Most high school graduates aren’t prepared for college or a career, concludes Meandering Toward Graduation, a new Education Trust report by Brooke Haycock and Marni Bromberg.
Forty-seven percent of 2013 graduates didn’t take a coherent college-prep or career-prep sequence of courses, a study of transcripts showed. If “mastery” is defined as a 2.5 academic grade point average, only 39 percent of graduates were college and/or career ready.
The dental program, huh?” the community college admissions counselor asked as she looked over Tre’s high school transcript. “Then why didn’t you take more science?”
. . . “I just took the classes my counselor put me in,” Tre stammered. “She knew I wanted to be a dentist.”
. . . The admissions counselor looked at him with empathy as she described the course entry requirements for the dental program, including high school biology, chemistry, and college preparatory math — all passed with a C or better. Tre nowhere near met these requirements, despite passing all of his classes and earning a diploma.
A majority of not-quite-college-prep students missed more than one requirement,commonly Algebra II, a foreign language and chemistry or physics.
Lower-income, black and Latino students were less likely to complete the college-prep sequences and less likely to achieve mastery, according to the report.
Among those who’d completed a college-ready curriculum: 82 percent of white graduates had a 2.5 academic GPA or higher, compared with 51 percent of black graduates and 63 percent of Latino graduates.