It’s Thursday, and the end of the semester is in sight if not in reach. Welcome to Teaching, a weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. I’m Beckie Supiano, a Chronicle reporter covering teaching and learning. This week a recent article in The New Yorker has me thinking about academic preparation for college. Keep reading for new research on undergraduates changing their majors and news of an unusual student accomplishment.
A Messy Handoff
College freshmen are rarely referred to as 13th graders. And with good reason: The transition from high school to college is a lot more complicated than advancing from one grade to the next.
That’s been on my mind since reading this article about the Success Academy Charter School network in The New Yorker. The article, by Rebecca Mead, focuses on the network’s highly regimented educational environment, and describes its leaders wrestling with how well this model serves students once they get to college, where they will “have to flourish without constant supervision.”
Despite decades of work to cultivate a “college-going culture” in schools and a cultural obsession with elite-college admissions, the handoff from high school to college remains messy.
Higher education is quick to blame weak preparation in K-12 for dismal college completion rates — without, perhaps, having a good understanding of what school systems are up against. High schools, meanwhile, may not even know how many of the students they send to college never finish it.
The problem of academic preparation touches every corner of academe. Forty percent of students at four-year public colleges take at least one remedial class — for which they’re paying college tuition, but not doing college-level work. Two-thirds of students at community colleges do. Whatever a high-school diploma signifies, it’s not that a student is ready for first-year college classes.
But what about all of the students who take college-level classes while they’re still in high school? Some of them begin college as upperclassmen. But they, too, may not be as prepared as they look on paper.
Dual enrollment — in which credit is earned by passing college-level classes at a high school or college — is spreading. So are questions about whether earning such credits saves students time and money, or sets them up to fail.
Similarly, selective colleges have wrestled with whether and what kind of credit to award for Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams. Is taking AP U.S. History really the same as taking an intro class at Vanderbilt or Dartmouth? Some professors are pretty sure the answer is “no.”
But for all of their concerns about what AP and IB tests measure, professors may be inclined to read too far into SAT scores. Admissions officials expect any move they make to de-emphasize standardized tests will be met with at least some faculty resistance. Those professors, one imagines, equate high scores with strong students. Research, however, shows that what the SAT predicts well is first-year academic performance — and it does so best when it’s considered alongside high-school grades. The scores, meanwhile, are correlated with students’ family income, raising concerns about equity.
Do students arrive in your classroom ready to do college-level work? If not, how do you get them up to speed? Are you involved in efforts to improve students’ preparation before they get to college? Share your story with me at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, and it may appear in a future newsletter.