Dive Brief:
- Though the national high school graduation rate has peaked at 82%, a recent evaluation of high school seniors showed fewer than 40% were ready for college-level work.
- Part of the college-ready failure may be due to diploma requirements that vary from state to state; a reported 32 states don't require four years of English and math through Algebra II, but both are typically considered a minimum for college prep.
- Some business professionals are also concerned over whether recent high school graduates are "able to collaborate and communicate effectively," the New York Times reports, since those skills aren't necessarily taught in high schools.
Dive Insight:
If blame for the problem of a lack of college readiness is shouldered by individual states, the new Every Student Succeeds Act might not help, since it places even more power over educational performance in states' hands. There's also a racial achievement gap. A report released this summer by ACT found that 62% of black students "didn't meet a single benchmark across four categories of college readiness."
Yet some schools, like Long Beach Polytechnic High School in Long Beach, California, are bucking that trend. There, a primary focus on “mathematical modeling,” or the application of mathematics to real-world problems, lets students to skip Cal State Long Beach's math placement test, as well as other college math classes.
And in Texas, high school students who are struggling are now automatically placed into special college-prep math classes. That's because of a recent state law aimed at aggressively preventing remediation and easing the transition between high school and college.