Saturday, April 24, 2010
The way up
Poor students are not getting matched up to the right college or are not completing college. President Obama hopes that America will have the world's largest proportion of college graduates by 2020. In order to achieve this goal, college will need to be made more affordable and high schools will need to help students apply to colleges worthy of them. Students are more likely to drop out if colleges are not challenging enough. Interestingly, the share of poor teenagers hoping to go to college tripled from 1980 to 2002.
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5 comments:
It is great to promote higher education in the U.S. Even though matching students better with colleges is a good idea, it would be very difficult to come up with a rubric to achieve this I feel. Also, I cannot think of a student that has left school because it was "not challenging enough." I am sure there are some, but it would be few I would guess. The article had good goals and reasons for increasing education, but some of the facts seemed to be debatable.
It definitely is harder to pay your way through school now as opposed to in the 1980's. It will be interesting to see if Obama does anything to help with this.
I wonder if students who find school not challenging enough just don't try, and then end up doing poorly. Considering the wage differentials between someone with a high school degree and a person with a college degree, I cannot imagine a circumstance in which a person would drop out merely because the school was too easy.
I fully support this goal, but I think it would require more than just government efforts. I think the colleges would need to become involved in trying to get top students from poor neighborhoods into their schools. This seems to be what is happening in some midwest schools based on the article.
It is crucial for the United States to not only promote higher education but also to make it more readily available to those less fortunate. Students today, often struggle to find the right fit because they are more concerned about the financial aspects rather than the schools themselves. Perhaps one day a students college decision will have nothing to do with money!
This article is a little disconcerning for me. With all the controversy over No Child Left Behind, is this just extending it to colleges? Everyone should have an opportunity to go to college, but will it lower the quality of education overall? It would be nice for college to be more affordable, but I think there would be definite repercussions if every single person went.
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