Nancy Hoffman, Joel Vargas, Andrea Venezia, and Marc S. Miller, eds
September 2007
According to this new book as well as a number of earlier volumes, Americans who lack a postsecondary education will lag behind in the global economy. But a lot of Americans, as we know, aren't getting to college and a lot more aren't staying there. In these pages, however, you can find innumerable recommendations to fix that. And while its chapters offer lots of as yet untried remedies, it's the current efforts that are most interesting. For example, an early college high school program in our hometown of Dayton, Ohio, sits on the campus of the University of Dayton, a location that automatically immerses low-income students in a postsecondary environment (see here). The editors are themselves involved with other such programs. In New York City, the CollegeNOW program allows high-school juniors and seniors to jointly enroll in the City University of New York. States such as Oklahoma and Ohio sponsor high-school skill exams, usually for tenth and eleventh graders, to assess competencies in math and to determine what needs to be fixed before students move on. Many of these programs are promising, but they are relatively new and therefore lack information about outcomes. Nonetheless, this book offers lots of solid information. You can find it here.