Clearinghouse Findings on Factors in College Entry, Science & Engineering Majors

The National Student Clearinghouse provides a variety of services to schools districts and universities around the country, including a tracking service used to calculate reliable college-entry and retention rates. The Boise District has used Clearinghouse services since 2005.

The Clearinghouse has a research group that is increasingly producing interesting reports about patterns of college attendance and graduation patterns nationwide. An article today in the Huffington Post by Jennifer Klein told of an NSC research report indicating that poverty is the strongest factor influencing college attendance, regardless of minority or rural/urban status of the school. Here is the NSC research report, in which the college enrollment patterns of over 3.5 million students were studied.

Though few would be surprised by the findings in the NSC report, it points up the importance of scholarship and grant opportunities for students with potential such as Capital alum Kristie Hoang, last year's Bev and George Harad AVID scholarship winner, who's attending the University of Southern California this fall.

NSC researchers have also done analyses of Science and Engineering degree patterns among students nationwide in their database. One article examines patterns of Science and Engineering degrees by gender, and finds that degree completions are increasing rapidly for both women and men, and that the percentages by gender of S & E degree completion are equivalent.

However, the study includes social science and psychology degrees in the Science and Engineering category. When the data are broken down, 81% of Engineering degrees are attained by males, a statistic that has not changed since 2009. The percentages in other areas: Math and Computer Science, 74% male, and Physical Sciences and Earth and Ocean Sciences, 62% males.

On the other hand, 58% of Biological and Ag Science degrees and 62% of Social Science and Psychology degrees were attained by females.

Poverty and Kindergarten Preparedness

In the previous post (Idaho Kindergartners - Preparation for Reading) we discussed the state of reading preparation among kindergartners around the state of Idaho.

Since the free-reduced lunch data are available for schools around the state on the ISDE website, and research indicates that the two variables are related, we decided to run a scattergram portraying the relationship between preparedness and free/reduced lunch percentages.

For the chart, we used 2013 free-reduced lunch percentages for schools with over 25 entering kindergartners, and Fall 2013 IRI percentages of reading-ready students for those schools. A few of the schools in the comparison are kindergarten-only schools, for which lunches are not provided, so we used the District percentage of free/reduced instead.

Here is the scattergram:



By way of explanation, Van Buren and Sacajawea in Caldwell have free/reduced percentages of 91 and 90, respectively, and 23% of kindergartners at those schools achieved a "3" on the Fall 2013 IRI. Conversely, Hidden Springs (Boise) had 6% free/reduced and 82% scores of "3" on the IRI, and Galileo in Meridian had 11% free-reduced and 87% prepared to read.

As you can see, the correlation between preparation and free/reduced percentage the two variables is quite high (-.755) and negative ((-1) would be a perfect negative correlation).

If a pilot of pre-k is initiated in Idaho, it might make sense to carefully select high poverty/low-preparedness participating schools, so as to maximize the possible return on investment. If Basin District's experience is any indicator, the pilot will yield tremendous gains in reading literacy.