Why are local high school grads struggling in college? Listen and they’ll tell you
There’s no shortage of data, and just as many ways to slice it. In a vacuum, the numbers can start to feel abstract and ambiguous.
We know that many students going from high school to college don’t end up finishing their degree. According to statistics gathered by Graduate Tacoma, just 57 percent of Tacoma Public Schools students who go straight from high school to post-secondary education end up finishing their programs within six years. While it’s difficult to compare local and national data, that’s generally below the national rate.
The number of students who finish degrees drops to roughly 28 percent when you account for TPS grads who delay the start of college or post-secondary education, according to the data.
Certainly, the cold statistics tell a story of struggle, according to Dr. Kelly Bay-Meyer, who served as lead researcher for a recently released study that sought to better understand why this happens.
What’s often lacking, Bay-Meyer said, are the voices of students whose experiences and challenges are boiled down to data points.
Bay-Meyer and her team hoped to help fill that void by interviewing more than 50 Pierce County high school graduates who attended Tacoma Community College or the University of Washington Tacoma and left despite being in good academic standing.
“The intent of the project was to share quotes publicly to help really spearhead efforts in the community to help students in the future,” Bay-Meyer said. “I think focusing on college completion is really critical for individual students, their financial futures, their families and the strength of our community.”
As Tacoma continues to work toward improving not just grades and high school graduation rates but the overall life fulfillment and success local students achieve, the questions now becomes just a little bit more clear:
Are we going to listen to what these students are telling us, even if the picture they paint is complicated?
If so, what are we going to do about it, collectively?
Because, according to Bay-Meyer, the solutions will likely require steps to be taken inside and outside the classroom.
“I felt a little just kind of like disconnected, you know, from what I was used to just coming right out of high school,” explained a Black female former UWT student quoted in the report. “It was a transition. I’m being very involved coming right out of high school and having that strong sense of community and I just felt kind of a little lonely there.”
According to Bay-Meyer, some of the challenges identified in the report that can lead to a student failing to finish college or post-secondary education were not a surprise. Others were. By analyzing and organizing hours of recorded interviews, the researchers were able to identify seven main themes in the students’ responses, she explained.
Overall, college fit — or the lack of a sense of purpose or belonging — was the most common, the report found. This was followed by financial struggles, family care and life events, mental health, physical health, classroom experience and challenges with college navigation.
What was perhaps most telling was the way in which factors working against students often overlapped and compounded, Bay-Meyers said. For instance, while three-quarters of the former students interviewed said financial challenges had influenced their decision to leave college, often money was not the sole reason for the students’ struggles.
The students’ answers also shined a light on the existing “inequities underlying the reasons they leave in the first place,” Bay-Meyer said.
She noted that Graduate Tacoma statistics indicate that 57 percent of all TPS grads who go straight to college or post-secondary education complete the program within six years, while only between 34 and 45 percent of students of color manage the same accomplishment.
“I was trying to help my family financial wise. So that’s also why it made me make that decision,” said a male Hispanic student quoted in the report. “It’s mostly because of my job and then to take care of the family.”
Nalani Linder is the director of Tacoma Completes, a community initiative launched by the local nonprofit Degrees of Change that is working to assist Tacoma college students toward graduation.
The report purposely avoided providing recommendations, Linder said. Instead, it focused on establishing key questions about how students can be better supported.
The point was to make the space to actually hear what the students are saying, and then engage everyone in a broader conversation about how to address it.
If the research team had jumped straight to, “This is what should be done,” Linder said, it would have risked leaving out the input and perspective of the very people the report aims to help.
Linder said the idea is to avoid decisions being made by “folks who look like all the other decision makers who have created the systems we’re trying to change.”
Bay-Meyer agreed.
While there are clearly some takeaways that lend themselves to potential action — like the need to account for problems like the lack of affordable housing and child care and make sure that high school grads have the support they need to develop a plan for post secondary education — mainly she’s hopeful that the new report will spark a new, overdue discussion.
“A huge part of the national conversation is about trying to get everybody college and career ready, but we’re still seeing a huge gap. Something’s not not working. There are a lot of things that aren’t aren’t quite working,” Bay-Meyer said.
“So how can we do this better?“
▪ A virtual forum will be held Feb. 19, 2021 from 8:30-10AM to share key findings from the report. Registration for the event is available online.
This story was originally published February 12, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
