEGE READINESS
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Why is this important?
As we continue into the 21st century, higher education plays an increasing role in determining people’s life chances. Success at the college level is a key individual stepping stone to full participation in society and economic security. At the same time, having a well-educated population and workforce is an important component in maintaining society’s position in an increasingly complex and competitive world system. The extent to which our primary and secondary schools are preparing their students for college-level work is a key element.
Measuring college readiness: It is definitely the case that high graduation rates and high percentages of graduates receiving Regents Diplomas reflect strengthened standards through the secondary school level. However, while such measures reflect passing grades in coursework and on state-wide examinations, they do not assess the extent to which students are actually prepared for meeting the academic demands of college-level work.
Research in this area has demonstrated that one of the best predictors of college-level success is students’ grade point averages at the high school level. This makes logical sense since students with high average grades are, by definition, those who have done well in coursework across the breadth of their high school curriculum. Students who demonstrate curricular mastery at the high school level are more likely to be able to meet the academic challenges they will have at the college level.
We have thus devised a measure of curricular mastery based on average school-level performance across multiple Regents Examinations. For each high school, we recorded the percentage of students scoring 85% and above across Regents Examinations in the areas of English, History, Chemistry, Physics, and the two highest-level Mathematics courses. By presenting school-level data across the curriculum on the percent of students who perform very well, we provide a relative measure of how well schools are preparing their students for the rigors of college-level work.
How are we doing?
Overall, Long Island schools outperform New York high schools as a whole. On average Long Island high schools report that 39% of their students who took Regents examinations in 2006 scored at least 85%. That compared to 28% for New York state schools as a whole. Between 2003 and 2006 there was a 7% increase (from a 32% average in 2003), which outstripped the increase in New York State.
As we have seen with other educational indicators, the school-level measure of college preparedness is strongly correlated with poverty. Low-poverty schools report very strong scores on our measure of college readiness (49% in 2006), but high-poverty schools report much lower scores (19% in 2006). The trend from 2003 to 2006 for both low- and mid-poverty schools reflects increasing levels of college preparedness (8% and 9% increases, respectively). For high-poverty schools, the trend has been much more uneven. The score increased from 2003 to 2004 by 6%, but has been relatively constant between 2004 and 2006. High schools with a large percentage of economically poor students face a much greater challenge in academically preparing their students for college.