The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, at its most recent quarterly meeting, received an update on the progress of the Closing the Gaps initiative, an effort to raise the level of participation, success, research, and excellence to that of the other populous states by 2015. As reported here earlier, much of the story concerns the challenge of keeping up with the growth in the Latino population. The published report contains information that should be of interest to community and technical college educators. There are a great many charts and graphs in the full report, which is provided here. It is recommended to peruse through the Table of Contents and the Executive Summary in the various categories.
Below are few verbatim bits that are of particular interest:
Analysis and Observations
Graduation rates for entering full-time students must improve if Closing the Gaps success rates are to be achieved. The six-year graduate rate of first-time, full-time cohorts at universities increased steadily during the first five years. Since then, however, it has been flat. To continue progress on the undergraduate success goal, more than 56 percent of all students who enter universities as full-time enrollees must graduate within six years.
At community colleges, 25.7 percent of first-time, full-time students completed a bachelor’s or associate’s degree or a certificate for the cohort completing six years in FY 2000, compared with 30.6 percent for the FY 2005 group, and 30.8 for the most recent FY 2007 group. This growth is encouraging, but the percentage of students enrolling full-time at community colleges is decreasing. Increasing completion rates at two-year institutions in both academic and technical programs is imperative.
Efforts to help students persist and succeed in higher education must be increased. Hispanic and African American students persist and graduate at lower rates than whites and Asians. The plateau of graduation rates may reflect the increasing number of these students in the entering cohorts. Understanding the needs and challenges of our state’s diverse student participants will be critical for meeting success goals.
Strategies for improving success must address the critical role of students’ preparation for college-level coursework. Efforts must focus on both improving the skills of incoming students and supporting effective and scalable developmental education programs for student who arrive underprepared. Students who do not meet the state’s TSI standards in math, reading, and writing must take developmental education in their deficiency areas.
For the fall 2004 cohort of first-time students at universities, only 35.6 percent of these students who were not prepared in math successfully completed a college level math course within three to four years.
Less prepared students are more likely to attend community colleges. Only 15.7 percent of entering 2004 community college students who were under prepared in math successfully completed a college level course within three to four years. As with universities, the percentage of community college students receiving college credit in the other two TSI areas was higher -- 42.7 percent for those deficient in reading and 35.4 percent for those underprepared in writing.
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