Who Gets to Graduate?

For everyone who can&#x27;t be bothered to read the article:<p><i>&#x27;The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t.&#x27;</i><p>---<p><i>&#x27;But the disadvantaged students who had experienced the belonging and mind-set messages did significantly better: 86 percent of them had completed 12 credits or more by Christmas. They had cut the gap between themselves and the advantaged students in half.&#x27;</i><p>Basically, straightforward encouragement and promotion of a sense of belonging has a significant effect toward equalizing the health, academic performance and graduation rates of economically disadvantaged kids of the same aptitude as wealthier peers.

This is interesting because it shows a specific mechanism by which smart kids of non-college-educated parents drop out. She failed a test in her first month in college, and her mother told her maybe she wasn&#x27;t meant to be there. I vaguely remember failing a test early in college too, but it never would have occurred to my (intelligentsia-class) parents that I wasn&#x27;t meant to be educated. I can only imagine how discouraging that feels.

<i>The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t. Or to put it more statistically: About a quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree.</i><p>I find this very interesting in light of studies I&#x27;ve seen in Canada and Europe: Those studies all found that parental <i>income</i> was irrelevant after regressing for the overwhelming effect of parental <i>education</i>. Poor kids of well-educated parents were far more likely to graduate than rich kids of uneducated parents.<p>Of course, this would reinforce the story being told even more: Parents with college degrees encourage and expect their progeny to attend and graduate from college, while parents without that higher education do not provide an analogous proof of possibility.

Not to divert from the main point of the article, but this is frightening:<p><i>More than 40 percent of American students who start at four-year colleges haven’t earned a degree after six years. If you include community-college students in the tabulation, the dropout rate is more than half, worse than any other country except Hungary.</i><p>It is astonishing that 2&#x2F;5 of American students can be saddled with huge debts without having generated the means to repay that debt (increased wages through a college degree).

What&#x27;s interesting is that I had a very similar experience as a white male (first to go to college out of my siblings&#x2F;family), and got a 0.4 the first semester.<p>Things seemed easy in high school, so I thought I knew what I was doing, until I realized that University is serious business academically.<p>With friends failing out right and left, I forced myself to attend paid tutoring sessions (worth it) and meet others who had study groups.<p>In the end, it worked out after years of making up for that one mistaken semester, but I had to buckle down on my own because of the fear of telling my parents how bad I performed...

Vanessa averaged A&#x27;s in high school but tested a 22 on the ACT: she was the top of her class, but her class was very far behind the students in the rest of the country. Her high school was clearly ineffective and set her up for failure on her first test. Good for her for sticking with it and working through&#x2F;around&#x2F;with a terribly unequal system that disadvantaged her from the start.<p>Perhaps instead of an SAT or an ACT, there should be a test where different colleges contribute questions that are representative of intro level classes at the school. Questions would progress from relatively easy (large state school questions) to more complex, esoteric questions that would show up for the more selective, private school caliber students.<p>This would overcome an important informational friction: high school students don&#x27;t see college-level test questions until they&#x27;re enrolled and sitting in class, with the test in front of them. If you are going to make a $200k investment, you should have as much information as possible about your chances of success before signing on the dotted line.

It&#x27;s interesting because my younger brother and I fared very differently. He had a very low score after high school (I think it was the second lowest score one could get) and never graduated college (despite being accepted for an online degree which he then dropped out). I had a high score in high school, graduated from college (and picked up awards along the way), got accepted in two masters (one of which I dropped out to pursue another masters). We were two years apart and in fact my family gained more income by the time I started college. However I sympathise with this article because not only did I moved cities and am a minority but also because I too failed some subjects in my first year. All you need is perseverance and support.

Uh oh..<p>&quot;But here’s the key — none of them know that they’re in the bottom quartile.” The first rule of the Dashboard, in other words, is that you never talk about the Dashboard.&quot;

A lot of junior colleges offer more personal instructional programs and are geared more towards helping out first time students. The more interpersonal relationship between professors and students are community colleges seems like an overall better way to transition students from high school to university. Not to mention they are far more efficient to run!<p>Surely one potential solution would be to remove the social stigma of attending a community college? I am proud that I went to a CC with professors that cared about their students, class sizes in the 20s, and office hours that extended throughout the day.<p>I had brilliant professors across multiple subjects, the common thread running throughout my entire community college experience was that each and every professor who worked there was there because they loved to teach and spread their joy of their field to students.<p>The other obvious issue is poor study skills taught in HS. I tell students in HS that if they get one thing out of HS, which is otherwise a large waste of time, it should be to learn how to study.

An academic paper summarizing studies on the effect of attitude interventions like those discussed in the OP:<p><a href="https://labs.la.utexas.edu/adrg/files/2013/12/REVIEW-OF-EDUCATIONAL-RESEARCH-2011-Yeager-267-301.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;labs.la.utexas.edu&#x2F;adrg&#x2F;files&#x2F;2013&#x2F;12&#x2F;REVIEW-OF-EDUC...</a><p>Positive feelings of belonging and capability seem to be a surprisingly powerful form of race and class based privilege.

&gt; It may seem counterintuitive, but the more selective the college you choose, the higher your likelihood of graduating.<p>I hope they controlled for the admission criteria here. Otherwise, the obvious reason to see a correlation like this is that more selective colleges <i>select</i> students who are better at studying for tests (and therefore more likely to graduate).

For an in-depth description of the qualitative disadvantages in education, I recommend reading &quot;Live on the Boundary&quot;: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lives-Boundary-Achievements-Educationally-Underprepared/dp/0143035460/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Lives-Boundary-Achievements-Educationa...</a>

Speaks to the failure of affirmative action. She should not have gotten into this school, but instead went to an easier one where she would have passed the exam. Imagine how bad the second pick students are?

<p><pre><code> The distribution of grades ... didn’t follow the nice sweeping bell curve you might expect. Instead, they fell into what he calls a “bimodal distribution.”</code></pre>

I&#x27;m curious: how would the achievement gap change if all or most post-secondary education was delivered online instead of at physical colleges&#x2F;universities?

a) has this study been reproduced (i.e. the Dashboard business)<p>b) still smells like Lysenko-ism

TL;DR

I didn&#x27;t read the whole article, but from the introduction, it seemed she failed the test because she wasn&#x27;t used to studying hard in high school. Richer students do have more resources but I can&#x27;t figure why money was a relevant factor in this case.

It&#x27;s strange that this article just hit the front page of HN, when it was written 20 days ago.

further reading on getting dramatically underqualified students to graduate anyway: <a href="http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/blackelite.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com&#x2F;blackelite.htm</a><p>At some point, you wonder: what if we gave the same level of support to the qualified students?