States Vary Greatly in How Well They Prepare Children for College, Report Says

Chronicle of Higher Education 1/4/07

By Peter Schmidt

A person's chances of earning a college degree vary greatly depending on the state in which he or she was raised, according to a report released on Wednesday by Editorial Projects in Education, publisher of the newspaper Education Week.

With financial support from the Pew Center on the States, Editorial Projects' research center developed a Chance for Success Index that evaluates how well young people in each state are faring at key points in their development and education. One of the report's key conclusions is that most states need to do much more to help young people make the transition from high school to college -- a finding that echoes the results of several other studies released in recent years (School & College, The Chronicle, March 10, 2006).

Only 11 states have adopted a formal definition of "college readiness" to help ensure that schools are adequately preparing students for postsecondary education, the report says. Just six states have aligned their high-school tests with some definition of the work students should be able to do in college, while nine other states report that their public colleges use the results of high-school tests in admissions, placement, or scholarship decisions.

"Smart states, like smart companies, try to make the most of their investments by ensuring that young people's education is connected from one stage to the next -- reducing the chances that students will be lost along the way or will require costly remedial programs to acquire skills or knowledge they could have learned right from the start," the report says.

The states that ranked best on the research center's index were (in order of their score) Virginia, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. In Virginia, the report notes, the average child "starts out ahead of the curve" by being less likely than children in most other states to be part of a low-income family, and more likely to have college-educated parents. Those early advantages are subsequently amplified by higher-than-average achievement levels throughout elementary, middle, and high school, with one result being that young Virginians are more likely to go on to college than their counterparts in most other states.

In the state that ranked dead last on the index, New Mexico, children are more likely than average to come from poor families and to have parents who never went to college and, in many cases, do not speak English fluently. Such early disadvantages are compounded as those children fall behind in school, with one result being that they are less likely than average to earn a high-school diploma or go on to college. Other states that ranked near the bottom were Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas.

Copies of the report, "Quality Counts 2007: From Cradle to Career: Connecting American Education From Birth to Adulthood," are available online.