Sandra S. Ruppert, Education Commission of the States
October 2003
Using information from the 2000 census, this report provides discouraging data on both high school graduation and college participation rates. Paralleling the significant achievement gap in K-12 education, high school graduation and college participation rates vary greatly when the numbers are broken down by race/ethnicity. For example, while 33.6 percent of white American adults have a college degree, only 14.7 percent of Hispanic adults and 20 percent of African-American adults have a college degree. The report makes several recommendations, none earth-shattering, to state policy makers, including the importance of getting reliable data that will help "tell the story about performance conditions in their state." Based on this information, Ruppert feels policy makers can then focus on the specific students' needs by targeting the growing parts of the population without proper access to college. We suspect that the solution to the problem has more moving parts than that, but sunshine is still the best disinfectant. The detailed state-by-state information is available on the Center for Community College Policy website, http://www.communitycollegepolicy.org/html/top.asp?page=Issues/Access/Access_map.asp and the national summary can be found here.
