College Dropouts, Prevention

We encourage high school students to attend Career Tech and/or college, but that is not enough. Many young people beyond high school age need mentoring, too. Nontraditional students with families and/or jobs merit additional encouragement and supportive considerations from institutions and community members. 

A decade ago, then-18-year-old Sophia Stoll resolved that she wanted to go away for college. The working-class New Yorker enrolled in a private Catholic university outside of Pittsburgh, but by her junior year, she’d realized that the media and technology program didn’t suit her goals. Stoll dropped out, worked odd jobs for a year back home, then transferred to SUNY-Fredonia. But she ended up suffering from extreme anxiety, she says, and withdrew after a semester.

Several years later, she tried enrolling once again—this time at Brooklyn College—and enjoyed it. Yet after switching schools for the second time, she was discouraged to find that many of her credits hadn’t transferred. She withdrew the same year.

“The thought of going back again after all this time makes me tense up,” she said. “I also don’t want to take out any more loans” than the $11,000 she already has. It’s been two years since Stoll, now 28, left Brooklyn College. And because she has a stable communications job at a local union, she’s not sure she’s ever going back.

A new study has found that Stoll’s academic history is overwhelmingly common for “repeat noncompleters”—students who have a stop-and-start college experience. The study, based on National Student Clearinghouse Research Center data of 4.5 million non-first-time students, found that only about a third of students who re-enrolled in college between 2005 and 2008 ended up earning their degree. The completion rates for those students at public four-year universities and community colleges was 27 percent lower than for first-time students.

The study was conducted by InsideTrack, American Council on Education, NASPA: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, and the University Professional and Continuing Education Association. These numbers confirmed what education experts already knew: Colleges and universities need to do a better job retaining their students—especially nontraditional ones with families, jobs, and other commitments, which now account for 75 to 80 percent of all incoming college students, according to the study’s researchers.

“The thought of going back again after all this time makes me tense up.”

“Most universities are entirely organized around the residential student, around the type of four-year experience most policymakers in D.C. had,” said Bob Hansen, CEO of UPCEA. “There’s been a fundamental failure on their part to change.”

Nontraditional students often have no choice but to go to school part time, which ultimately fails to engage them, said Ben Miller, senior policy analyst at New America Foundation.

“What we have to face is that part-time enrollment is just not a path that leads to graduation at a high rate,” he said. “For someone who’s taking so few classes,” and will therefore finish very far in the future, “the question of whether it’s worth their time and money is increasingly harder to say yes to.”

The situation grows worse if the student transfers to another school, creating what Hansen calls a “credits swirl”—they exist, but don’t accumulate. If Stoll went back to school, for example, she’d have to retake Introduction to Biology and other core requirements—something she has “absolutely no desire or concentration to do.” Plus, she added, “it’s a waste of money.”

Yet New York is actually doing better than most at retaining their non-first-time students, with a graduation rate of 39 percent. California, on the other hand, has only a 24 percent completion rate for returning students. A state’s size doesn’t necessarily correlate with graduation rates, either; Wyoming has the same non-first-time student graduation rate as California.

Dave Jarrat, vice president of marketing at InsideTrack, said one hypothesis for the gap is that some students may intentionally enroll in community colleges without planning to get a degree. California’s junior colleges, for example, often aren’t focusing on “producing associate’s degree graduates,” but rather framing themselves as “a place of learning for all citizens of the state.”

MICHAEL RUBENSTEIN / FOR NBC NEWS

Sophia Stoll enrolled in college more than once and never graduated, but doesn't plan on going back to school because she has a stable job.

Miller agrees that this is an often overlooked aspect of the conversation. Some students, he said, are enrolling in one or two classes to get additional workforce skills, like welding or IT.

“If you’re a contractor and you need some electrician skills,” said Miller, “why stick around for the full associate’s?”

Gabriel Marquez, a welding instructor at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, California, knows this dynamic all too well.

“We get a lot of guys who took shop in high school, who now work at Walmart and Home Depot,” he said. “[They’re] wanting to get out of their minimum wage jobs.” But as soon as these students gain a few welding skills, they’re lured away by employers offering $19 for an entry-level welder position. Sometimes, Marquez said, they don’t even finish the class they signed up for.

Of course, there are many other reasons why students intent on a four-year degree never end up graduating, and experts say much of the responsibility rests on universities. Nontraditional students need targeted attention in order to keep them on track.

“Because they’re often working at the same time, you have to proactively support them in developing time-management skills,” Jarrat said. Normalizing the experience of the non-first-time student helps, too. “If they haven’t been back for many years, it may feel like an alien environment to them, which makes them doubt their ability to succeed,” Jarrat added.

Miller thinks there should be an “early warning indicator system” that makes it easier to identify someone who’s at risk of dropping out. And sometimes, the difference is in the details.

“If they haven’t been back [to school] for many years, it may feel like an alien environment."

“Check their course schedule with them,” he said. “Send them to tutoring if they need it. Be really cognizant of small-dollar impediments”—if the student needs a bus pass, for example, or assistance paying for books. [Metro Career Tech Foundation in Oklahoma City provides such assistance.]

But some disincentives to pick school back up again go beyond university policy—like the student loan system. Sixty-three percent of college debtors never finished their degree. Many of these former students are already financially struggling, and hate the thought of taking out more money.

Now that Stoll has a fulltime job, she’s just beginning to pay her own loans, which has been a “wake-up call.” She said “nobody really explained this before,” and that nobody encouraged her to go to a much cheaper state school in the first place.

Jarrat said that when it comes to financial aid, “universities should have a candid conversation about a clear path to completion,” and fully explain what these loans mean to the student’s financial future.

Despite exposing these deficiencies, Miller said there’s a glimmer of hope in this story. “There are lots of people out there with the desire to go to college, and who have tried it,” he said, pointing to Census data that shows there are now more college dropouts than high school ones.

Besides encouraging high schoolers to go to college, he said, we should make the early-20s adult who dropped out “part of the discussion,” he said. “They often get lost in the mix.”

Education coverage for NBCNews.com is supported by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. NBC News retains sole editorial control over the content of this coverage.

First published November 17th 2014, 4:17 am

NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ

 Ret. 4-6-15

Let us know how your community and institutions reach out to Career Tech and college students.

Soft Skills

Soft skills for getting a job and advancing...

Different perceptions between young people and potential employers...

Begin teaching, modeling and pointing out soft skills early.

Preparing for the 21st Century: Soft Skills

Stedman Graham 

Author, Speaker, Entrepreneur

Posted: 02/24/2015 11:01 am EST Updated: 02/24/2015 1:59 pm EST

"In a gentle way, you can shake the world."
--Gandhi

Are you prepared for a career in the 21st century?

If you're not sure, you might want to rethink your next steps.

Most of us are still operating under a 20th-century paradigm. We were taught that learning all we can about a specific profession is the key to moving up to our goal rung on the socioeconomic ladder. Even "digital natives" learned this flawed premise; like the generations before them, they still think that hard skills are the key to advancement.

In a study conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, there was a remarkable difference between the perceptions of college students and their potential employers. While the vast majority of employers thought that oral communication, organizing and evaluating information, and solving complex problems were critically important, fewer than 30 percent of college students realized that these soft skills are essential to their success.

Hard skills are easily defined and obviously measurable. They include technical mastery and vocational qualifications. For an executive a hard skill might be the ability to navigate complex proprietary software.

Soft skills are intangible and difficult to measure; while they greatly impact an individual's chances for success, they are not normally taught through traditional education. Soft skills include practices that were once in the backgrounds of all our lives. Team building, eye contact, analysis of body language, and conflict resolution were constantly demanded from us as we moved through our days. We had to learn to answer the family phone, speak politely to a clerk, and deal with the boredom of children on a long car ride.

Now we can text silently and privately in our family homes, ignore the clerk as we scroll through social media, and hand our children instant entertainment on a portable screen. In business we can negotiate contracts and form relationships through email and texting, with no person-to-person interactions. There is no firm handshake practice or eye contact involved in many of our day-to-day negotiations.

Many of us aren't getting enough experience with personal feedback and group interactions, the building blocks of basic soft skills. At the same time, we are constantly challenged to master the new soft skills involved with the ever-changing methods of communication. It's difficult to master courtesy in texting. It's easy to be abrupt in an email.

The most important soft skills are not likely to be developed through silent communication, unless we are engaging in person-to-person contact. An abrasive person can write a popular blog post, but she won't get very far in negotiating a speaking engagement or a book deal. A shy introvert can send a compelling text message, but he might not be able to maintain eye contact during an interview.

Of course hard skills are important. Hard skills build résumés. In the St. Louis workforce study employers reported that hard skills are very important for getting a job offer. But hard skills alone don't provide for significant advancement opportunities.

As careers develop, hard skills, which can be delegated, matter less and less, while soft skills continue to play the biggest role in determining your chances of achieving success. In fact, the more we constrain ourselves with hard-skill development, the less chance we have at achieving the goal of delegating our work to others so that we can advance to the next level.

Let's face it: We're in the middle of a worldwide social experiment. It doesn't matter what age you are. All of us have to engage in this precarious blending process. We have to keep up with the latest and greatest technological advances without losing our human edge.

There is not an easy answer to this dilemma, and the gap between our ideas and our actions needs to close.

While more than 85 percent of the executives and recruiters surveyed in the Gallup-Lumina Foundation report thought that businesses and universities should work closely together to develop career paths for students, fewer than 22 percent of these businesses had an internship or student advancement program in place.

When the effort is made to add feedback and practical experience to the educational track, the results speak for themselves. With an emphasis on the soft skills of networking, study habits and résumé building, the charitable foundation of One Million Degrees works with community colleges and employers to achieve a graduation rate of 84 percent, more than three times the national average.

We all need to continually relearn our communication skills and reconsider our self-perceptions.

We can build a bridge between the best of the past and the miracle of the new with a simple shift in our thinking; the past, the present, and the future all have valuable lessons and tools for us.

In this new worldview the fresh, bright light of new ideas and technologies can be used to illuminate, rather than outshine, a pathway for the wisdom of the ages.

"With hard skills, you can manage your boss; and with soft skills, you can lead your boss."
--Professor M.S. Rao, leadership specialist

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stedman-graham/preparing-for-the-21st-ce_b_6738538.html 

Ret. 3-17-15

Mentoring At-Risk Postsecondary Students

amazon.com

For assisting at-risk college students--low-income, first-generation and underrepresented minorities...

Thanks to Kerri Kearney, M.B.A., Ed.D., associate professor, Higher Education & Student Affairs, Oklahoma State University, for directing us to a new book. Below is part of an interview posted on the Amazon website. Note our emphasizing points in blue font.

The Hidden Curriculum

August 4, 2014

By

Charlie Tyson

In recent years, many colleges and universities have turned to mentoring programs in an attempt to retain underperforming students. Federally supported mentoring programs have been around since the Higher Education Act of 1965, which created student services programs such as Upward Bound, said Stephanie Gordon, vice president for professional development of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. But as colleges and universities face more scrutiny on retention rates, more institutions have launched or expanded mentoring efforts, Gordon said.

Buffy Smith, an associate professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota, says many institutions see mentoring programs as cheap, quick ways to boost recruitment and retention of at-risk students. But for mentoring programs to succeed, they need money and clear objectives, she warns.

In her recent book Mentoring At-Risk Students through the Hidden Curriculum of Education (Lexington Books), Smith offers suggestions for how colleges and universities can guide at-risk students – low-income students, first-generation students and underrepresented minorities – through what she calls higher education’s “hidden curriculum.” The hidden curriculum, Smith writes, consists of the “norms, values, and expectations” that govern interactions among students, faculty, staff and administrators. To excel in college, at-risk students must navigate a world of new social norms – typically those of the white middle class, she argues.

Smith responded by email to questions about her book.

Q: What are some norms and values to which at-risk students often have trouble adjusting?

A: One common college norm is that students have to become comfortable with asking questions when they do not understand something and seeking help when they need academic support. Students often suffer in silence because they do not want to give the impression that they are stupid or do not belong in college.

Another college norm is that students should take the initiative to build social capital with their professors because strong faculty and student relationships are highly valued and rewarded in higher education. If students develop a great rapport with their professors, they are more likely to have access to privileges such as research opportunities and internships.  

Q; Do some kinds of institutions need robust mentoring programs more critically than do other kinds of institutions? Is the need for a mentoring program geared toward unveiling a “hidden curriculum” as pressing at a historically black college or a community college as it might be at a wealthy, predominantly white institution?

A: All institutions have a formal curriculum and a hidden curriculum. Since students are either rewarded or penalized based on their knowledge of the hidden curriculum, it is important to unveil the hidden cultural codes and norms to students at all institutions.

I do not believe wealthy predominantly white institutions are the only institutions that struggle with how to systematically unveil the hidden curriculum to their student populations. For instance, an African-American male, first-generation college student would face difficult challenges decoding, interpreting, and understanding the hidden curriculum at historically black colleges and universities. Although a black male might face less racial prejudice and discrimination at a HBCU, he would still need mentors to help him translate the hidden rules of his school in order to maximize his privileges, opportunities, and resources on campus.

Q: You write that “some scholars are very concerned that good-hearted white mentors will encourage underrepresented protégés to replace their home culture with the majority culture in order to succeed in higher education.” How does a mentor go about giving a student the social tools to succeed in college without tacitly encouraging that student to adopt the majority culture?

A: The goal of academic mentoring is to provide students with the knowledge and skills they need to thrive in school. Mentors have to be mindful not to “groom” students to become like them, regardless of their racial/ethnic, gender, or social class backgrounds. The primary focus of mentoring is transmitting information and knowledge to students, not replacing their cultural identities.

One way mentors can avoid the cloning process is to be intentional and explicit about affirming and validating their students’ home cultures in words and actions. Mentors and mentees should have honest conversations and decide together on the most effective approach for integrating home culture with school culture. Good mentors never implicitly or explicitly encourage mentees to ignore or replace their multiple cultural identities; rather, mentors empower students with the necessary skills to adapt to and succeed in their academic environment. Simply put, mentors should promote acculturation (i.e., adapting to the culture of higher education) not assimilation (i.e., adopting another group’s cultural identity). For example, mentors should teach mentees how to talk with professors in a polite and respectful tone without implying that students need to change their dialect or style of speech.

Q: Where do current mentoring programs fall short?

A: The major challenge that many mentoring programs encounter is that they do not have well-defined objectives that can be measured and directly connected to the mentoring process. For instance, it is difficult to argue that a student’s improvement in grades is directly related to her mentoring relationship when the student could have also benefited from tutoring and other support services. In order for mentoring programs to become more robust, they should incorporate assessment plans that actually link mentoring activities with desired education outcomes.

Q: You develop a mentoring model that has three cycles: advising, advocacy and apprenticeship. Tell me about these three cycles.

A: An example of how the mentoring cycles work is the following. A student who earned a “D” grade on his exam is told by his mentor to go talk with the professor about the exam (advising cycle). The mentor might also use her social capital to connect with the mentee’s professor to talk about test strategies that could help the mentee on future exams (advocacy cycle). Finally, the mentor will share the test strategies and role-play with her mentee about how he should talk with his professor to get the best education outcomes and build social capital with the professor (apprenticeship cycle).

As educators, we usually do a good job at the advising cycle, but it is important that we not stop there. We should advocate for our students, and more importantly, we need to empower our students to become advocates for themselves. A simple way of thinking about the mentoring cycles is that advising is telling students what to do, advocacy is doing things on behalf of the students, and apprenticeship is empowering students by showing them repeatedly how to be confident and proactive in their own education and build meaningful relationships with administrators, staff members, and faculty.

Q: How important is it for a mentor to be of the same race, class or gender as the mentee? You say there’s inconclusive evidence on this point. Yet your fictional mentor draws on her own experiences as “a faculty of color” in order to validate her mentee’s feelings.

A: Research suggests that matching mentors and mentees on the basis of race, ethnicity, social class, or gender is not the best way to produce successful mentoring relationships. Instead of trying to match individuals based on socially constructed identities, mentoring program directors should encourage mentors and mentees to establish clear expectations and norms, have honest conversations, and provide quality feedback that fosters trusting and meaningful relationships with one another.

Q: What are some best practices for mentoring programs?

A: One best practice for mentoring programs is to develop a mentoring curriculum that explicitly focuses on topics related to the hidden curriculum. For instance, all mentors in the network would teach the same topics (e.g., the importance of adhering to deadlines and showing up for scheduled appointments, and how to pose certain questions to demonstrate intellectual curiosity) to their mentees. The mentors would have varied teaching styles, but the hidden curriculum content would be similar.

I believe colleges should reform their existing mentoring programs to include unveiling the hidden curriculum as a major objective, and create a uniform standard for teaching the knowledge and skills necessary to decode, interpret, and understand the hidden curriculum. Once a mentoring curriculum is established, it will be easier to evaluate learning outcomes of the mentoring process.

Q: You write that a college “cannot run a successful mentoring program without a full-time mentoring program director, full-time administrative assistant, a medium-size private office space that is designed exclusively for mentoring services … and a budget line that is comparable to similar programs at the college." In addition, you say that program directors should not assign more than two students to a mentor. Is this financially realistic?

A: University administrators have to make difficult decisions as to how they will allocate their resources. I recognize there are more good initiatives than financial endowments. However, I have learned that programs considered essential to promoting the university’s values and mission receive institutional funds and are not perceived as “administrative bloat.”

Therefore, colleges have to decide if mentoring represents a core value of their institution. If schools perceive mentoring programs as a cheap and quick remedy for improving “diversity” issues on campus, they will not provide the institutional staff and support that I recommend. However, if universities redefine the mentoring process as a crucial component for students’ learning and excelling in the formal curriculum, they are more likely to provide adequate funding.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/04/book-argues-mentoring-programs-should-try-unveil-colleges-hidden-curriculum  

Ret. 3-19-14

Note: Dr. Kearney is the impetus behind Oklahoma's R is for Thursday Project for foster alumni.

R is for Thursday Project: R is for Thursday is a collaboration of higher education professionals, community members, and foster alumni college students working toward increased understanding and support of former foster youth who attend, or who have graduated from, Oklahoma colleges or universities.

Link to more information: http://education.okstate.edu/risforthursday

Grads of Life Website

In our previous post, re-posted from The Huffington Post blog by David Shapiro, MENTOR's CEO, Grads of Life was mentioned. Below are the website link and some screen shots as teasers to learn more. Mentoring is a win-win for business and the community.

See the "Success Stories" section to learn how businesses have built the workforce pipeline through mentoring, internships, and school-to-work programs.

http://gradsoflife.org/

See the actual mentoring guide at 

http://gradsoflife.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Mentoring-Guide.pdf

Mentoring Definitions and Benefits
Mentoring is a development strategy for a young person's successful path to adulthood. It's all about developing a structured, trusting relationship between a professional (mentor) and an aspiring professional (mentee).

Mentoring focuses on providing support and guidance around workplace skills and career exploration, as well as general encouragement on life challenges through meetings, activities and information communications.

Although this guide focuses on building a stand-along mentoring initiative, best practices from other employment pathways on this website (school-to-work, internships, hiring) all include a mentoring component.

Ways to take small and big steps

• One-to-one mentoring
• Group mentoring
• Team mentoring
• E-mentoring (conduct as an add-on to any of those listed)

The Business Benefits of Mentoring 

Mentoring can be a good step towards an internship or hiring initiative, since it can develop similar workforce and professional skills. Key benefits include:

• Cost-effective Talent Development

         Cultivates a talent pipeline through meaningful employee volunteerism

• Enhanced Employee Engagement

         Strengthen employee satisfaction and morale

• Stronger Community Impact

         Boost visibility with your community, your customers, future leaders and potential 

         talent

 

Success Stories

http://gradsoflife.org/success-stories/

Ret. 10-13-14

Paying Less for College, New Study

Notice the positive trend.

From Forbes.com, 7/24/13, by Susan Adams

Parents Are Paying Less For College, Says New Study

I'm just back from a round of college touring in California with my son, who will hopefully be starting as a freshman in the fall of 2014. As I looked at the other parents on the tours, I kept asking myself, where are you all going to come up with the $60,000 a year to pay for this? At the rate tuition and costs are rising, I’m guessing the annual bill will hit $75,000 by the time my kid graduates. I know we could send him to a community college for two years and then he could transfer, or have him attend a State University of New York school, where tuition and fees come to a much more reasonable $23,000. But still, who has $92,000 to spare?



How the typical family pays for college 2013: Average percent of total cost from each source.

Fewer and fewer of us, says a new study released yesterday by loan giant Sallie Mae and Ipsos Public Affairs, a market research firm. According to the study, families are tapping grants and scholarships to pay for more of the cost of higher education and they are coming up with ways to cut expenses for students.

According to the report, average college spending came to $21,000 per student in 2012, down from a high of $24,000 in 2010. Of that $21,000, the amount families pay from their own savings and income has shrunk to $5,700 of the total cost, while payments from scholarships and grants has increased to 30% of the cost, or $6,400, up from $4,900 in 2009. The peak year for parent funding was 2010, when families covered 37% of college costs, an average of $8,700.

 Today, the remainder of college payments come from student borrowing (18%), parent borrowing (9%), student income and savings (11%), and relatives and friends (5%).

“What we’ve seen in the last year is families moving to a post-recession reality in how they approach their decision-making about college,” says Sarah Ducich, senior vice president for public policy at Sallie Mae. “We’re seeing an increasing cost consciousness among families.”

According to the report, average college spending came to $21,000 per student in 2012, down from a high of $24,000 in 2010. Of that $21,000, the amount families pay from their own savings and income has shrunk to $5,700 of the total cost, while payments from scholarships and grants has increased to 30% of the cost, or $6,400, up from $4,900 in 2009. The peak year for parent funding was 2010, when families covered 37% of college costs, an average of $8,700.
Today, the remainder of college payments come from student borrowing (18%), parent borrowing (9%), student income and savings (11%), and relatives and friends (5%).
“What we’ve seen in the last year is families moving to a post-recession reality in how they approach their decision-making about college,” says Sarah Ducich, senior vice president for public policy at Sallie Mae. “We’re seeing an increasing cost consciousness among families.”

Move up http://i.forbesimg.com tMove down

 

Some of the ways that cost-consciousness plays out:
Some 67% in the survey said they cut a number of colleges from their list of possible schools at some point during the application process because the schools were too expensive. More students—57%– are now living at home instead of paying for expensive campus dorms, and greater numbers of students are choosing schools close to home, to cut down on travel costs. They are also taking in roommates if they live in off-campus housing. Students are pushing to finish college in fewer years to cut tuition costs.

Other ways families are paying for college: One fifth of parents boosted their work hours or earnings this year and half of students, 47%, also worked longer hours. Some 27% of students are cramming their schedules full of classes so they can graduate in less time. Most families aren’t transferring students to less expensive schools, though one fifth of low-income families are taking that step.

Despite steadily-rising college costs and parents’ dwindling contributions, more parents than ever reported that they believe in the value of a college education. Some 85% said they strongly agree that college is an investment in their child’s future. That’s the highest percentage in the last five years, up from 80% in 2009.

Though families said that going to college is a priority, many families lack a clear plan for how they will fund all four years. “The worst thing a family can do is decide they can fund the first year or two of college and then discover that they can’t pay for all four,” says Ducich. “Students need to get that degree.” According to the survey, only 40% of families have a four-year plan.

The report also contains some interesting numbers about the cost of different kinds of college degrees. Social science and engineering majors are paying the most for college this year, at an average of $29,000 and $26,000 respectively. In the middle are math and science majors, visual and performing arts majors, and business majors, at $20,400, $20,000 and $19,000. Students who plan to go into professional and vocational jobs paid the least, at $18,000 and $16,000.

The report also pulls in some numbers from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which tracks starting salaries for students graduating in a variety of disciplines. The Sallie Mae study uses those numbers to find that a social science degree costs the most and has one of the lowest starting salaries, while engineering majors pay a greater amount for their degrees but earn starting salaries that are $18,000 greater than the average graduate. Business majors also do well, paying $2,600 less per year for their degrees and making $9,400 more in starting salaries.

Ipsos conducted the survey by telephone between April 10 and May 9 with 802 parents of undergraduates ages 18-24 and 800 undergrads in that age group.

[Many other pertinent articles were linked on the same page.]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/07/24/parents-paying-less-for-college-says-new-study/