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How realistic are high school students' educational aspirations? Reviewing the findings of the High School Survey of Student Engagement, Ms. McCarthy and Mr. Kuh note a troubling mismatch between the academic habits of many high school students and what will be expected of them in college.
HIGH SCHOOLS are under more scrutiny today than at any other time in recent memory. Employers and university faculty members lament that high school graduates do not have the knowledge, academic skills, and practical competencies to perform adequately in college or work environments. The senior year in particular is thought to be an educational wasteland.1
Policy makers, including President Bush, say that at least two years of college are needed to function effectively in today's work force, a view affirmed by various advocacy groups.2 But only 68 of every 100 ninth-graders graduate from high school on time, with about 40 of them enrolling immediately in postsecondary education.3 Equally troubling, only 27 of the original group of ninth-graders persist to a second year of college.4
Students drop out in part because they are not developing the skills they need to succeed in school - writing, spelling, basic math computation, and so forth. Even many of those who get to college are not well prepared. Threefifths of students in public two-year colleges and one-fourth of those in four-year colleges and universities require one or more years of remedial coursework.5 More than one-fourth of fouryear college students who have to take three or more remedial classes leave college after the first year.6
Certainly we must ensure that students take the right courses in high school and perform well on college entrance and placement exams. Transcripts and standardized tests document whether students and schools "measure up," but they do not identify the student behaviors and school features that need to be changed in order to enhance achievement and improve test results. It is also necessary to determine whether students are developing the study skills that are the foundation for academic success after high school. This is where data on student engagement can be helpful.
At first blush, the engagement premise appears simple, even self-evident. Under the right conditions, the more students do something, the more proficient they become. For example, the more...