Secrets of Graduating From College

Like most people, I have a favorite novel ("Mindbridge" by Joe Haldeman), a favorite movie ("Tootsie" with Dustin Hoffman), and of course a favorite ice cream (chocolate chip, Baskins-Robbins).

But how many people have a favorite federal government report?

Mine is "Answers in the Tool Box: Academic Intensity, Attendance Patterns and Bachelor's Degree Attainment," published in 1999 by the U.S. Department of Education. I am thrilled to announce the publication of its sequel, "The Toolbox Revisited: Paths to Degree Completion From High School Through College."

The first Toolbox provided the most powerful argument by far for getting more high school students into challenging courses, my favorite reporting topic. Using data from a study of 8,700 young Americans, it showed that students whose high schools had given them an intense academic experience -- such as a heavy load of English courses or advanced math or Advanced Placement -- were more likely to graduate from college. It has been frequently cited by high school principals, college admissions directors and anyone else who cared about giving more choices in life to more students, particularly those from low-income and minority families.

The new Toolbox (after March 15, order online at www.ed.gov/pubs/edpubs.html) is 193 pages of dense statistics, obscure footnotes and a number of insightful and surprising assessments of the intricacies of getting a college degree in America. It confirms the lessons of the old Toolbox using a study of 8,900 students who were in 12th grade in 1992, 10 years after the first group. But it goes much further, prying open the American higher education system and revealing the choices that are most likely to get the least promising students a bachelor's degree.

Then it does something I have rarely seen in any educational report. It asserts that raising the college graduation rate is more the responsibility of the students themselves than the business executives, educators, foundation officers and government policy makers who are most likely to read the report.

Both Toolbox I and Toolbox II are the work of Clifford Adelman. His full title is senior research analyst, Policy, Research and Evaluation Staff, Office of Vocational and Adult Education, U.S. Department of Education. He is a very serious social scientist, but with a passion for clarity that make reading his work a trip.

He doesn't spare the reader the technical stuff. Here is a sentence from page 38 of the new Toolbox: "Likewise, following Pedhazur's (1982) rules of thumb for identifying potential collinearity problems from correlations, table 11 advises that if we use the high school academic curriculum index, we should not invoke either highest level of math or science momentum in the same multivariate model." But after chopping your way through a patch of Adelman underbrush, you are rewarded with a flash of insight, such as this new Toolbox dismissal of old assumptions about students in the pipeline toward a degree:

"There is no linear path to a degree," he says. "The default 'pipeline' metaphor . . . is wholly inadequate to describe student behavior [which] moves in starts and stops, sideways, down one path to another and perhaps circling back. Liquids move in pipes; people don't."

The Toolbox Revisited has some good news. By 2000, the portion of the high school class of 1992 who spent at least some time in a four-year college had a college graduation rate of 66 percent, up from 60 percent for the high school class of 1982 after that same period of time.

But many of our assumptions about how they managed that feat are wrong, Adelman says. For instance, despite our national obsession over picking the right school, Adelman shows is it not where you go to college but how you use that time in college that most closely correlates with getting a college degree. If you earn at least 20 credits your first year, don't take more than one break from college of more than a semester (not counting summers) and keep your grades up, your chances of getting a bachelor's degree are very good.

Also, Adelman says, it is not true that freshman year is the make or break time for undergraduates. Ninety percent of them show up for sophomore year, although those with bad first-year grades are unlikely to survive much longer.