With the reality that school districts and states are now being required to report high school graduation rates under the "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) Act, the accuracy of dropout data is becoming a major issue. For more than a decade, the official dropout figures came from a consensus definition used by the National Center for…

Federal law mandates that universities reveal their graduation rates purportedly to inform policy makers and constituencies about efforts to support educational attainment for students and athletes. These rates are widely used to compare universities. Analysis of 10 years of graduation rates across all major athletic programs concludes that…

This paper assesses how policies and institutions affect private returns to invest in tertiary human capital, the ability of individuals to finance this investment and the institutional characteristics of tertiary education systems. Focusing on core tertiary education services, the paper presents new measures of private returns to tertiary…

This report presents a summary of a number of outcomes-oriented studies dealing with dual enrollment (acceleration). (Contains 1 graph.)

"A Blueprint for Excellence", New Jersey's long-range plan for higher education, adopted in 2003, aims to make the state stronger, more competitive, and a better place for all to live, work, and go to school. This document reports progress-to-date in achieving plan objectives: enrollment and the number of degrees awarded have increased,…

This Winter 2007 quarterly newsletter from the Community College League of California includes: (1) Incumbents: Some Win, Some Lose in November Trustee Elections; (2) Voters Approve $2 Billion in Bonds; (3) Photos from the "Together We Can" conference; (4) Report, Media Criticize Transfer, Completion Rates and Colleges; (5) District…

In 1996, the State University of New York at New Paltz developed the Supplemental Writing Workshop Program for its basic writing students in response to public pressure to discontinue the offering of so-called remedial writing courses at four-year institutions. Our primary purpose in this article is to describe the design of the SWW Program, which…

Undergraduate enrollments have grown sixfold in the last half-century and continue to boom; today more than 80 percent of high-school graduates go to college within approximately eight years of graduation. One might expect those accomplishments to be celebrated, but the expansion of higher education has been accompanied by ambivalence, anxiety,…

The Student Transitions Project (STP) is a collaborative effort of British Columbia's (BC's) Ministries of Education and Advanced Education and Labour Market Development and BC's public post-secondary institutions. STP research is helping school districts, post-secondary institutions and the Ministries of Education and Advanced Education and…

In this article, we review the empirical evidence on the impact of education vouchers on student achievement, and briefly discuss the evidence from other forms of school choice. The best research to date finds relatively small achievement gains for students offered education vouchers, most of which are not statistically different from zero.…

There is a persistent concern over mismatches between the degrees awarded by universities and the needs of the job market. Although there are shortages of graduates in some fields, many university graduates have difficulty finding jobs that make good use of their education. This has been discussed in newspaper articles, in education and business…

International educational statistics have reported a gender gap in educational outcomes, with boys falling behind girls in regard to grades, high school graduation and university enrollment and retention. This study involved pre-service teachers and school counsellors in Colleges of Education at three universities on three continents carrying out…

Unfortunately, too many low-income students enter college academically under-prepared, and too few find the support they need to succeed in college. As a result, their rates of completing four-year degrees continue to lag behind those of more-affluent students. The gap has not diminished in recent years--indeed it may have increased somewhat over…

This paper presents the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs' Bureau-Wide Annual Report Card for 2008-2009. This report, covering 186 schools provides data tables on: (1) Enrollment; (2) Average Daily Attendance Rate, Graduation Rate and Dropout Rate; (3) Student Achievement; and (4) High Quality Teachers.

Chapter 1 examines the effects of college quality on students' learning, employment and earnings in Colombia. Scores on a national college "entry" test solely determine admission to many selective Colombian universities, creating exogenous peer and resource quality variation near admission cutoffs. In one regression discontinuity (RD)…