Programs and Policies to Support Postsecondary Success in Tennessee

Abstract

Nearly 62% of middle and high school students say they want to pursue higher education, and 83% of these students agree that obtaining a college education is important (Gallup & Walton Family Foundation, 2023). Yet students face well-documented obstacles along the path to a college degree. Between 10-40% of high school graduates who have been admitted to a college do not end up enrolling in the fall—a phenomenon referred to as “summer melt” (Castleman & Page, 2014; 2020). For students that do enroll in college, a substantial portion are placed into remedial, non-credit-bearing courses (Chen, 2016; De Brey et al., 2023), and only about 47% of students attending 4-year colleges and 34% of students attending 2-year colleges ultimately finish their degree “on-time” (De Brey et al., 2023). These struggles are faced by thousands of high school graduates each year, underscoring the need to re-examine support systems for students as they transition from high school to college and career. To address these issues, education policymaking has increasingly focused on improving support systems for students and on strengthening connections between K-12 education, college, and the workforce. However, it is not always clear which policy solutions are working and for whom. The following papers study policies and programs within Tennessee to examine different elements of the secondary and postsecondary systems that are designed to strengthen students’ skills and support their progress to and through higher education. Papers one and two are from a mixed methods study exploring federal and state college and career readiness accountability indicators in a public school district. In chapter one, I conduct a quantitative analysis of the relationship between meeting accountability indicator criteria and college-going among students. In chapter two, I use interviews with school and district personnel to explore how accountability indicators are used to shape school- and district-level decisions. I also combine this qualitative analysis with the findings from chapter one to explore how participants’ perceptions about the utility of state indicators compare to the measured relationship between indicators and outcomes. Paper three is a quantitative analysis of the secondary-level International Baccalaureate (IB) and Cambridge Advanced International Examinations programs where I estimate the impact of different levels of performance on IB and Cambridge Advanced assessments on a range of college outcomes for high school students. Paper four is a qualitative study from a larger evaluation of a support program for community college students at Nashville State Community College, where I use interview data with part-time college students to understand the relevance of time poverty theory (Vickery, 1977; Wladis et al., 2018, 2022) for understanding and supporting non-traditional college students as they enter college and complete their studies. Together, these papers paint a picture of how policies, programs, and actors at different levels of the education system in a single locality shape a range of pathways through which students transition between high school, college, and career.