HIGH SCHOOL REALLY DOES MATTER FOR COLLEGE-BOUND

Saturday, May 1, 2004

Efforts to get more students to enroll in college have been energetic, widespread and commendable, especially when they have opened the doors to opportunity for young people who are well prepared to stride through them to success.

But perhaps these efforts have been too successful; among high school seniors in 1992, 84 percent of seniors were planning to earn a college degree. Most of them didn't. And that's the point; getting into college is not a goal in itself, but a means to the end of graduation with a degree. Many students are not prepared to do that. Worse, they don't know they aren't prepared. And worse than that, the people who should be telling them so, including their teachers and counselors, keep silence for fear of giving offense.

The well-intentioned effort to encourage all students to go to college, says Northwestern Professor James E. Rosenbaum, "inadvertently gives them the impression that high school grades don't matter."

But grades do matter. In an article in the spring issue of American Educator (www.aft.org/american_educator/spring 2004/), a journal published by the American Federation of Teachers, Rosenbaum points out that of 1982 high school graduates with no better than a C average who started college, only 14 percent received even an associate degree. Students whose high school grades average C or lower have less than a 50-50 chance of earning even one college credit, let alone a degree.

"Do your students know that? Do your colleagues? Did you know that?" he asks his readers, most of them presumably teachers. Good questions all.

Rosenbaum isn't opposed to open admissions at community colleges, by any means. For the 14 percent who succeeded, it was a valuable second chance. For "the other 86 percent, their second chance was only another experience of failure."

He asks, "Shouldn't we tell the students: If you want to graduate from college, exert the effort and get good grades in high school?"

Ah yes, but who's "we"?

Rosenbaum and his colleagues have found that guidance counselors seldom discourage students with poor grades from attending college, don't tell them when they are unprepared and do not warn them about their poor chances of success. Counselors told the researchers that when they try to do those things, parents object and principals back the parents.

It used to be that counselors underpromoted college, often for stereotypical reasons -- mine told me to go to secretarial school, for instance, though that was a very long time ago. But overpromoting it also carries harsh penalties. Students who think their high school work doesn't matter aren't motivated to work hard, they waste the time they could have used to prepare for college, they spend their college savings "on remedial courses they could have taken for free in high school" and they reduce their chances of graduating.

Furthermore, when they do go off to college and are put in remedial courses, they often don't even know that the courses they are taking don't count toward a degree. So they don't realize that a "two-year" associate degree may take much longer to complete, between three and four years on average for full-time students, one community college administrator told Rosenbaum.

"Discovering after 1.5 years that you are still two years away from a two-year degree is not only demoralizing," Rosenbaum says, "but may present virtually insurmountable time and budget problems."

So who does the telling? The AFT has an online fact sheet, "What you need to do in high school if you want to graduate from college," that maps out the territory for students (link from the page above). It shows students how their chances of graduation are related to their high school grades, to the amount of homework they do, to the number of math courses they take.

Of students who take calculus in high school, 80 percent get a bachelor's degree. Of those whose highest math course is Algebra I, only 8 percent do. This is correlation, of course, not causality. Strong students who are likely to succeed in college are also more likely to sign up for more demanding courses. But at the margin, weaker students may be encouraged to take one more math course than they otherwise would, and if they discover that one additional course is too hard for them -- and some will -- at least they've learned something important about their realistic expectations for success in college.

Rosenbaum doesn't neglect the prospects of students who decide that college isn't the best choice for them. Solid high-school-level skills are sufficient for many decent jobs. The habits of good discipline and hard work, even if they don't lead to stellar grades, are prized in the workplace. Blowing off high school and hoping to make it up in college is a bad strategy for life, and high school students need to know that.