This paper uses multiple data sources and a unified methodology to estimate the trends and levels of the U.S. high school graduation rate. Correcting for important biases that plague previous calculations, we establish that (1) the true high school graduation rate is substantially lower than the official rate issued by the National Center for…

This article describes Fisk University's drive to improve its graduation and retention rates. Fisk's six-year graduation rate is more than 10 percentage points above the national average for four-year institutions. Seventy percent of Fisk alumni go on to graduate or to professional schools. No other institution produces as many black doctorates in…

The aim of the present study was to explore the educational background of the total population of inmates in Norwegian prisons. The sample consisted of all 3 289 inmates over 18 years of age in Norwegian prisons. The response rate was 71.1 percent. Ninety four percent of the participants were men and mean age was 35 years. A questionnaire…

It has been suggested that growing interest in curriculum assessment and development in higher education is the result of a number of external and internal factors. External factors include increasing government interest in quality assurance, accessibility, and degree completion rates; growing recognition of the important role university graduates…

Since 1995, efforts to prohibit affirmative action have intensified, perhaps most strikingly in higher education. In 1996, California voters adopted Proposition 209 (Prop. 209), an amendment to the state constitution that banned both discrimination and affirmative action programs that give preferences to groups or individuals based on their race,…

In this study, the long-term academic effects of mentoring relationships in higher education are explored, with particular emphasis on students in ethnic categories with a low first-year retention rate. A sample of 339 undergraduate students in a student-faculty mentor program was statistically paired with 339 nonmentored controls on gender,…

There has been a surge of attention to issues of access and success in higher education. The U.S. Education Secretary's Commission on the Future of Higher Education has discussed it. State policymakers are proposing new goals and accountability systems to address these issues. Even the mainstream press has been increasingly critical of higher…

This study traces the academic performance of the entering freshmen class of 1959 at the University of Arizona for 10 years. The objectives were to ascertain how many students succeeded in attaining a college degree at the University and elsewhere and to determine some of the relationships between various measures of scholastic performance and…

Presently, state and federal school accountability efforts require greater attention to performance measures, such as the graduation rate, which serve as key indicators of a school's success in educating its student population. AZLEARNS, Arizona's school accountability system, includes a school classification system based on a set of performance…

The Washington state operating budget requires the Higher Education Coordinating Board (HECB) to set biennial performance targets for each public baccalaureate institution and to review each institution's performance annually thereafter. This report compares 2003-04 academic year performance against those targets, as well as against baseline data…

This is the second in a series of issue briefs to be written for The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement during 2006. In this issue brief, the author examines what recent research says about high school dropouts and explains the powerful role schools can play in keeping students on track to graduate. The latter includes…

Few people seriously regard students as "products" coming off an educational assembly line, but notions about accountability and quality improvement in higher education are pervaded by manufacturing ideas and metaphors. Because numerical indicators of quality are inevitably expressed by trend lines or statistical control chars of some kind, they…

Community colleges are open-door institutions serving many students with academic, economic, and personal characteristics that can make college completion a challenge. Their graduation rates are low, but community college students do not always have earning a degree as their goal. While individual students may feel that their experience at a…

This report presents the findings of a study designed by the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education to identify the institutional characteristics, practices, and policies that might account for differences in retention and graduation rates among colleges and universities that serve high concentrations of low-income…

As the majority of the graduation class, transfer students are neither being counted into the college graduation rate nor giving entrant institutions positive effect on retention. The study examines 906 students of 2002 transfer cohort in a public four-year institution. The study found the majority of the transfer students were female and white,…