Colleges realize that many of them continue to be involved, and they want to leverage that desire by inviting them to participate in specially formed parent boards.  These parents are seen as a rich fundraising group that also can assist with internships and recruiting of new students.  These colleges also comply with these parents’ need to have information about “financial aid, graduation rates, and job placement.”

Despite this new trend, the blog writer, Caralee Adams, referred to a piece written in the Chronicle of Higher Education, that suggests that colleges should balance this trend with “the need to maintain policies of privacy that allow students to fight their own battles with grades and disciplinary issues so they can emerge from college as adults ready for the real world.”

For the first time in 30 years, there are more young women in school than in the work force.  While their male counterparts are more willing to take any job that they can find, young women are using the country’s economic problems as a chance to improve their skill sets with more training.  Many of them feel that women are at a distinct disadvantage already, and more training will give them an advantage when the economy improves.

Rampell reports that more than 400,000 young women have dropped out of the labor force entirely as they seek more education.

Studies have shown that despite the fact that Asians represent only six percent of the United States population, they meet the standards for college admission far out of proportion to their representation in the population.  Furthermore, it is noted that those colleges with race-blind admissions have twice the percentage of Asian students of the Ivy League schools.

The major concern is that those students who indicate that they are Asian are competing against the many other Asians who are extraordinarily high-achievers, so they are often denied admission into schools for which they qualify.

Most of the attrition comes from engineering and pre-med students who may not have had adequate math preparation or who aren’t willing to work hard enough.  Additionally, many of those students find their freshman classes challenging, and the classes in the subsequent years tend to be mainly theory class—classes that don’t feed many students’ passions.  Peter Kilpatrick, dean of engineering at Notre Dame, cites the engineering school’s success in retaining students by creating design projects and reducing the lecture experience to meet with smaller groups of students.  The engineering school used to retain between 50 to 55 percent of its students, but now it retains more than 75 percent.

The research asserts that middle school is the best time to guide students toward this two-part discovery:  what they might be best suited to do and how to make that happen.  The National Association of Secondary School Principals associate director of middle-level services, Patti Kinney reminds readers, “Effective middle-grades schools help students understand their potential and give them multiple opportunities to explore the future through a variety of experiences, support, and guidance.”  Pathways to Success seeks to involve middle school students, their parents, their schools, and the community to put those students on the right path to improve their chances of having a successful career.

In her article “Higher Education Is Goal of GED Overhaul,” Education Week’s Catherine Gewertz reports that this revamping is “driven by mounting recognition that young adults’ future success depends on getting more than a high-school-level education.”  Consequently, the GED’s redesign is in response to labor market requirements for training beyond high school and the acknowledgement that colleges are having to remediate too many of their enrollees who seem ill-prepared for college, and, therefore, ill-prepared for a bright future.

The changes are significant:

• Reworking the five subject-matter tests
• Changing the tests from pencil and paper to taking them on a computer
• Changing the professional development for GED teachers
• Reworking the GED curricula
• Incorporating strong support through counseling with emphasis on planning

By 2014, GED candidates can receive one of two kinds of passing points:  “the traditional one connoting high school equivalency, and an additional, higher one signaling college and career readiness.”

A recent New York Times article reports that because of unsatisfactory performance on the colleges’ reading, writing, or math tests, the number of entering freshmen who need remediation in any or all of three subjects (reading, writing, or math) is greater than one might expect. In general, 74 percent of incoming students from New York have to take at least one remediation course. Often, however, the additional expense of two or three courses for which they get no credit for their degree was prohibitive for many students, so many of them drop out. To counter this, City University of New York community colleges established an intensive remediation program called Start. Start works for one semester with students in need of remediation for one semester on just the three subjects for five hours a day for five days a week. The program has been successful and has since been expanded.

Parents should not assume that if their children’s grades are satisfactory, they are not in need of some kind remediation. That’s why many parents acquire tutors that can be found from an array of tutoring websites or other types of enrichment programs to make sure that their children are really ready for college.