Monday, December 21, 2009

Completing the college years

TOO OFTEN, colleges and universities have blamed the poor performance of low-income and minority students on the preparation they received in high schools. Basically, their message was: Send us better students, and we'll show better results.

So it's nothing sort of a breakthrough that leaders of half the country's public colleges have embarked on an initiative to close racial and socioeconomic gaps in enrollment and graduation. Data from the Access to Success Initiative released this month paint a gloomy picture of low-income and minority students: Far too few enroll in college, and even fewer make it to graduation. Consider, for example, that 45 percent of low-income and minority students entering as freshmen in 1999 had received bachelor's degrees six years later, compared with 57 percent of other students.

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