MOCAN – Missouri College & Career Attainment Network

Increasing equity in college and career for Missouri students

College Access

Addressing Summer Melt Starts in the Spring

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Caroline Doglio, Program Associate

Even though it might feel like summer is far away, for some students summer melt might already be starting. An estimated 10-40% of high school students with the intention to enroll in college never actually do so. This phenomenon disproportionately impacts students of color, first-generation students, and students from low-income backgrounds.

But why aren’t these students actually matriculating? The reality is that showing up to campus is not only a question of whether or not the student wants to go, but also if they have the resources to do so. Unfortunately, students often stumble when faced with complicated forms and processes.

Understanding financial aid is often the biggest barrier for students. It’s estimated that 7.2% of students selected for FAFSA verification do not receive subsidized federal as a result, and we know that verification disproportionately impacts Black and Latino students. These burdens add up, making it more difficult for students to enroll.

The first step to tackling summer melt is understanding how many students it’s impacting and their demographics. A senior exit survey is a great first step to collecting the necessary data. Harvard’s Strategic Data Project Summer Melt Handbook offers resources on increasing completion and what exactly to include in the survey with examples. The guide encourages that questions be specific, like what students’ enrollment plans are and if they have paid their enrollment deposit.

With the senior exit survey providing an estimate of how many students intended to enroll at graduation, data from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC)’s StudentTracker for High Schools service can provide a count of how many students actually enrolled.

Though potentially more insightful, identifying groups of students melting at a higher rate than other groups in order to perform targeted outreach. [BD1] Were there specific institutions with higher summer melt rates than others? Is it a race question? An income question? All of the above? Understanding who summer melt is impacting the most is the first step to performing targeted outreach for the years to come.

But how do we help students right now? And how do we make sure they matriculate after they leave the building? Some practitioners are turning to texting. Text Steps was a project piloted by Ascendum Education Group in 2015 and expanded to 13 school districts in Wisconsin between 2018 and 2020. Some key lessons outlined in the brief include:

  • Successful summer melt interventions require the buy-in of both district and school leadership and frontline staff members
  • Student level-data is key for understanding an intervention’s success – but working with data like this involves a learning curve, so prior planning is required
  • Summer melt will start before summer and interventions should take place year-round

The school districts involved measured their impact through NSC data, comparing the postsecondary outcomes between the class of 2018 (control group) and the class of 2019 (who received the text messages). The average fall enrollment across the 13 districts increased by 3 percentage points.

These impacts were felt most by students of color and economically disadvantaged students. In 2018 in participating districts, students of color had a 40% fall in enrollment rate but 65% of students of color participating in Text Steps enrolled in fall 2019. Economically disadvantaged students participating in Text Steps had a 64% enrollment rate compared to a 37% rate for the class of 2018.

You can learn more about summer melt with NCAN’s toolkit and K-12 calendar.  Have questions about summer melt? We’d love to hear from you! Contact Caroline Doglio ([email protected]) to hear more about approaches to freezing summer melt.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: Learn from Other Schools’ Success Stories

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Bill DeBaun, Senior Director, NCAN

Before I jump into the rest of this awesome blog post, I’d love for you to save the dates for April 17-21. During this week, NCAN will host at least a webinar a day organized around the idea that everyone in a school has a role to play in students’ college and career readiness. Students’ postsecondary pathways aren’t just a school counselor’s focus, or a teacher’s focus, or a principal’s focus. No, every caring adult in a school, along with external partners, parents, and students themselves has a role to play.

Our great webinar lineup will examine topics like helping students reach different kinds of college and career pathways, how to build a college and career readiness team, and what kinds of frameworks are useful for understanding what students should know and experience. Interest piqued? We hope so. Full details are coming soon, but giving us your name and email here will make sure we get you more information and an invite ASAP!

Onto this post’s main business. Lots of districts and schools really want to improve their college and career readiness efforts. You may even be associated with one of them! But it turns out lots of districts and schools can also benefit from help figuring out how to do that. Don’t reinvent the wheel! It feels bad. Instead, borrow someone else’s wheel and make it yours!

I’ve pulled some blog post from NCAN’s blog that focus on different aspects of college and career advising. These are mostly from a high school context, but some also feature K-12 and community-based partnerships. Have questions? As always, I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at [email protected], and I hope you’ll reach out!

Still with me? I’m grateful, thanks for reading! As a bonus, here’s three more of my favorite posts:

Next month we’ll have more information on how to freeze summer melt early. Summer melt starts way before summer starts, so it’s never too early to start thinking about it. In the meantime, I hope this post got some ideas going on different practices districts and schools can adopt to help students be more successful!

Start Your Year Off Right by Refreshing Your College and Career Toolbox

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Caroline Doglio, Program Associate, National College Attainment Network

As January approaches and you consider your new year’s resolutions, here at NCAN we find it to be a great time to reaffirm your commitment to college and career readiness! If you’re lost on where to start, a great jumping off point is our K-12 resources for postsecondary transitions. This page serves as a compilation of resources, some created by NCAN and others not, to help navigate every step of a student’s transition into the postsecondary world. 

Depending on what you and your district might want to tackle first, there are numerous tools linked on the page. If you’re curious on where your district or school can improve its work around postsecondary advising, OneGoal has rubrics that measures advising on seven different focus areas. Once a district goes through the rubric, identifying places they might want to concentrate on, NCAN’s K-12 calendar can be a great resource to accomplish certain shifts. The calendar is color-coded by topic, such as partnerships, FAFSA, data, summer melt, etc., making it easy to focus on topics that the rubric identifies.

Another option for tools to focus on could be data! Understanding where students are not only going, but persisting and completing, after high school is key to improving postsecondary outcomes. The National Student Clearinghouse’s StudentTracker for High Schools is an easy, affordable way to start understanding student-level outcomes and identifying patterns. Once you become more comfortable with the tool, NCAN has some resources on how to level up the work you do with it.

The final tool linked on the page is an NCAN brief that examines five school districts and partner organizations using big ideas to improve their students’ postsecondary outcomes and how other districts could replicate these practices to achieve similar outcomes.

On top of these tools, there are additional pages linking to plenty of resources on various topics. There’s a page on transforming postsecondary advising, which allows you to explore strategies for connecting students and families to information they need. Another page provides more information on how to use data to educate students and inform services. There’s a FAFSA specific page to learn about best practices that have worked across the country. And finally, a whole page on strategies for reducing summer melt, which, by the way, starts way before summer.

The new year provides a chance to re-orient yourself and your goals and what is a better goal than easing postsecondary transitions!

Have questions or looking for a specific resource not covered by the above? I’d love to hear from you! You can reach me at [email protected]!

As The Year Winds Down, Use NSC Data to Plan Next Steps

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Bill DeBaun, Senior Director of Data and Strategic Initiatives

NSC

The National Student Clearinghouse recently announced that its “effective date” for the fall 2022 semester was November 18. This means that StudentTracker for High Schools subscribers will have new postsecondary outcomes data for their students in the next few weeks. That data is invaluable for understanding students’ postsecondary pathways and shaping postsecondary advising strategy.

If the words in the paragraph above seem foreign to you, let’s stop and rewind in the paragraph below. Did you catch all the above? Skip over the next paragraph or read it for a refresher.

The National Student Clearinghouse is a nonprofit organization that warehouses data covering about 98% of all the postsecondary enrollments nationally in any given year. They offer a subscription service to K-12 districts and schools ($595 per high school per year) that matches high schools’ senior classes with their postsecondary enrollment and completion data. Three times a year, the NSC sets “effective dates” where they have enough high school graduation and postsecondary enrollment data to generate new sets of reports. These reports are a collection of charts and spreadsheets that have both aggregated and student-level data. (Incidentally, education nonprofits who work with students can also access this data through a different subscription service, either Student Tracker for Outreach or Student Tracker for Educational Organizations.)

In the next few weeks, Student Tracker subscribers will receive an email when their reports are available for them to download from their FTP accounts. Once that notification goes out, it’s important to take a look and share with any internal personnel or external partners who collaborate with you on college and career readiness activities. Not sure where to start? Here are four things to look for in the data:

  1. Class of 2022 first fall enrollment: This is the fall 2022 semester effective date, so naturally most users will be interested in how their most recent graduating class fared. The class of 2021 experienced substantial first fall enrollment declines compared to class of 2020, so all eyes will be on the class of 2022 and whether these students will continue the enrollment declines.
  2. Previous classes’ persistence patterns: We know that the past few years haven’t just been disruptive for the classes of 2021 and 2022, they’ve been disruptive for, well, pretty much all of us. Using the stacked bar charts showing year-by-year outcomes in the aggregate report, it would be interesting to take a look and see if students from previous classes had an uptick in stopping out or if they were able to persist in and/or complete a postsecondary pathway.
  3. Top 25 institutions: The Student Tracker report comes with a .csv file showing the top 25 institutions to which students matriculated. Many districts and schools have fairly set matriculation patterns, but it’s always good to look for surprises here. The next level of analysis is to use the “student detail file” to break out students’ outcomes by institution. Are the institutions to which students are matriculating delivering good outcomes? If not, it might be time to consider a conversation with the institution, a change in college advising, or both.
  4. Outcomes by student demographics: When submitting a “graduates file” with the names and birth dates of students from each graduating class, the NSC offers the option to include students’ demographic characteristics. When provided, the NSC then sends back a report disaggregating outcomes by those characteristics. This is important because all student groups may not be getting the same outcomes as a graduating class is overall. Having this data available highlights gaps that can be addressed through practice and programming. Not submitting student demographics? Include them in your next graduate file upload, and you’ll see these charts in the next release.

Interested in the above but not a Student Tracker subscriber? It’s not too late to sign up. Once subscribed, you’ll be sent a report based on the November 18 effective date and then two more reports (mid-April, mid-August) in the next calendar year.

The effective use of data can help us improve students’ outcomes. The NSC’s Student Tracker service is a handy tool to in the toolkit for examining students’ actual postsecondary pathways.

Tackling Summer Melt in the Fall

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Caroline Dogolio, National College Attainment Network

Despite fall still being its early days, it’s never too early to think about freezing summer melt. It’s estimated that every year between 10-40% of college-intending students fail to enroll in college the fall after high school graduation. This is a phenomenon that disproportionately impacts students of color, students from low-income backgrounds, and first-generation students.

Understanding the Problem

Like many other issues in postsecondary education, finding the solution begins at learning more about the predicament. For summer melt, this means measuring the percentage of students that are not matriculating. While getting this number can take some effort, having this knowledge is well worth it.

For many, a senior exit survey can serve as the perfect jumping off point. Harvard’s Strategic Data Project Summer Melt Handbook offers resources on increasing completion and what exactly to include in the survey with examples. The guide advises that the more specific questions are, the better. These questions should include what students’ enrollment plans are and if they have paid their enrollment deposit.

With an understanding of how many students planned on enrolling, data from the National Student Clearinghouse’s (NSC) StudentTracker service will provide the numerator in this equation (e.g., how many students truly enrolled).

Knowing the percentage of students melting each year is a great place to begin intervening, but even better is identifying groups of students melting at a higher rate than others.

Prevention

Summer melt can serve as a motivator to strengthen K-12 and higher ed pipelines. NCAN’s understanding of enrollment trends across the country is that there are typical institutions that receive high proportions of students matriculating from the same high schools each year.

The Puget Sound College and Career Network created a number of checklists for their students’ popular college choices to ease the application process and the transition. These one-page cheat-sheets lists tasks, deadlines, “good to know” information, and contact information.

Along with these cheat-sheets, identifying these institutions can serve as a motivator to form relationships between high schools and their students’ popular college destinations. Edutopia has some suggestions on programs that can serve as a win for both parties:

  • Getting volunteers for an after-school STEM programs
  • Inviting guest speakers to discuss career pathways
  • Collaborating on a grant that could bring professional development for school staff

One idea not outlined by Edutopia, but worth exploring is inviting staff from financial aid offices to present or assist with FAFSA completion. These personnel can provide some expert knowledge not only on financial aid questions that may come out of the FAFSA but also on related topics such as how to read an award letter, what student can expect in financial aid packages, and the financial aid appeal process.

These partnerships will vary vastly from school to school, but the University of California system offers several great ideas that can be used throughout the entire K-12 spectrum.

Along with the resources outlined in this post, NCAN provides a Summer Melt Toolkit along with our K-12 Advising Calendar which has a summer melt category.

Have questions about summer melt? We’d love to hear from you! Contact me at Caroline Doglio ([email protected]) to hear more about approaches to freezing summer melt.

FAFSA Season is Here – Here’s How to Prepare

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College Campus

Caroline Doglio, Program Associate at National College Attainment Network

With October comes all the exciting autumnal things, trees changing colors, Halloween, and the opening of FAFSA season. As FAFSA numbers continue to grow, getting closer to pre-pandemic numbers slowly but surely, we’re sure schools remain eager to raise those numbers even higher. NCAN has a robust library of resources that we are happy to provide in these efforts.

The Class of 2022 began to show signs of rebounding from the pandemic. FAFSA completion grew 4.6% by this past July 1 nationally, though we are still not at pre-pandemic numbers. This growth represents approximately 52.1% of seniors in 2022 completing the FAFSA. By comparison, the pre-pandemic class of 2019 finished at 53.8%. Alabama and Texas were standout states in terms of year-over-year growth, and, notably, both implemented an universal FAFSA policy this past academic year.

District and schools, and the myriad professionals that make them run, have their work cut out for them. There have never been more demands on counselors, teachers, district and school leaders, and the other caring adults that pave the way for students toward college and career readiness. The past three years have been devastatingly difficult, and the prospect of helping students complete the FAFSA, a notoriously not-fun form, may be daunting.

It doesn’t have to be. We’re here to help.

This month NCAN will begin sending out our first of this cycle’s monthly reminder emails. These emails are geared towards K-12 practitioners and supply suggested to-dos depending on where in the cycle we are, as well as help in catching up if needed or what to look ahead for. Those interested can sign up for these emails is here.

These emails can be used conjointly with NCAN’s FAFSA resource library, which has a monthly calendar of action items as well as resources on actives that can promote FAFSA completion such as: 

  • A FAFSA planning calendar
  • Info on laying the groundwork and engaging external partners
  • Completing the actual FAFSA form
  • Training and capacity building
  • Communication
  • Accessing and using data

Need more on how to put together an effective FAFSA completion campaign? We’ve got that, too.

By the way, NCAN’s Form Your Future FAFSA Tracker, which counts completions at the national, state, city, district, and school levels, will return for the sixth straight year in early October.

More specific to this FAFSA cycle, FSA is introducing multi-factor authentication, or as they’re calling it, “two-step verification.” NCAN understands that this introduction will likely create barriers for students located in places with limited Internet or cell phone reception or in school districts that have restrictive cell phone and Internet policies. These barriers may bring a different array of questions to practitioners than in years past. To help prepare for this adjustment, NCAN has an article outlining the process, with tips and resources from FSA.