Higher Education School Readiness

Abstract

Higher education or postsecondary readiness is a student's or student body's preparedness for postsecondary school, especially college or university. It encompasses several dimensions of preparedness, but most assessments of public schools' capacity to inculcate readiness focus on academic readiness and meeting academic achievement benchmarks. As college enrollment increased to include more than half the student population, postsecondary readiness came to be viewed as one of the responsibilities of public high schools, and both government and nonprofit organizations conduct assessments of schools' competence in this regard.

Overview

Readiness for higher education consists of a state of preparedness on the part of the student to thrive in the environment of college (or other higher education institution). Depending on the student's situation, it includes academic readiness, the mastery of the skills and knowledge the school assumes incoming students possess; financial readiness, the ability to pay for school and for personal expenses while in school; emotional and social readiness, the ability to contend with the new social environment, which may include the challenges of living away from home for the first time; relevant life skills such as doing laundry, budgeting expenses, managing time without parental supervision, and handling crises and conflicts; and practical considerations such as living arrangements or the school-work balance, as applicable.

Most assessments of secondary schools' ability to prepare their students focus on academic readiness, which is perhaps both the easiest dimension of readiness to quantify and the one with the most data available for study; indicators such as college enrollment and retention are, at least, impacted by the other readiness dimensions. The degree to which readiness is the responsibility of high school, and which aspects of readiness high schools should teach, has always been subject to some debate, but the issue of high school preparing students for higher education (especially bachelor's degree programs) has been central to discussions of public education since college enrollment became increasingly common in the 1960s.

Students from low-income families, as well as first-generation Americans and students of color, are less likely to attend college. At least some of this is due to the uneven distribution of readiness among schools. Low-income students are more likely to attend underfunded schools, immigrant and non-white families are more likely to also be low-income families, and schools with predominantly non-white students are on the average more resource-poor than predominantly white schools even when family incomes are the same. Those economic factors also impact the financial ability of students to attend college, and it must be assumed that many students who are adequately prepared for college nevertheless do not attend, due to financial inability or because they are not as encouraged to do so as their white or affluent peers.

College readiness programs of several sorts became increasingly common beginning in the 1990s; most of them serve either the well-off, as extensions of SAT prep courses, or are designed specifically to help prepare disadvantaged students. At least one study (Le et al., 2014) found that a representative readiness program, the St. Louis's College Bound program, had a measurable positive effect on its enrollees, resulting in increases to enrollment in four-year colleges and in AP or honors high school classes. College Bound is a community- and school-based readiness program for minority and first-generation students, and was founded in 2006 by Lisa Orden Zarin, the daughter of a single mother teacher who had grown up in a low-income New Jersey neighborhood.

Further Insights

The Department of Education administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is the largest and oldest nationwide assessment of American students, having been conducted since 1969. It is not limited in its focus to college readiness, but its results, based on a sampling procedure intended to represent the American population in terms of race, ethnicity, economics, and geography, are used to inform policy decisions and take readiness into account. The annual NAEP focuses specifically on public schools, but has been augmented by separate irregular studies on private schools and charter schools, as well as studies on specific types of student knowledge and achievement.

Achieve, a nonprofit education reform advocacy group, collects information on and consults with state departments of education on K-12 academic standards, graduation requirements, and assessment tools. The assessment score Achieve uses for states is the College- and Career-Ready Assessment Score, based on college- and career-ready (CCR) indicators. The CCR assessment, as the name indicates, takes into consideration both college readiness and, for students who opt not to continue their education, readiness for entering the workforce. CCR indicators include graduation rates, ACT/SAT scores, coursework completion by ninth graders, and college credits earned in high school. Also included among CCR indicators are graduation requirements, specifically mathematics that usually include Algebra II and four years of grade-level English. A frequent measure of an institution or state's higher education readiness is postsecondary persistence: the percentage of high school graduates who enroll in postsecondary education (either a two-year or four-year school), complete at least one year, and enroll for a consecutive year.

Although Achieve uses CCR indicators, in practice college/university readiness—readiness for four-year liberal arts schools, even more than higher education readiness in general—is given more emphasis in public discourse than career readiness. Apart from acknowledging specific situations such as special education and homeschooling, American education policy favors, at least by implication, a one-size-fits all approach in which the "typical student" is one who graduates from high school between ages seventeen and nineteen, enrolls in a four-year college the following fall, and earns a bachelor's degree without interruption to their education.

This set of expectations has a number of unwanted effects. Academic inflation is an effect that has been observed for several decades, in which the minimum level of education required by the job market has increased over time as the supply of labor has become more and more educated. Jobs that once had no educational requirements now require bachelor's degrees (true of over half of American jobs in 2017); those that once required bachelor's degrees now require graduate degrees. The degree requirement for employment is one of the drivers of spiraling student loan debt, which reached crisis levels by the beginning of the twenty-first century, and is also implicated in the skyrocketing cost of college as colleges have attempted to serve more and more students. The net effect has been the normalization of young adults assuming a significant amount of debt in order to attain educational credentials that are nearly mandatory for middle income jobs.

Overqualification is another serious economic problem. In some sectors, the number of available jobs requiring a certain level of qualification is smaller than the number of qualified applicants, but applicants who vie for jobs for which are overqualified are often turned down. Employers may suppose overqualified staff will quit once they find something more suited to them. This has been an ongoing problem in American jobs for at least a generation, and there are many industry-specific examples as well: for example, various factors contributed to a superfluity of law school graduates even though the demand for young lawyers has not increased in decades.

Academic inflation is also one of the drivers in the rise of predatory for-profit colleges, many of which do little more than provide paper credentials with no real education. Other effects of academic inflation include contributing to the postponement of marriage and starting families, and a change in the motivation for attending college.

Issues

In a sense, the first effort at increasing post-secondary readiness in the United States was the founding of junior colleges, the antecedents of what are now called community colleges. Beginning in the early twentieth century, junior colleges were established as two-year institutions, serving a variety of purposes, including professional training and college preparation. Although there had been a handful of important universities in the United States since the colonial era, the modern era of higher education had not begun until the late nineteenth century, when the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 granted states money to open public universities.

Junior colleges were part of a larger, complicated phenomenon in which everything about American education was in flux, and the role of higher education was being reevaluated. Free and compulsory public education at the elementary school did not exist nationwide until 1918, and in the previous two decades the percentage of American children attending school had roughly doubled. Free and compulsory public secondary school soon followed (with exemptions for farmers' children at first), a sharp contrast from the majority of the history of American education, in which schooling was primarily for the upper class, and to some degree for the middle class.

The first American universities were founded at a time when most Americans did not receive an education, much less have the leisure, means, or interest in higher education. The land-grant colleges soon had to adjust to the fact that a much larger population of children was being educated, which meant a much different population was seeking out college. It is also notable how diverse that freshman population became. Public education expanded as much as it did because of a push to provide a means to teach English and American history to a rapidly growing population of first-generation Americans as a result of the immigration boom of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Significant pushes were also made to increase the offering of education to women and African Americans. An amendment to the Morrill Act withheld land grant funds to colleges that restricted admission based on race unless the state also maintained an institution for minorities.

Where public education had once been focused mainly on literacy, numeracy, and basic mastery of history, it transformed into a massive and ambitious project. Amid this climate of change, it was unclear in the early twentieth century what the function of higher education would be. Some universities and educators pushed for colleges and universities to emphasize research rather than teaching, and even to eliminate the freshman and sophomore years, which were viewed as just an extension of high school—similar material, taught in a similar way, rather than a more advanced educational environment as was found in senior-level courses and graduate seminars.

One of the niches junior colleges filled was to offer a college experience to high school graduates who were either not suited to this research-focused university environment or not interested in it. Initially, proposals were made that high school should become a six-year school in order to offer these "13th and 14th" grades that universities were proposing to eliminate. California went as far as authorizing the state's secondary schools to offer postsecondary courses. Instead, junior colleges were formed—slowly, with less than fifty public and private junior colleges in the country by 1914—and once formed, they adapted to serve various needs. While many students attended with no intention of advancing further than junior college, many others attended junior college with the intention of then enrolling to a "senior college," for which they would now be better prepared. This was particularly an advantage for students who had attended low-resource high schools that had not adequately prepared them for a competitive college environment. By the time the American Association of Junior Colleges was formed in 1920, junior colleges were a mix of college readiness (including remedial courses), transferable liberal arts courses, and vocational programs. The Great Depression, beginning in late 1929, drove increases in junior college enrollment, tripling over the next decade, as young people did what they do now in response to an economic crisis that contracts the job market: They returned to school to gain skills to increase their employment opportunities.

In later decades, when enrollment in four-year colleges increased, junior colleges—now more frequently called community colleges—differentiated themselves with a larger focus on vocational skills and nursing programs. That enrollment increased drastically from the 1960s on, more than doubling from 1965 to the 2010s, due to numerous factors from the G.I. Bill to increases in scholarship funds and student loan access to an increasingly white-collar job market. Over the course of the twentieth century, and especially from the Great Depression to the Vietnam War, college transformed from something offered to and designed primarily for the children of the economic and social elites to something more than two-thirds of young people enrolled in.

The increase in interest in attending college—and a disproportionately skyrocketing increase in college costs—created the higher education readiness crisis that led to the rise of standardized testing, the test prep and academic tutor cottage industry, and exit exams for high school students. After the 2008 economic crisis, college enrollment rates begin to decline, for the first time in generations.

Terms & Concepts

Attrition: The loss of students from a college population through dropping out, failing out, or transferring to other schools.

Community College: Two-year post-secondary schools offering associates' degrees and certificates; typically significantly less expensive than four-year colleges. Originally called junior colleges, when they were intended to prepare high school graduates for four-year institutions.

Higher Education: Post-secondary institutions that grant degrees and/or professional certifications, including community colleges and universities, vocational schools, institutes of technology, trade schools, and seminaries.

K-12: Kindergarten through twelfth grade, or elementary school plus secondary school; in the United States, K-12 consists of the years of school that are both free and mandatory (with some exceptions for Kindergarten and for students above a certain age, 16 in most states).

Readiness: Readiness for higher education is the state of being prepared for the challenges of college (or other post-secondary institutions).

Retention: In higher education, retention is the process of retaining students who complete the semester and return the following semester; the opposite of attrition.

Secondary Education: Education for older children; in the United States, secondary education always includes high school (grades 9 or 10 through 12) and is sometimes considered to include junior high or middle school (grades 7 and 8).

Bibliography

Cheon, J. J., Lee, S. S., Crooks, S. S., & Song, J. J. (2012). An investigation of mobile learning readiness in higher education based on the theory of planned behavior. Computers & Education, 59(3), 1054–1064. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=77446750&site=ehost-live

DeAngelo, L. D., & Franke, R. (2016). Social mobility and reproduction for whom? College readiness and first-year retention. American Educational Research Journal, 53(6), 1588–1625. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=120586118&site=ehost-live

Kim, J. J., & Bragg, D. D. (2008). The impact of dual and articulated credit on college readiness and retention in four community colleges. Career & Technical Education Research, 33(2), 133–158. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=85191776&site=ehost-live

Le, V., Mariano, L., & Faxon-Mills, S. (2016). Can college outreach programs improve college readiness? The case of the college bound, St. Louis program. Research in Higher Education, 57(3), 261–287. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=114192285&site=ehost-live

Lemmens, J., du Plessis, G. I., & Maree, D. F. (2011). Measuring readiness and success at a higher education institution. Journal of Psychology in Africa, 21(4), 615–621.

Machado, C. (2007). Developing an e-readiness model for higher education institutions: Results of a focus group study. British Journal of Educational Technology, 38(1), 72–82. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=23573643&site=ehost-live

Martinez, R. R., Baker, S. B., & Young, T. (2017). Promoting career and college readiness, aspirations, and self-efficacy: Curriculum field test. Career Development Quarterly, 65(2), 173–188. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=123521982&site=ehost-live

Mattern, K. K., Allen, J. J., & Camara, W. W. (2016). Thoughts on a multidimensional middle school index of college readiness. Educational Measurement: Issues & Practice, 35(3), 30–34. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=118225977&site=ehost-live

Morningstar, M. M., Zagona, A. L., Uyanik, H., Xie, J., & Mahal, S. (2017). Implementing college and career readiness: Critical dimensions for youth with severe disabilities. Research & Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities, 42(3), 187–204. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=124739866&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Blignaut, A. S., & Els, C. C. (2010). Comperacy assessment of postgraduate students' readiness for higher education. Internet & Higher Education, 13(3), 101–107. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=51437805&site=ehost-live

Bonner, S. S., & Thomas, A. A. (2017). The effect of providing instructional facilitation on student college readiness. Instructional Science, 45(6), 769–787. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=126016985&site=ehost-live

Castellano, M., Ewart Sundell, K., & Richardson, G. B. (2017). Achievement outcomes among high school graduates in college and career readiness programs of study. Peabody Journal of Education (0161956X), 92(2), 254–274. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=122763214&site=ehost-live

Williams, C. C., & Armstrong, S. S. (2017). Complicating college readiness: The hidden literacies of academia. Illinois Reading Council Journal, 45(2), 22–28. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=121698389&site=ehost-live

Pulliam, N. N., & Bartek, S. N. (2018). College and career readiness in elementary schools. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, 10(3), 355–360. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=127212143&site=ehost-live