Pathways to Academic Success in Higher Education

Expanding Opportunity for Underrepresented Students

Edward P. St. John, Glenda Droogsma Musoba

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136964565
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Pathways to Academic Success in Higher Education examines two major challenges facing the nation. The first is preparing high school students for college, a reform that has been tackled largely through state policy initiatives. The second is creating new pathways to academic success for underrepresented students in higher education, a challenge that must be addressed within a decentralized system of higher education.

• Part one: Presents and documents key findings from research on K-12 education policy.
• Part two: Provides action research using a state data system to inform colleges and universities.
• Part three: Focuses on the future of policy and organizational initiatives to improve opportunity.

This book integrates studies conducted over nearly a decade and offers guidance on how best to understand and promote retention and success once students have gained access.

1
Introduction

The United States is in the midst of a massive systemic transformation of its high schools. The old model of comprehensive high schools provided general education for most students, along with college preparatory courses for some and vocational courses for others (Conklin & Curran, 2005). The new goals are for all students to be prepared for college during high school and for a majority of students to attain two-year or four-year college degrees. The college-ready standard for high school graduation is also often stated as workforce ready. By merging the workforce and academic standards into one new higher standard for graduation, a mandate for radical and rapid change has been put in place. Even more recently there has been a new push in higher education to improve rates of degree attainment (Bowen & McPherson, 2009; Carey, 2008). This new emphasis on graduation rates is also workforce related and is often framed as a challenge for the United States to compete internationally in the new global economy. Achieving these goals of transforming high schools and improving college graduation rates will require both centralized policy and decentralized action within complex systems of education.

Yet the organization and control differ dramatically for K-12 and higher education in the United States. States are the locus for reform of high schools because they have control over graduation requirements¹ and most have raised these standards. In contrast, many institutions of higher education (IHEs) enjoy substantial autonomy, as do their faculty because of their academic freedom, so change initiatives in IHEs need to use decentralized methodologies, possibly as part of statewide initiatives.

Summary

This book addresses the complex issues related to system change using analyses of state and national databases and case studies of organizational change. We start each chapter with a summary. Pathways to Academic Success in Higher Education: Expanding Opportunity for Underrepresented Students Using State Databases and Action Inquiry (hereafter referred to as Pathways) examines the systemic change of U.S. education in three steps:

• Part I: Reforming Academic Preparation. A transformation of the K-12 system has been underway for three decades. There has been a concerted effort by states and the federal government to raise the standard for secondary education since publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). A new standard, now widely endorsed by states (e.g., Conklin & Curran, 2005; Hoffman, Vargas, Venezia, & Miller, 2007), emphasizes college preparation for all. The change from a national system of comprehensive high schools to college preparatory education for all students is a systemic change that requires more than raising standards (St. John, 2006), an issue that is of major concern in this volume. The chapters in part I provide a national assessment of progress in preparation, along with a case study of the State of Indiana, which is the focus of our research.

• Chapter 1 examines the evolution of policy arguments about access as rationales for changing the educational system.

• Chapter 2 uses a state indicators database of educational policies and outcomes (http://www.ncid.umich.edu/promotingequity/) to examine the relationship between graduation requirements and access both nationally and in Indiana.

• Chapter 3 uses a national sample from the College Board 2000 high school seniors who responded to the SAT questionnaire (about 95% of test takers) along with a state sample for Indiana to examine the relationship between high school courses and test scores.

• The chapters in part I illustrate that progress toward the goal of improving preparation has been uneven across the states, but Indiana stands out in the early 21st century as having forged a new path. Many groups are now arguing for a massive expansion of higher education (e.g., Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, 2007; Conklin & Curran, 2005). Unfortunately, progress toward this goal has been modest. During the early 2000s, the enrollment rate for college-age citizens did not substantially improve in spite of these widely held goals. The reasons for the lack of progress are complex. Part of the problem relates to the failure of states to adequately fund public higher education (St. John, 2006), but the problem is more complex than implied by an economic perspective alone. Public colleges and universities enjoy substantial autonomy from states (Schmidtlein & Berdahl, 2005). In this nationally decentralized system of higher education, we argue that campuses are the appropriate locus of change; they must create the new pathways to college success.

• Part II: Expanding Postsecondary Opportunity. States have a crucial role to play through both finance and facilitation. In part II we test an approach to using state databases with student records as a basis for informing inquirybased change at the campus level.

• Chapter 4 explains our approach to framing and facilitating interventions in higher education.

• Chapter 5 examines how a state program that guaranteed aid for low-income students (Twenty-first Century Scholars) was associated with academic preparation during high school.²

• To assess critical challenges, we analyzed a longitudinal cohort database of Indiana students in the high school class of 2000 who enrolled in the state’s public and private colleges and universities. We examined college transitions (chapter 6), academic support (chapter 7), changes in majors and colleges (chapter 8), and degree attainment (chapter 9).

• The focus in chapters 6 through 9 is on how campus officials used this information to design and refine interventions focused on improving persistence and extending opportunity to more students. Multivariate studies are provided in appendices to these chapters.

Major Themes

Pathways was written for practitioners (faculty and administrators who are or seek to be engaged in reform), policy makers in government agencies who seek to collaborate with researchers on improving educational opportunities in their states and institutions, researchers who seek to provide analyses to inform and support educational reform in K-12 and higher education, and graduate students who want to learn about action research methods in higher education. As an introduction, we focus on the three themes of the volume:

1. To increase the number of students who obtain college degrees, it is necessary to focus on expanding opportunity for underrepresented students.

2. To do that, it is necessary to shift the focus in policy and practice from raising standards as a policy emphasis to creating new and diverse academic pathways of high quality educational opportunity.

3. To enable the systemic changes to transform educational systems it is necessary to build organizational capacity for change, including an explicit focus on research-informed interventions in colleges and universities.

Theme 1: Expanding Opportunity for the Underserved

The focus on expanding opportunity for underserved students runs through all three parts of this book. Educational policy that centers on raising standards has resulted in an approach to research and development that focuses on replicating best practices, exporting practices from well-funded educational institutions to institutions that are not as well funded. The assumption has been that replication of best practices will ensure that students in underfunded schools will have the same level of preparation and academic success available to them as their better-funded peers. This assumption is problematic for both high schools and colleges. In part I, we examine the results of state efforts to reform high schools and introduce the alternative of capacity building based on inquiry. In part II, we present the results of our efforts to work with IHEs in the State of Indiana using an inquiry-based approach to educational reform. The research and cases presented illustrate that it is possible to use this approach to expand opportunity, but the result of this work falls far short of system transformation. These analyses demonstrate examples of targeted reform rather than large scale change, which we expect is also possible. Below we briefly introduce our approach to integrating a focus on expanding opportunity for underrepresented students into analyses of K-12 reform and higher education interventions.

Our emphasis on underrepresented students is based on Nussbaum’s (1999, 2000) theory of human capabilities. She argues that education to a level sufficient to support a family is a basic human right, especially for women. Given the emphasis on college-preparatory (Conklin & Curran, 2005) and workforce education (Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, 2007), high school reforms that emphasize advanced Math and literacy for all students can appropriately be considered part of a new human capabilities standard. If all high school students had a chance to graduate with this level and quality of preparation, they would be eligible academically to attend college. Therefore, it is appropriate to consider the opportunity to attend college as a human capabilities standard akin to a basic right for all high school students, including the underserved.

Race/ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and gender are critical to all policies and practices that focus on expanding opportunity, whether or not the problem is explicitly recognized. In the context of antiaffirmative action rhetoric, the language of reform frequently shift s when issues of race and class are raised. In higher education, the litigation over the Gratz and Grutter cases in the early 2000s (e.g., Moses, & Cobb, 2001) often quieted discourse on the underlying problem of class and race, as did the focus on individual benefits over the public good (Pasque, 2007). In K-12 education, the language of “success for all” and “no child left behind” supplanted terms like the disadvantaged and equal education in the policy discourse. Yet for the sake of the public good, it is crucial to consider how public policies and organizational practices influence opportunity for low-income and ethnic minority students because these excluded groups must be included if the goals of expanding opportunity are to be realized.

Throughout our collaboration on the development of educational and financial indicators (used in part I) and in the use of state databases (parts I and II), we included a focus on underrepresented groups in the assessment and evaluation research. While many of the policies and interventions we study did not always have improving equity as an official intent, we present research and analyses in this book that address the underlying issues of race and class.³ In part I, we address issues of racial inequality in preparation for and access to higher education in the United States as well as in Indiana.

We focus on racial inequality in the national assessment because: (a) inequality in opportunity for African Americans and Hispanics continues to be one of the most challenging issues in American society; and (b) data on race/ethnicity for national and state populations was more consistently available for 1992 to 2006, the period studied in part I, than was data on income. Since there are changes in the distribution of income over time along with inflation or deflation, income comparisons continue to be problematic in trend studies of college preparation and access. Take Pell grants for example. We cannot use Pell eligibility as a source of comparison in trends for college students because: (a) the Pell maximum changes from year to year so that some students may be eligible one year and not the next; and (b) this variability in aid eligibility can mislead efforts to discuss trends in access for low-income students. Consequently, trends in racial/ethnic representation continue to be the best indicators of inequality and underrepresentation in trend studies, which are part of our foci in part I.

In the studies of interventions in part II, we discuss how we used the assessment research to raise issues related to race and class for policymakers and practitioners. We could consider income differences along with race in these studies because we were using a cohort database for which information on income and aid was collected.⁴ In fact, the first study in part II (chapter 5) focuses on low-income students in the 2000 Cohort, which provides an interesting contrast to the study of academic preparation by all SAT takers in the cohort in part I (chapter 3) comparing the Indiana cohort to a national sample. In many cases, the interventions undertaken did not have an explicit focus on race and income even though they addressed issues that could reduce inequality.

There is an underlying problem with how public higher education has been financed in recent decades. If we treat education to a college preparatory level as a basic right, then we must not only be concerned with expanding opportunity but also with equity in the distribution of opportunity for post-secondary education whether or not opportunity is expanded. In other words, low-income students should not be the last served, nor should they be the first left out of the educational system when methods of public finance change or when private markets are introduced. While affirmative action provided a means for elite universities to remedy inequality by race during the late 20th century, the extent of equality and inequality across income groups remains largely dependent on public finance strategies. Changes in access to higher education, especially four-year colleges, are closely linked to strategies used in the public financing of education.

We view public finance as an underlying issue in inequality related to our interpretation of John Rawls’s theory of justice. In his discussion of distribution of right, Rawls (1971, 1999, 2001) was careful to distinguish the roles of merit and equity as being important and necessary. If there is not prior inequality, then individuals should have a right to com...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Reforming Academic Preparation
• Part II Expanding Postsecondary Opportunity
• Part III Pathways to Academic Success
• Notes
• References
• Index