A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Toward Resiliency: At Risk Students Who Make it to College - May 1998.

Foreword

In December 1997, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) published Confronting the Odds: Students at Risk and the Pipeline to Higher Education (NCES 98-094), prepared by Laura Horn of MPR Associates. This study was one in a series known as the Postsecondary Education Descriptive Analysis Reports (PEDAR). The PEDAR reports are based principally on data collected in NCES’ longitudinal studies, and have covered such topics as transfer behavior, part-time undergraduates, minority student participation, packaging of financial aid, and others (these and other NCES publications are available for downloading at this website: http://nces.ed.gov).

The National Institute on Postsecondary Education, Libraries, and Lifelong Learning (PLLI) is housed in the same organizational unit of the U.S. Department of Education as NCES, and its staff interacts frequently with NCES, serving on technical review panels, performing data editing services, and assisting in the development of surveys.

In the course of reviewing drafts of Confronting the Odds, PLLI was intrigued by the possibility of taking a more focused look at the "at-risk" population in relation to postsecondary enrollment and persistence. Specifically, we wanted to concentrate on moderate- to high-risk high school students who overcame the odds and enrolled in higher education, and to provide some idea of how this population was distributed by race-ethnicity. We thus asked MPR Associates to conduct a second analysis of the issue.

We were also interested in an alternative statistical methodology, namely, logistic regression and the explanatory power of the "odds ratios" produced by this procedure. One might note, for example, that 80 percent of the students who enrolled in a 4-year college reported that all or most of their friends had planned to attend college (see Confronting the Odds, p. 35). That statement, however, is not as persuasive as the observation in this document, that the odds of attending a 4-year college are 6 times as high if all or most of your friends plan to attend college than if none of your friends plans to attend. Odds ratios can be powerful tools for high school counselors, teachers, and college outreach workers.

The data set used in both Confronting the Odds and Toward Resiliency is the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88). The most recent survey of this group (1994) took place two years after their scheduled high school graduation. At that time, 75 percent of the high school graduates had entered postsecondary education, and 60 percent were still enrolled (Berkner and Chavez 1997). Whether these students will complete degrees or whether others will return to higher education will not be known until after the next scheduled NELS:88 survey in the year 2000. Toward Resiliency helps establish some key lines of analysis on persistence and completion that will be used at that time.


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