Some high school students will now be able to view how well their school’s graduates are doing in college, according to The Washington Post.
The National Student Clearing House has created a database with information from over 93 million college students and over 3,300 colleges across the nation. This information allows The National Student Clearing House to present some high schools statistics on their graduates’ college success.
The Washington Post published the statistics of one of the schools involved in the study. The school's 2004 graduating class was used to analyze results. 23.8% of students graduated from college; 15% were still attending college; 28.5% dropped out of college; 3% returned to college after dropping out, and 29.4% of students were not in the database.
High School administrators can use this data to view the records of individual students. These high school administrators can see the classes that their most successful graduates took while in high school. Over 76% of high school students who scored a 3 or higher (a passing grade) an AP exam graduated from college. Also, 59.4% of students who took an AP exam and received a 2 or lower (a failing grade), which is still a much higher statistic than the 24.7% college graduation rate for students who did not take an AP exam.
These numbers are not representative of all high schools. They only pertain to the unnamed high school that article cited. However, these numbers are likely to be very similar to most high school’s statistics through The National Student Clearing House.
This is very valuable data to high school administrators because they can build their curriculum around what helps students succeed in college. Also, these numbers can allow high school administrators to encourage students to take AP classes. Administrators could cut classes that are not helping students and spend more for the beneficial classes. Also, high school students can locate the specific classes that have been the most beneficial for previous students.
