| 摘要 | Key Points
High school grades are correlated with degree attainment. Earning good grades in high school—which requires showing up to class and participating, turning in assignments, and taking quizzes—typically requires developing habits that are relevant for college success.
After controlling for selection bias, students who take more rigorous coursework are more likely to succeed in college. Providing access to advanced coursework by screening all students can identify and prepare more students with the potential to succeed.
Researchers and educators should collaborate on pilot interventions aimed at improving success in high school courses. These could be focused on content or more general strategies aimed at helping students learn how to learn.
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Executive Summary
A student’s academic preparation in high school is one of the strongest predictors of college degree attainment. Carefully designed research has found that students who take rigorous coursework and earn higher grades are more likely to score well on college entrance exams and be more prepared to succeed in college. Student-level characteristics, such as gender and race, also have important correlations with college completion rates, and while policymakers cannot influence a student’s gender or race, presumably they could influence the disparities in outcomes by gender and race. As Matthew Chingos notes in this report, one of the biggest areas that policymakers can affect is to ensure that more students are academically prepared for college at the time they arrive on campus.
There have been a handful of school-level initiatives that have proven to be effective in raising students’ academic readiness in high school. One carefully studied example found that students who took two algebra classes concurrently (rather than a single math class) had much higher high school graduation rates, college entrance exam scores, and college enrollment levels. Another study found that students who enrolled in more rigorous courses, after controlling for selection bias, also had higher high school graduation rates and college enrollment levels. Other factors such as teacher quality, school resources, and family environments also drive student learning, which situates students to be more successful in college. While scaling up any program is at risk of creating different results than originally intended, policymakers should look for ways to carefully replicate and study successful K–12 programs that enhance student readiness as part of a larger effort to increase postsecondary attainment.
In this report, Chingos reviews what is known about academic preparation and the largest determinants of college readiness. He then proposes a series of recommendations that policymakers might consider as they look to improve college completion rates.
—Rick Hess and Lanae Erickson Hatalsky
Introduction
It is well-known that students with higher levels of academic preparation are more likely to enroll in and graduate from college. But discussions of college completion tend to focus on policies, such as financial aid, and institutional factors, such as student support services. This makes sense from the perspective of higher education policymaking, which can do little to change entering students’ characteristics beyond changing admissions practices to exclude less-prepared students. However, that would not increase completion overall and would make the system even more inequitable.
Colleges should continue to focus on how they can best serve the students they enroll, but that task would be easier if students arrive on campus better prepared to do college-level work. The goal of this paper is twofold: to provide a high-level overview of what we do and do not know about the student-level factors that predict college success and to discuss what the strong correlation between academic preparation and college completion does and does not mean for policy and practice.
Many factors affect college completion. Demographic characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, consistently predict college enrollment and success rates. Troubling disparities between students of color and their white peers and among students from different socioeconomic backgrounds persist even after adjusting for differences in academic preparation.1
But academic preparation, including student ability, matters most, at least in terms of how strongly it predicts success in college. Figure 1, which is broken down by family income and standardized test scores, shows the rates at which a nationally representative sample of 10th-grade students attained bachelor’s degrees a decade later.
Students with the same family income grouping whose test performance was among the top quarter nationally were 45–59 percentage points more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree by 26 than were students in the bottom quarter of test scores. Differences in attainment rates among students with similar test scores but different incomes were smaller but still pronounced: 7–22 percentage point differences between the top and bottom income quartiles.
Academic performance in high school predicts not only bachelor’s degree attainment but also the rates at which students attain any postsecondary credential, including certificates and associate degrees. These rates are 34–39 percentage points higher for students who were among the top quarter of test takers than they are for students from the same income group but who were in the bottom quarter of scores.2 Once again, differences in attainment rates between the top and bottom income groups (among students with similar test scores) are not as large (15–21 percentage points).
Moving beyond the simplistic test score example above, I will first review the empirical evidence on how much various measures of academic preparation predict college success. Often-cited measures include college admissions scores; high school grades; courses taken, including Advanced Placement; and scores on other tests designed to measure “college readiness.” Noncognitive factors such as student motivation and grit are also surely important and are the focus of Mesmin Destin’s paper in this series.3
Second, I will provide a conceptual framework for considering how improving preparation might translate into improved success in college and increased degree attainment. I will discuss how much the predictive power of preparation can be used to infer the likely effects of interventions that improve academic preparation, as opposed to unmeasured student ability and family characteristics. This discussion is relevant to whether policy interventions should target particular preparation measures.
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