BOISE DISTRICT COLLEGE-GOING TRENDS

Happy New Year! Hopefully, your Christmas and New Year's holidays were enjoyable and restful.

The National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) provides excellent data for us about college-going and college graduation trends among our high school graduates.We have been using the Clearinghouse, which supplies data from about 94% of colleges nationwide, since the class of 2007. So we have 9 graduating classes which are now in the database.

NSC provides information about each class for the first 8 years after high school. So we have complete data for the class of 2007, 7 years for the class of 2008, 6 years for the class of 2009, and so on.

NSC does not provide information about students who join the military or go on church missions. However, we presume that many students in each category enter some form of post-secondary education after their service to the country or to their church. It's one reason why, especially in Idaho, the percentage of students who graduate from  post-secondary training opportunities grows after year 6, or even after year 7 or 8. We wrote about this phenomenon in an earlier post.

Here is an update of Boise District college-going trends.

Direct to College

As indicated, many Idaho students serve missions or join the military after high school. From research our counselors have done, we think that this affects Boise's college-going rate by about 3-4 percent each year. It appears that the percentage is higher in other parts of the state, and especially in eastern Idaho.

You can see that the District percentage has steadily increased since we started tracking data. Idaho's percentage dropped from the class of 2008 to the class of 2010. but we don't yet have any national data after the class of 2010. That 45% Direct Enrollment rate for the class of 2010 was the lowest in the nation.

Here are the trends for the 4 comprehensive Boise high schools. Note that relative income levels of the student population also play a role in the college-going rates. Timberline and Boise have higher go-on rates than do Borah and Capital, and lower rates of free/reduced lunch among the student population. Each of the high schools has seen an increase in the Direct to College rates since the class of 2007.

College-Going Rates Within 1 year of Graduation

NSC also tracks this data, which allows us to see how the trends develop one year after high school graduation.

The district and school trends pretty much follow those of direct entry, with percentages increasing a bit as more students try college for the first time.

College Going Rates Within 2 Years of Graduation

Though the patterns look similar, it's important to note that the percentage of students who enroll in college within two years of high school graduation is almost 10% higher than that of Direct Entry. For example,  60% of the class of 2013 enrolled in college directly out of high school. In 2015, the percentage is 70.  Since 1,754 students graduated in the class, about 175 additional students enrolled after the fall of 2013. Note also that the percentage enrolling has increased by 7 from the class of 2007 to the class of 2015.

For the high schools, it's interesting to note that Capital's 2 year enrollment has gone from 60% for the class of 2007 to 73% for the class of 2015.  Though the 2 year enrollment trend has increased at all 4 high schools, Capital's improvement is especially impressive. Also, Boise High's 2 year enrollment percentage has been above 80% for the last two high school graduating classes.

So the improvements in college enrollment are consistent for Direct Enrollment and 1 and 2 years after college. But how does that play out in terms of college graduation? That will be the subject of the next post on Data Points.