Two months ago, I became Commissioner of Education in Rhode Island, and one of my most significant areas of focus has been on improving the high-school graduation rate in our state. I’ve learned that among our 9th graders who are living in poverty, 1 of 3 students is likely to fail to graduate from high school. This number is appallingly low, and it shows us the challenges that so many of our students of color and our students living in poverty face every day.

While we have adequate data about how many students fail to graduate from high school, when I ask how many of our students are likely to graduate from college, it becomes clear that our information is minimal. We have no reliable, accurate statewide data on college completion. One national study estimated that only 1 of 5 Rhode Island 9th graders is likely to graduate from college eight years from today. I am quite certain that number considerably lower among students in our urban districts.

As evidenced by the many thoughtful responses to this week’s question, “How can college completion rates be improved?,” there is no single solution to this crisis. My thinking on this issue follows along the lines set forth in the report that a coalition of D.C. education agencies (including the DC State Education Office, where I was state superintendent, and the DC Public Schools) issued in 2006: “Double the Numbers for College Success.” This report groups possible solutions into four general areas: strongly supporting students and public schools, increasing high-school success, helping students with college enrollment, and helping students succeed in college.

I believe we can begin to accomplish these goals by focusing on what many have called the new three R’s of education: rigor, relevance, relationships.

We have taken major steps in Rhode Island regarding relationships. The Board of Regents Secondary School Regulations and the Rhode Island Diploma System require that all of our high schools focus on personalization, through such means as an advisory structure. The regulations encourage schools to function as “small learning communities,” and they establish as a goal that every student must be well-known by at least one adult in the school to whom he or she can look to for support.

The regulations also require that all students have an individual learning plan upon entry into high school. These plans outline a course of study for the student, and they articulate the student’s goals and aspirations. So we have made a lot of progress in getting our high-school students, early on, to consider their future and to focus on what they will need to accomplish to succeed in college.

Much of our work going forward will involve the other two “R’s,” relevance and rigor.

As to relevance, we need to prepare our students for the 21st-century global economy. They will need excellent skills in technology, the sciences, and world languages, and they will benefit from real-world learning experiences through such programs as internships and service learning.

As to rigor, we must raise the bar, and then give students the support that they need to reach that standard. I am deeply concerned about unequal educational opportunities in our schools. In Rhode Island, our AP participation rate is quite low, and it’s zero in many of our urban high schools. This must change.

My primary goal as commissioner is to transform Rhode Island education so that all Rhode Island students are ready for success in college, careers, and life. Achieving this goal will require us to work closely with our partners in higher education. Through our Governor’s PK-16 Council in Rhode Island, we have taken steps to align high-school graduation requirements with college-readiness standards.

We can do much more, however. A big part of my work as commissioner will be to ensure that all students have greater opportunities for dual-enrollment courses or early-college-access programs. I plan to build better connections between high-school students and students from their communities who are already in college. Our colleges that enroll primarily first-generation college students need to build their advisory systems – perhaps along the same model as our high-school advisories, with one adult knowing and supporting every enrolled college student. Colleges should also continue to improve their peer-support systems to help students stay enrolled and on course toward graduation.

Most of all, we need to ensure that our high-school students graduate ready for college, so we have to improve performance and close achievement gaps across our entire public-education system. We must establish world-class standards and assessments and hold the highest expectations for our entire education community, students and educators as well. At the same time, our colleges must meet the needs of their entering students and provide them with an education that will prepare them well for success in college, careers, and life.

Jim Kohlmoos, president and CEO of Knowledge Alliance www.nekia.org/, submitted the following in relation to the college-readiness question:

After sifting through studies, executive summaries, research and data, there exists little empirical evidence supporting a confident answer. Of course, there will ultimately be many answers based upon the varying characteristics of universities as well as the makeup and needs of a student body. But, in fact, there is meager research looking into the reasons why young adults are entering, but not graduating from college.

Crossing the Finish Line not only provides statistics, but offers an in-depth analysis regarding how this phenomenon exists, especially considering the increase in financial incentives of the college graduate wage premium. Unfortunately, the report is one among a few published pieces in the field to examine the problem.

Steve Peha has a point: not everything in the undergraduate experience needs to be quantified. There are a myriad of factors that lead to one’s college graduation, not all of which can be understood using numbers. However, this data presents the education research, policy, and academic communities with a charge to uncover exactly what works to move our nation’s students successfully through college.

Now the education community is responsible for what it knows, and the statistics that back up that knowledge. While it may be tempting to scramble for reforms and band aids, it would be wise to dig for empirical evidence first, any recorded investigation of this same question in the past. Mr. Van Roekel cites research in his response, as does Mr. Lomax. Hess’ study is mentioned, too. There is a place to begin answering this question, but few conclusions based on the research. The knowledge base is still too narrow.

To answer Ms. Krigman’s question directly, to boost college completion, the education community should translate the research that exists into knowledge so that it can be used and applied in policy and practice, and investigate more deeply the questions that emerge from this one and the gaps in previous studies.

In his most recent post, Monty Neill points out the failures and fallacies of using standardized tests as predictors of college readiness. And he seems to have his ducks in a row with regard to both research and common sense about what admissions officers in many schools are looking for and how kids’ skills (or lack thereof) play out in freshman year college classrooms.

However, I note that most people in our country, and especially those with the most degrees, the biggest foundations, and the highest political positions want more testing data of the same type we already have – and they seem to want to do even more with it all the time. (Tying teacher performance to test scores seems to be the next big thing.)

Having given a few multiple choice tests in my time, I’ve always found the data to be a little odd. For example, when giving the Gates-McGinitie Reading Test to a group of 3rd graders one year (per district orders), three little girls turned out to have 12th grade vocabularies. Granted they were smart little cookies. But in no way, in September of 3rd grade, were they ready for anything resembling high school literature. By the end of the year they were barely getting through Harry Potter.

I think anyone who has ever given out multiple-choice tests (and even those with the occasional short answer here and there) realizes how limited they are – and how strange the results can be. Yet the most powerful education policy people seem to want more and more of this kind of testing.

Then there’s all the shenanigans the 50 states have been up to. As Diane Ravitch noted recently in an article about New York state’s reduction in the percentage of problems required to pass tests, virtually every other state has gone through the same “dumbing down” process. Whenever legislators want scores to go up, they just make the tests easier to pass. Aside from being a gross mismanagement of political power, this behind-the-scenes recasting of grade level performance is unfair to the public, to our teachers, and most of all to our kids. And yet the discussion, as Mr. Neill points out, seems to come back again and again to acquiring more test data and using it in broader ways.

I’m sure I’m the least accomplished member of the Education Experts here so please feel free to point out where I'm making ridiculous claims and unsupported arguments. But the passion that exists for data (when we all know the data is hopelessly flawed and subject to ever more corruption) seems to me unwarranted. I can’t imagine being in a position of power in our education system and advocating for more testing at this time. It seems to me unconscionable in light of what we know about tests and test data.

Of course, there’s always that old standby: Don’t worry, we’ll fix the tests! Well, alrighty then. Let’s get in and fix’em. Why wait? If everyone is so confident about our ability to have better tests and more ethical management of them, why don’t we put that to the test? Surely we can cook up a little longitudinal research study to sort this out. But until such study exists – and really it should be “studies” plural if we’re going to be scientific about it – I would like to suggest that perhaps the testing we’re doing now might be doing more harm than good in the short run.

As long as I’ve been in education, I’ve been a big fan of human judgment and high accountability. It would be interesting, I think, just as an experiment, to find maybe 100 high school teachers with 100 seniors each and have them judge who is and who is not ready for college. Then we might track who gets into college, how they do in their coursework, and whether or not they finish. I wonder what the results would be? And if human beings were a kind of “gateway” to the next level of learning, and their “scorecard” on this exercise was part of the data we used to evaluate them, why this could not suffice as a data-driven system that would improve things for everyone.

You see, right now, as we add more tests to more years, we are, paradoxically, lowering teacher accountability. As Diane Ravitch pointed out in her article, passing scores for state tests are often very, very low. And if the trend continues, they’ll be hitting rock bottom some time in the near future. In fact, we have already reached a time when passing all of one’s high school tests is an utterly meaningless piece of data with regard to college-readiness or readiness for anything.

Monty Neill works for FairTest so it’s his job to kick butt about good tests and bad tests, good uses and bad uses. But what I wonder is this? Has any test yet been created for high school students that is a good predictor of success at the college level? Is the ACT or SAT as good as it gets? (While obviously not being good enough for the 800+ institutions Monty sights in his post.) Or do we have something better up our sleeve?

Monty wants tests that are fair. I want tests that are accurate. Or I want no tests at all. Ideally, I’d like to see educators themselves step up to the plate and make personal – and, yes, even subjective – assessments of their students’ fitness for higher levels of learning while being held accountable for their accuracy. Relying on human judgment would radically change the responsibility and accountability teachers have for their students – something that testing (and teaching to the test) is gradually eroding.

When teachers know that all they have to do is use the required district textbook, teach the required test problems, and wait for the state to pronounce their students smart enough or not, they become distanced from both students and learning. Like that study on “The Widget Effect” says, teachers feel more and more like plug and play hardware with each year that goes by. And I believe testing is part of the problem. Specifically, knowing that you are being held accountable for inaccurate testing with cut scores that change all the time just makes the entire endeavor of teaching ludicrous – even if the cut scores are moving downward in your favor.

If we want to know why kids aren’t graduating from college, and why remediation classes on college campuses are at an all-time high, we have only to look at our state testing systems which eagerly confer upon their students credentials that seem like they ought to be good enough to get kids off to a good start on a higher education. But in fact, we know that few, if any, states have tests that are rigorous enough to be sound predictors of college readiness. And, as Monty points out, many schools aren’t even that hot on the ACT and SAT anymore – preferring the high school transcript instead.

So I come back to my original question: Why are we so excited about testing? Where does this mania come from? Why do so many people see it as the panacea for our educational ills? Maybe some people think this will all be settled if and when we get national standards. But I’d like to point out that as yet we don’t even have drafts in two subjects. It’ll be a long time before national standards are truly in play nationwide. And I don’t see anything in the last ten years of reform to indicate that the tests we’ll have for those standards will be any more reliable – and free from political corruption – than the tests we are using now.

We have for many years had a wonderful way of knowing who was ready for college and who wasn’t: it’s called the college admissions process. Granted, it’s gotten a little out of hand in recent years because so many kids want to go to school and so many colleges want their money. But as Mr. Hess and his group have shown, the graduation statistics for a given institution can be determined and, if disclosed, would probably sway more than a student or two (or more likely the parents of a student or two) from applying to suspect institutions for whom scholarship is far down the list of organizational priorities.

Human judgment, along with just a bit of transparency with regard to college graduation rates, could dramatically improve the process of how we determine who is ready for college and who isn’t. Rather than having high school teachers score tests to align themselves with standards (as standards people love to do!), why not have them meet with college professors to align themselves with real-world expectations? My hunch is that it would work just as well. And it wouldn’t be subject to the arbitrary whims of test makers who seem to have no shame about the unreliable tests they create and politicians who seem to have no shame in corrupting their results.

I find it interesting how much of the discussion of seemingly somewhat different topics – such as ensuring more college graduates - ends up involving assessment issues.

I was pleased to read Michael Lomax' discussion of how the Gates Millenium Challenge does not rely on SAT or ACT scores as the high school record is more valuable. In fact, at the Historically Black Colleges and Universities studied in Crossing the Line, there's a negative correlation between SAT scores and six year graduation rates. Fortunately, a growing number of colleges do not erect test barriers to applicants. FairTest has a list of 830 colleges and universities for which all or some applicants need not submit SAT or ACT scores for admissions.

I also would caution on over-interpreting the ACT findings as to who is "college ready." Many whose scores predict they are not ready are in fact ready, and some who are deemed "ready" are not. Keeping them out, as Checker says, would not be wise.

Several people have spoken strongly on the need for adequate preparation, along with the necessary tasks of providing adequate financial and other supports for students. Learning to fill in the correct bubble or write a short response to a prompt is not college preparation. We have to get away from the increasing control test prep exerts over school curriculum and instruction if we expect students to be ready to succeed in college. Achieve, for example, surveyed results from teachers of first year college students. The knowledge and skills these professors say students need are poorly or not at all measured by our standardized tests. That means the results of the tests do not tell us nearly enough. More importantly, the drive to boost scores has increasingly eliminated or failed to cultivate the content, skills and dispositions students need to succeed, not only in college but as effective citizens. (There is other evidence on this point, see for example the FairTest fact sheet on graduation tests.)

In short, one key part of better ensuring students are able to succeed in college is to overhaul our assessments.

It is critical to make sure more people attend college and that college students reach their educational goals, whether the goal is a degree or a certificate or further education and training. President Obama has declared this a national priority, and our members are working to help students succeed. But we face big obstacles and a lot more needs to be done.

First, we need to bring together teachers in K-12 and higher education in order to clarify and match up the information and skills students require to succeed in college. To promote collaboration between K-12 and higher education, the AFT has encouraged and will continue to encourage our members in schools and colleges to meet together locally to clarify student expectations and curriculum, and create a seamless educational system.

Second, we need to do a better job of making college more affordable and accessible, especially for students who are low-income, first-generation-in-college or returning adults. Students responding to surveys cite finances more than any other reason for dropping out. And there are hard numbers to go along with the survey data. The proportion of state support for public higher education has been going down while student tuition has gone up--and federal financial aid has had a hard time keeping pace. For students who already live close to the edge financially, any illness or job loss in their families may prompt them to drop out—often hoping it will be temporary—or to switch from full-time to part-time status, which greatly diminishes their prospects of getting a degree. We are working with both the Obama Administration and Congress to improve conditions on this front—the stimulus has kept state funding from declining as much as it would have otherwise, and big increases in Pell Grants and less expensive loans are in the offing. We all need to think about creating more stable and secure funding for public colleges and universities so they can meet the demands placed on them.

Third, we need to strengthen educational and support services for at-risk college students. Continual contact with helping professionals is particularly important during the first year. It helps students, especially those who may be uncomfortable in educational settings, keep up with class work and shore up their learning skills.

Fourth, we need to conduct more research into student success and abandon the current formula for calculating graduation rates. We need to conduct far more research into what makes for student success. At the federal level, we really need to develop a better formula for measuring college attainment because the current graduation rate formula presents a highly inaccurate picture of what is really going on. Among other things, the current formula doesn’t take part-time students into account, it doesn’t take college transfers into proper account and it doesn’t distinguish between students who have dropped out and students who are still in college at the end of six years. Also, the formula does not count students who may not graduate with a college degree but achieve their educational goals by acquiring new skills or earning different certification, which is not uncommon particularly at community colleges. The academic community and government officials should work together to develop formulas that track students accurately.

Finally, we are kidding ourselves if we think we can achieve real improvement in student success without taking steps to reverse the current direction of academic staffing, under which full-time faculty positions are vanishing and replaced by contingent faculty, particularly part-time/adjunct faculty who are exploited financially and professionally in a way that has a negative impact on students. Contingent faculty teaching undergraduates outnumber full-time tenured faculty almost three to one, and teach more than half the undergraduate courses. Although contingent instructors are excellent teachers, working under the conditions of contingency takes a toll on the faculty member’s involvement in the college, the time available to tutor or advise students, and the opportunity to keep up with their progress over time. Because of these conditions, some recent studies indicate that student retention rates decrease as the ratio of adjunct faculty at an institution increases.

I’ve laid out a heavy agenda here, but the good news is that faculty, administrators and government all seem more focused than ever on helping students succeed.

There is no single reason why students are not finishing college. However, I dare say that for many the answer is simply that they can’t afford the high cost of a college education. Despite their best efforts, too many students have been forced to choose between continuing their education or putting food on the table and a roof over their heads. If we want students to finish college, we must make college more affordable. But, affordability is not the only issue.

Also, we must look at the environment in which we ask college students to learn. The alarming increase in college dropout rates is an indication that we need to be more proactive in fostering an academic environment that benefits and supports students. Research indicates that students perform better in academic environments when they feel connected to the university and their course work. How do we make them feel connected? We ensure that all of our institutions of higher learning meet specific quality standards, including well trained faculty and staff available to students for supplemental instruction, counseling and academic guidance. We cannot expect students to succeed if they don’t have adequate access to well-trained faculty and staff when they need help. The nation’s colleges and universities need more faculty and staff.

Finally, the best way to ensure college success is to provide students with a firm academic foundation in their primary and secondary years. Preparing students to succeed in a complex, multicultural society starts before elementary school and includes quality teachers in every classroom, smaller class sizes, access to the latest technology and state-of-the-art learning facilities. College success starts in kindergarten and continues for a lifetime.

College completion rates are not what they should be in this country, and it’s clear institutions must do more—which will be challenging in the current financial environment. However, they can’t do this alone.

There are three steps to higher graduation rates:

We need academically prepared students who are able and motivated to do college-level work. As was discussed on this blog several weeks ago, the most recent data from ACT indicate that only 25 percent of graduating high school seniors are college-ready. Some students who leave college do so because they are unable—or unwilling—to do the work.

We need adequate financial resources for students. Increased funding for need-based federal financial aid and a simplified FAFSA are vital to helping students afford college.

We need academic counseling and other support services for students who need them. Many students who arrive on campus need some form of remediation to fill gaps in their secondary education. Colleges and universities must identify and address these needs.

At the same time, we need to be careful about making college completion rates the end-all and be-all, for two reasons.

First, we could boost completion rates if we shifted from our current system of higher education, which encourages access for anyone who wants to pursue postsecondary education, to one in which only those prepared for college-level work were admitted. This is the basis of much of the European system and accounts for higher rates of completion there.

Second, we need to remember that federal graduation rates are wildly inaccurate. According to the federal government, anyone who transfers or who takes more than six years to graduate is a dropout—including President Barack Obama, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), and former House Education and Labor Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA). A system that classifies these people as dropouts is in desperate need of revision so that we can accurately capture data on graduation rates.

Postsecondary education remains the single most effective path to a better work force, a stronger position in our competitive global economy, and a brighter future for our nation. It is incumbent on all of us to ensure that students not only have access to a college education, but also the resources and support to complete it.

This week’s question goes to the very heart of UNCF’s mission and work. College completion, we believe, must be not just a goal but the goal. It’s the goal of everything that UNCF does, and in fact our largest program, the twenty-year, $1.6 billion Gates Millennium Scholars Program (GMS) has yielded some very encouraging results. GMS, which this year is marking its tenth class of Gates Scholars, is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Independent research on the Program reflects considerable success in achieving college completion. The key finding: The low-income African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who receive Gates Millennium Scholarships have a five-year graduation rate of 80 percent at the over 1300 colleges and universities they have attended.

Two of the GMS findings track closely with observations of the Crossing the Finish Line authors reported in the Inside Higher Education review. One is their conclusion that high school records have greater predictive value than SAT or ACT tests. We agree. In fact, the Gates Millennium Scholars program does not request or consider such test scores in its selection process.

UNCF’s GMS experience also tracks well with the authors’ contention that student support services greatly improve chances of completion. Gates Scholars receive academic, mentoring, leadership and other support services and those services have played a significant role in increasing the program graduation rate.

Two other observations based on our GMS experience:

·Finances are important. Inadequate finances remain the single most important barrier to college completion. Often the cost of staying in school is taking a job that reduces the time they can devote to their studies and the number of credits they can carry, forcing them to extend the time required for degree completion to five or six years or more. Scholarship checks need to be in amounts at least large enough to keep student jobs to a minimum number of hours.

·Let students go anywhere and study anything. Institution-based programs like the University of Maryland-Baltimore County’s Meyerhoff Scholars Program and programs that encourage study in needed disciplines like STEM are important parts of the solution, but so are programs like Gates Millennium Scholars that let students pick—and change—where they go and what they study. Discovery of the world and of oneself is a critical part of going to college. We believe that students are more likely to succeed when there is a good fit between them and their college and major, even if those change as students come to understand themselves better.

Even as we devote attention and resources to helping minorities complete college, it’s important to recognize two important truths about college completion:

· Increasing college completion rates is not just about minorities. The data from Crossing the Finish Line that are reproduced in Inside Higher Education’s review of the book show significant gaps between the graduation rates of minority and majority student populations. But the 42 percent four-year graduation rates for white students is nothing to write home about either. We should therefore focus on making changes that will improve graduation rates for all students, not just on closing the gap between groups, as important as that is.

·Increasing college completion rates is not just about college. Right now, approximately thirty percent of all entering freshmen need to take at least one remedial course when they get to college. The percentage is higher among minorities. What this points to is both the importance of improving the education students get from preschool through high school, for its own sake and to better prepare students for college, and to the folly of siloing education policy—preschool, elementary, high school and college. Any improvement in education at any level is welcome, but we won’t make meaningful increases in college completion rates until we fix the entire preschool-through-college process.

Will replicating the success of the Gates Millennium Scholars Program and other programs be expensive? Without question. But it will not be nearly as expensive as the consequences of the status quo for our economy and civil society.

Let me start by saying that I am very happy to see this question being asked. When I entered a large state university as a first-generation college student many years ago, the university did everything it could to be sure that I knew that the university was only responsible for giving me an opportunity and was not at all responsible for my success as a student; that was my responsibility as a student. In fact, the university was pretty clear that it didn’t even expect most of us to succeed. The old “look to your left, and look to your right” speech about not expecting many of us to succeed was all too common.

Not much had changed by the time I started my own career in higher education. The common saying then was “students have a right to fail.” Most institutions didn’t even keep track of dropouts. Enrollment was what counted and, if students dropped out, that was just fine so long as others took their place. In many institutions, this attitude regrettably still prevails.

Fortunately, this attitude began to change in the early 1990s as the concepts of “the learning paradigm” or “the learning college” began to emerge. The thinking behind this movement was that institutions had a responsibility to promote and support student learning, and that they should measure their success as institutions based upon how well students learned. Sure, students had a great deal of responsibility for their own success, but so did the institution. The shift from “teaching” to “learning” was really a shift away from measuring the success of a college or university based upon resources and processes to measuring success based upon outcomes.

Concern about how institutions could improve student learning and student success led to the development and expansion of measures of student engagement (NSSE and CCSSE) as proxies for student learning. The foresight of major Foundations that saw education as the solution to social and economic equity helped to raise concerns about affordability, access, and success (more recently, completion). The Lumina Foundation for Education, in particular, has made a significant contribution to our knowledge about ways to increase student success in community colleges through its early and consistent support of the “Achieving the Dream—Community Colleges Count” initiative. Several other foundations are now supporting this or similar initiatives.

My colleague responders have made good points about the need to improve preparation for college, the need to be sure that college is affordable, and the importance of accessible and sufficient need-based student financial aid. As many as 60% of students who enter community colleges right out of high school are not prepared for college, and have to take at least one remedial or developmental course. However, we can’t just blame our high school colleagues; we need to work together to find solutions to our problems. I applaud the work that is being done to align standards and to communicate expectations for higher education success to high school teachers and students. Research indicates that students who attend an early college high school (one located on a college campus) are more successful than high school students in general. We also know that students who have taken some college coursework while still in high school do better in college than students who don’t. Can we build on these successes?

Achieving the Dream and other similar initiatives have taught us that institutions that decide to improve student success rates can make significant progress. Creating a “culture of evidence and improvement” by itself is important. Colleges that collect and disaggregate student success data and then challenge faculty and staff to develop strategies to improve success rates are making progress. Some of what has been learned is common sense, yet higher education hasn’t historically changed its practices even when we know what should be done. For example, we know that students who take a college success skills class early in their college career are more successful than those who don’t; we know that financial aid is critically important for low-income students; we know that students who register late have the odds stacked against them; and we know that students who are part of a learning community are more successful than those who are not. Why don’t we do more of what we know works, and why don’t we find out what else needs to be done to help our students to be successful?

We also know that today’s college students are more mobile that they ever have been, often attending several colleges and universities on their way to a baccalaureate. Yet, our transfer policies most often frustrate them and make it difficult, more expensive, and more time consuming for them to advance toward the degree—if they do persist. Only a small minority of states have effective course articulation agreements or common course numbers. Isn’t it past time for us to overcome institutional protectionism and consider the best interests of students and those who are paying for their education?

With the challenge that President Obama has given us to improve college access and completion and the goals set forth by major foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation for Education, we have a unique opportunity to make significant advancements. At a time when it is clear that we need all Americans to contribute to the maximum of their potential, it is simply unacceptable for us to continue to ignore the low rates of participation and success in higher education for students from low-income families, first-generation students, and racial minorities (in particular, minority males). We must do much better.

To compete in a world that relies increasingly on knowledge work, college completion rates can and must be improved. For some time, the wages and opportunities of those with higher levels of education have been pulling ahead of those of high school graduates, that, today, barely enable subsistence. Yet, despite all of our investments in high school reform, only about 50 percent of 9th graders enter postsecondary education, and only about 35% graduate with a college degree – about half the rate of countries like Finland and Korea that have been intensely reforming their education systems.

Earlier this year, President Obama set, as a national goal, that the United States would lead the world in the proportion of college graduates by 2020. If we are to accomplish this goal, we need to focus on two major issues – student readiness and more adequate financial aid, as these are the two issues that contribute most to the high dropout rates from college.

Later this month, we will see the draft of the college and career-ready core standards being prepared by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association. Once completed, these standards will be an important roadmap for improving student readiness in the United States. From these standards, we will be able to identify the curriculum, the instruction, and the assessments that best prepare our children for college.

As we look at global competitors like Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and Singapore, we see several commonalities that have led to improved student achievement and postsecondary success for all. Each of these nations has used common standards at the state or national level to develop the sorts of curriculum and assessments that ensure virtually all students are prepared for postsecondary instruction and technical careers. Each of them has made major investments in the quality of teaching. And each of these nations is outperforming the United States on international benchmarks.

Unlike the tests that have dominated the U.S. landscape, the assessments used in high school examination systems in these and other high-achieving nations emphasize open-ended essay questions and complex problem solutions, rather than relying on multiple choice items. Furthermore, their assessments include extended research papers, design products, science investigations, and other challenging tasks that help ensure that students learn to write, think, research, and manage their own work – the very skills colleges and employers are now demanding. These tasks are supported by well-designed curriculum and extensive teacher development, as well as teacher participation in developing and scoring the assessments, so that they deeply understand the standards and how to teach them successfully.

When supported by adequate resources, thoughtful curriculum, and embedded assessments that support professional learning for teachers, these core standards have the ability to level the playing field for all students, ensuring that every child is provided a true opportunity to learn and succeed. All students work toward challenging intellectual expectations with comparable supports, regardless of race, socioeconomic status, or geography. These approaches enable students of all backgrounds to be prepared for college-level work, having graduated high school with the experience of reading and analyzing serious texts, conducting complex research projects, and writing and rewriting papers, not just filling in the bubbles on multiple-choice tests. Not only can such standards and opportunities increase the odds of today’s high school students attending tomorrow’s colleges, but they can greatly improve the percentage of students who graduate from college and are prepared to succeed at the kinds of jobs that lead a knowledge-based economy.

Indeed, students who have experienced these kinds of expectations, like those who attend schools that are part of the Performance Standards Consortium in New York, have been found to enter and graduate from college at rates that are double those of their peers. Having completed portfolios for graduation that require them to complete research projects, science inquiries, literary analyses, mathematical models, and community internships, these students (most of whom are low-income students of color) are more ready to manage their own work, access and use resources, defend their ideas, and engage in complex problem-solving than students who have spent their time filling in the blanks and answering questions at the end of the chapter.

If we increase the number of students with the skills and opportunity to enter postsecondary education, we must also ensure that they have the means to complete their educational journeys. Once students have demonstrated they are capable of college-level work, they should not be denied the opportunity due to lack of financial resources. Studies show that lack of financial aid is a major reason for students to drop out of college. This is an issue that needs national attention, as the declining federal contribution to financial aid has contributed a drop from America’s long-standing first place in college participation to 17th. Whereas federal Pell Grants covered about 75 percent of the cost of a four-year college education in 1979, the share had dropped to 33 percent of college costs by 2009. The situation is growing worse as the current fiscal crisis has led to large cutbacks in state aid to higher education. The number of states now spending more on prisons than higher education is growing each year.

In an era where education is the foundation for individual and societal success, funding should never be a barrier to college. Low-income students, first-generation college goers, and other aspiring students who have earned admission to college must be provided the financial supports they need to earn the diploma they seek.

We can increase college completion rates, and, with the right policies, we can produce the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. But we can only do it by focusing our efforts on a dual agenda: genuine student readiness for the complex world they are entering and guaranteed access to the resources these better-prepared students need to secure the education they deserve.

Kids today! Go figure! Why, in my day…. But it’s both silly and self-serving to pick on 17- and 18-year olds engaged in making what we tell them is a life-changing decision and somehow think that prior generations handled this much better. In my experience working with high schoolers, it seems that about 20% of them know where they want to go, what they want to study, and how to make it happen. The rest are pretty lost. Today’s high schools are great at telling kids what to do: go to college or else! But of the 50 or so I’ve worked in, none has done much to actually help kids make that a reality – either academically or psychologically.

And there, I think, is the problem for kids. We’re so obsessed with the quantitative aspects of education these days, we ignore the qualitative. Most kids, for one reason or another, just aren’t ready to go to college because they don’t know why they’re going. Some don’t have the academic skills. But many don’t have the emotional skills either – often because they have lived lives so programmed by their teachers and so cloistered by their parents that they’ve never developed the increased capacity for independence college requires.

The biggest problem people like to talk about, of course, is how unprepared high school kids are academically. This is easy to quantify, so it gets a lot of play. And there’s a lot of truth to it. But I think if more kids knew why they were going to college, they’d prepare better for it, and work much harder at it. And thus the need for so much remediation would be lessened.

As for the remediation issue, this is entirely the fault of colleges who admit kids that they know aren’t up to snuff. Why do they do it? Money. Extra courses mean extra dollars to institutions that care more about butts in seats than they do about baccalaureates.

And who can blame them?

More kids are going to college now than ever. And more colleges exist than ever. Why? Because there’s gold in them thar hills! As colleges raise costs with impunity, and a virtually endless supply of students seeks some form of higher education, starting a new institution – especially if it’s a “branch office” or an online system – is a pure profit play.

So if we remember that today’s high schools are set up to meet minimum state testing and graduation requirements. And that today’s colleges often put profits first. It’s easy to see how kids get squeezed in the middle and, as a result, have trouble finishing degrees.

But some institutions do a great job of graduating students. As Mr. Hess et al showed in Diplomas and Dropouts: Which Colleges Actually Graduate Their Students (and Which Don’t), their recent study for the American Enterprise Institute, some schools have graduation rates as high as 80% or better; but many also have rates as low as 20% or worse. Clearly, some schools know how to graduate their students; others probably don’t care.

However, the real driver behind the problem of low college graduation rates is strictly societal. In the last 15-20 years, we’ve endowed our kids with a brutal “College or bust!” mindset. I talk to parents and teachers all the time who are convinced their kids’ lives will be ruined if they don’t get a college degree. The push is powerful, the stigma severe. If you’re not on a college track (and kids, you know who you are!), you’re on your way to a life of misery. There are, in fact, a few powerful voices in the world of ed reform who have called for 100% college graduation as a goal of our education system. This “all or nothing” attitude about college is the catalyst that encourages too many kids to apply and too many colleges to accept them. The fact that many don’t finish is merely the result of this reaction.

So how do we improve the situation? We could ask high schools and colleges to provide more support. The traditional advisement kids receive at both high school and college doesn’t even begin to come to close to what we need. But most high schools probably don’t know how to do it and most colleges probably don’t want to.

Personally, I would like to see a cultural shift away from the “everyone has to graduate from college” meme that permeates our society today. But I don’t see anyone stepping up to the plate to take that one on. So let me take a quick shot at it here.

I believe that success and happiness in life derive from knowledge, skill, purpose, and perseverance. And I note that none of these requires a BA from an institute of higher education.

So one option is self-education. For example, I am self-educated in the field of education. I’ve been working nationally as a consultant for 15 years without a single relevant credential or any college classes in education, psychology, child development, or public policy. I hope, as we move into the hot, flat, and crowded future Thomas Friedman keeps telling us about, that we begin to value results over credentials. Certainly there’s a prominent and powerful movement like this brewing in education.

Another option I like to talk to kids about is entrepreneurship. Pick your passion; start a business. It works well for many people I know now, and I think it will continue to work well for people in the future – no matter how hot, flat, and crowded things get.

Finally, I see a lot of young people – particularly those with good attitudes and optimistic viewpoints – who are ushered into companies at low levels but who rise quickly through training on the job. If self-reliance and independent thinking are in your bag of tricks, a college education may not be necessary.

At least not the day you graduate from high school, that is.

One last way of improving college graduation rates would be to have many kids entering when they are no longer kids. What’s wrong with a 24-year old freshman who has five or six years of real-world work under his belt and a crystal clear vision of what he wants to accomplish with his life? Why can’t 35-year olds get BAs when they’ve settled into something that makes sense to them and they’ve learned to navigate adult life?

The solution to our problems in the area of college graduation might be as simple as who goes to college, when they go, and why. Clearly, for many kids, heading off to get a BA right after high school make sense. But for just as many, if not most, this traditional plan might not work as well as some more thoughtful alternative. We don’t all have to do what everyone else in school does, do we? Isn’t this a lesson our parents try hard to teach us? Maybe we can take that lesson to heart and help more kids find their way not just to the best college education but to the kind of education that works best for them.

There’s an endless debate about whether the high college dropout rate should be attributed to money or a failure to help students adjust and persevere. Like most such “better taste/fewer calories” arguments, it’s a pointless argument. We need to pay attention to both dollars and support.

Parse the dropout figures and you’ll see that poor students are least likely to make it to graduation. Those students, as economists remind us, do a better job of calculating short-term costs than figuring long-term benefits; that’s why proportionately fewer of qualified students from poor families enroll in college in the first place. The answer is straightforward—award grants during the first two years of school, when attrition is most likely, then shift gradually to a loan/grant package, making sure that students don’t face a crushing debt burden when they graduate.

At schools like U Mass and Montana—or for that matter at Berkeley, where I teach—it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. It may be hard for us codgers to remember, but the chasm is wide between high school—where courses are required, cutting is verboten and parents hover—and the on-your-own world of college. That chasm is especially wide for kids from poor families, Again, what needs to be done is well-known—early monitoring of student’s grades to spot problems, strong intervention (including requiring attendance in class), a mentor/tutor to whom the student can turn, tracking down dropouts and encouraging them to return etc.

None of this is brain surgery.What’s needed is more will and less whining.

One of the primary ways to boost college completion rates is to improve students' preparation for college while in high school. There are a number of indicators that students are not sufficiently prepared to succeed in college. The ACT sets benchmark scores for college readiness and in 2009 found 67% of test takers were prepared in English, 42% were prepared in mathematics, and 53% were prepared in reading. The reading scores are particularly troubling because reading skills are required for almost every college course. When students enter college unprepared, they end up having to take remedial classes that are costly and time consuming. Estimates range from a little over a quarter to about a third of all freshmen have to take remedial classes, while numbers are even higher for students at two-year institutions. Students are also taking longer to complete their degrees. This matters because the longer they take, the less likely they are to graduate. There's also growing evidence, that particularly for students who's parents haven't attended college, there's a need for greater support in choosing the right colleges, completing financial aid applications, and learning about how to seek help when they are struggling in a course.

To improve students' preparation for college, high schools should be organized around a comprehensive definition and vision of college readiness. This comprehensive vision includes offering rigorous academics, helping students achieve good grades in these rigorous courses, and helping students develop specific academic skills that they will need to be successful in a college-level course. According to David Conley at the University of Oregon, these skills include cognitive strategies such as analysis, reasoning and argumentation, and interpretation; the content knowledge necessary to understand the different academic disciplines, academic behaviors such as study skills, and others. Also according to David Conley and others, students need “college knowledge”—knowledge about how to apply, enroll, and succeed in a college environment.

There are a variety of ways high schools can organize themselves to work toward this vision. Early college high schools blend high school and college, and allow students to complete high school and earn up to two years of college credit or an associate’s degree at the same time. They help expose students early to the rigors of college-level work, better preparing them for postsecondary education. The Fast Track to College Act, a federal proposal will help build greater capacity at the state and local level for early college high schools. Another promising model is that of College Summit. College Summit helps high schools build a "college-going culture" and helps students plan for college. The program trains peer leaders to complete a college application and provides a postsecondary planning course for all college seniors.

There have been many fine points made that I won't repeat.

I would stress one of them with which I agree strongly: more students must graduate high school ready to do freshman level work without need of remediation, at least at the level of the community college or regional university. Reauthorization of ESEA should focus tightly and capably on helping push to this goal.

Finally, I am very curious to see the details of what the Administration and Congress will ask in return from states and community colleges in return for all the promised new resources. So far, the language in the community college initiative is positive but mushy. Will we expect sensible, explicit accountability in return for a significant increase in resources? I agree with Checker that there must be no watering down of credentials, but we need to get increasing numbers of students to credentials. The proof will be in the sophistication and effectiveness of the policies and how they work.

Will we ask for clearer expectations from higher ed to express to k-12 the precise knowledge and skills required for freshman level work? Will we fix remedial education? Will we measure more carefully how students navigate through their lower division work? Will it matter more in higher ed policy and appropriations policies in the states that we get more students to credentials?

The details on these policies that are currently under review will matter a lot.

College graduation rates reflect the fact that so many students enter college ill-prepared for the reading, mathematics, and science requirements of college-level studies.

ACT released a study recently showing that only 23% of the graduates of the high school class of 2009 were ready for college studies in English, social science, mathematics, and science.

About a third of the students who enter college across the nation require some remediation in basic skills as freshmen. In some states, the figure is closer to 50%. In New York City, half the students who enter the City University of New York need to be remediated in reading, math, or writing, and 72% of those who enter a local community college need remedial courses.

So, when we hear complaints about college graduation rates, we must consider that large numbers of those who start college are not prepared for college-level work.

Are we now going to pressure colleges to graduate students, even though they are not educated? We have already pushed the high schools to get their graduation rates up, even though many of their graduates have not mastered the basic skills.

It is not "the core mission" of colleges and universities to increase their graduation rates (as the New York Times recently said in an article on this same subject). It is their core mission to educate their students well so that they can be independent, thinking citizens, prepared to enter a variety of professions and careers. They could easily improve their graduation rates by accepting only students who are prepared for college-level studies.

Diane Ravitch

College requires the sophisticated reading of sophisticated texts, and to ensure success students need to be able to do that when they arrive. In addition, they need to be able to afford to continue their education. That doesn’t just mean paying tuition. Students drop out when they come from families whose web of financial security – the fallback wealth – is not sufficient to sustain the family when crisis hits. In other words, their parents need their help to meet the rent. The declining wealth of the middle class has exacerbated that problem, and has probably hit black students especially hard. Read Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammad in Sunday’s New York Times to see just why.

So if we want to fix college, we need to find ways to address the widening gap between wealth and poverty in America, and we need to create education policy that returns sophisticated reading to the curriculum. That doesn’t mean that we ought to be dumping difficult literature on kids who are not prepared to read it. But it does mean that we need to re-establish sophisticated reading as our goal, and support the teaching practices and the teachers that can take us there.

Tall order, all of it, I know. Sherman Dorn’s post seems to offer some practical advice for filling it. Take a look.

There are traditionally two answers to this question, and both are correct. But it's the absence of the third answer that's perhaps the biggest problem.

Answer number one is that we need to do a better job of preparing students to succeed in college. Even though 75 percent of high school graduates go on to some form of post-secondary education, far fewer get the rigorous curriculum and high-quality teaching they need to succeed there.

Answer number two is affordability: Crossing the Finish Line found an inverse relationship between college costs and the odds of completion. This is crucial: affordability isn't just a college access issue, it's also a college success issue. And while state and federal lawmakers need invest more in financial aid, by far the biggest driver of un-affordability is the underlying cost of college itself, which is increasingly relentlessly, faster even than the health care costs that are driving the federal government toward bankruptcy.

Preparation and affordability are crucial and I imagine we'll hear more about them today. But there's also a third, much less discussed answer: colleges themselves are not doing nearly as much as they can do, or should do, to help students--even well-prepared, financially stable students--earn degrees.

It's hard to generalize about "higher education," given the diversity of the American system, but overall our colleges and universities are surprisingly indifferent to whether undergraduates earn degrees.

In part that's because they don't have to be concerned about degrees--colleges are funded by enrollment, not graduation. Whether you're a private college or a public university, the crucial financial question is how many students are on campus in the fall, not how many are on the graduation stage in the spring.

In part that's because they're more concerned with other priorities--building the endowment, attracting "star" faculty, raising money for new facilities, making sure the football team gets to a bowl game on January 1.

And in part it's because college happens to sit right on the other side of the dividing line between childhood and adulthood. Students reach the age of majority as they matriculate, so there's a sense that their educational success, or failure, is wholly their responsibility.

As a result, we have stunningly low college graduation rate at some institutions--40%, 30%, even 20%. The numbers for low-income and minority students are often worse. Some of the biggest offenders are in urban areas where 50% high school graduation rates are routinely denounced as a national scandal. If local colleges and universities were only that good, they'd be a whole lot better than they are.

Fixing this problem will require change on multiple fronts. For public institutions, funding mechanisms should be altered so a significant part of base funding is tied to the number of graduates, taking into account institutional missions and the academic preparation of students. Peer comparisons are an appropriate benchmark here: if you're an open-access institution with a 30% graduation rate and your peers are at 55%, it's fair to expect you can do better. State lawmakers should establish graduation rate targets as part of robust accountability systems, along with parallel targets for student learning and post-graduation success in the job market, to avoid creating perverse incentives for colleges to just pass students through with a degree.

States also need to distribute resources more fairly. Right now we provide the institutions that serve the most at-risk students--community colleges and open-access four-year institutions--with the least amount of public funding, while lavishing dollars on flagship research universities. This needs to change. States also need to fix their systems of credit transfer, a hidden disaster that hurts increasingly-mobile students who move from one college to another only to find their perfectly good credits rejected.

Colleges need to invest more funding in high-quality guidance and student support. They also need to be willing to touch--no, grab with both hands--the third rail of higher education: undergraduate teaching. Students who aren't taught well struggle to learn. Students who struggle to learn tend to drop out. And a lot of undergraduate teaching is frankly terrible. Which isn't surprising, given that a lot of undergraduate instructors have no training in teaching and are often actively discouraged from spending too much time on their students, lest teaching distract from the more important work of publishing and advancing on the tenure track.

The professoriate routinely cites "academic freedom" as an all-encompassing principle to short-circuit these discussions, but that's ridiculous. Nobody should have the freedom to be incompetent at their job. Yet incompetence in undergraduate teaching is routinely tolerated, and the result can be seen in the tens of thousands of students who drop out of college every year.

It's important also to pay attention to what NOT to do, as some of the most obvious "remedies" are worse than the disease. One could, for example, improve the college completion rate by being a lot more selective in admissions, such as admitting to college only the one-quarter of ACT test takers that ACT says are actually ready to succeed at college-level academic work. That would, however, cut down a whole lot on college opportunity. At the opposite extreme, one could improve the graduation rate by slashing academic standards, in effect offering "automatic degrees" to everyone who is admitted. That would, however, radically cheapen the currency of a college degree. So we ought not do either of those things, simple and tempting as they may appear.

Over the past five years, for complicated reasons not worth going into, my wife and I have found ourselves supporting in college two individuals who are not members of our immediate familiy and who, it turns out, have nobody in THEIR own immediate families with knowledge and relevant experience in the U.S. college system. I've been staggered to see how difficult it is for such students to make their way successfully through that system, knowing what to take, what is prerequisite for what, what a major is, how to mesh one's requirements for the major with one's "distribution" requirements, how to sequence things--and how to study, prepare for exams, budget time, deal with crises, etc etc etc. In our experience with these two individuals, the universities involved (one public, one private, one east, one west) do a mediocre job of counseling/advising and a DREADFUL job of outreach to those who might need counseling but who might not even know quite what questions to ask. I came to realize how much of this sort of thing we did for our own kids back in the day, and how daunting it can be for individuals without such family support to make their way successfully through the system. I've come to believe that this is a nontrivial contributor to the college dropout problem (along with weak preparation, flagging motivation, finances, etc.)

The responses of Rick and Jamie are right on target. There are a myriad of steps that colleges can take and they enumerate them. I would especially stress the poor quality of the education received by college-bound students before they enter higher education. With remediation rates in excess of 40 percent, far too many students are behind before they take their first class and they never catch up. We must be committed to the goal of having all high school graduates college-ready and career-ready. This requires a much more rigorous K-12 curriculum and assessments that ensure that students are actually learning. Student counselling may also be a factor here. Many of these students should have enrolled in community colleges and not four-year institutions. The community colleges may have been more supportive to them in their efforts to complete their education.

I have not yet had the opportunity to read the Bowen book. I would note that the statistics cited are somewhat misleading in that they do not take into account transfers to other institutions from which the students may have graduated within six years. Transfers are increasingly common, especially with older students. While this might mitigate the situation somewhat, it remains alarming.

Mr. Merisotis wrote at the 20,000-foot level. I’m at the ground level, teaching undergraduates in a four-year public institution, and here is what would help my students and their classmates graduate:

Policy

- Turning Pell Grants into a program that doesn’t run out on a first-come, first-served basis, so everyone who applies for and needs assistance receives assistance.

- Simplifying the FAFSA form, so my students and their parents don’t need to be wealthy enough to have an accountant to complete it accurately.

- Requiring all students to complete the FAFSA form, so institutions can discover who deserves a Pell Grant and is not yet receiving one.

- Passing health-insurance reform with an individual mandate and means-tested subsidies, so poor students will not have to drop out because of a financial crisis caused by their illnesses or illness within their families.

- For states to have an articulation agreement like Florida’s, so community-college students who transfer to in-state four-year programs will have their academic credits transfer.

- Allow and encourage high school juniors to take community-college placement exams, so they know if they need to work harder to start college without needing developmental courses.

Within colleges and universities

- Link academic advisors into your course management system and have a one-click process for faculty to contact advisors about students who miss several classes, start the semester on the wrong foot, etc.

- Identify and focus attention and resources on curricular bottlenecks (mandatory courses with high drop and failure rates).

There is also a great need for alternative systems of publishing texts, and the Lumina Foundation is part of that conversation. Open-access is not the Holy Grail of low textbook prices; someone must update texts, and there will probably need to be multiple models of publishing to encourage that revision process. Sometimes foundations might fund the second as well as first version of a public-access text. But there will probably need to be other models that provide royalties to text authors.

The data may appear startling to those who don't routinely follow these issues, but they are hardly surprising to educators or policymakers involved in higher education. The list of possible responses is long and pretty common sensical. These include more carefully tracking students and student progress towards graduation so as to intervene when necessary, providing better support, encouraging more faculty to take mentoring and counseling more seriously, altering scheduling practices to facilitate on-time completion, integrating online offerings more strategically, shifting more resources into instruction, studying institutions with high completion rates to see what they are doing, and so on. None of this is rocket science.

The greater difficulty is focusing on the completion challenge and finding the wherewithal to actually address it. Prioritizing instruction means asking faculty to approach their roles differently, rethinking expectations and evaluation, and approaching hiring with new criteria in mind. Shifting resources to instruction and providing valuable supports will require making off-setting cuts elsewhere. Higher education institutions have tended to do all their changing around themargins, while hesitating to pursue changes that would rile faculty, college and university administration, alumni, students, or (in the case of public institutions) legislative cheerleaders and critics. The tricky part is creating the opportunity to get creative about problem-solving, and to provide the political cover to do so.

At Lumina Foundation for Education, this is the question that dominates our thinking and drives nearly all of our actions. In fact, as an organization committed to an ambitious and specific college-completion goal (60 percent attainment of high-quality degrees and credentials among the American population by the year 2025), one might say we are obsessed with this question. And it is a complex one — far too complex to be fully addressed in a blog post. (So please, don’t ask me to “tweet” the answer!)

Still, there are some unalterable truths that can be summarized here, two basic steps that must be taken if we hope to improve the dismal numbers cited in Crossing the Finish Line.

First, students must be better prepared for success in college — academically, financially and socially. Students and families must focus early and intently on the goal of college enrollment and success: taking the challenging courses in junior high school, saving steadily for college and exploring financial aid options, building a culture in which college success is the expectation and the norm.

Second, once enrolled, a variety of stakeholders must ensure that students have the sustained support they need to cross that finish line. Governmental and institutional policies must be structured, not merely to increase access to higher education, but to ensure that enrolled students are truly learning and are progressing toward completion.

Specifically, data on outcomes must be consistently collected, rigorously analyzed and then used to improve student performance and institutional effectiveness. Developmental education must be more effective, more available and less “stigmatized.” We must explore more alternative pathways to degrees and credentials and implement stronger articulation and transfer systems to keep students moving steadily toward degrees and credentials.

In short, if we hope to boost college completion, we must embrace that goal fully — as individuals, as institutions, and as a society. We must recognize the goal for what it is: a key to our nation’s economic security and social stability.

And frankly, as a first step toward embracing that goal, we would all do well to pick up a copy of Crossing the Finish Line and read it. This superb analysis by Bowen, Chingos and McPherson demonstrates very clearly that far too many of the nation’s low-income, first-generation, and minority students — the future backbone of our workforce — aren’t graduating from college. That is a very disturbing trend … one we simply can’t allow to endure.