When Jay Greene at the Manhattan Institute first decided to research methods of measuring high school dropout and completion rates, he realized that current measures were often contradictory.

Many states, including North Carolina, report the dropout rate — the percentage of students leaving the school each year without graduating — instead of the high school graduation rate. It’s a strategic decision backed by state departments of education, but their measurement may give an overly rosy picture of what’s really going on, Greene says.

The problem has always been that the two measures don’t nearly add up to 100 percent of entering high school students. North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction reports dropout rates under 5 percent, yet schools graduate significantly less than 95 percent of their entering freshmen classes.

The exact percentage depends on where and how the statistics are generated. That’s been Greene’s complaint all along.

The 2003 Manhattan Institute study adds a new component in its latest version. “Public High School Graduation and College Readiness Rates in the United States” also measures the college readiness of students who earn a diploma at the conclusion of their four-year stint in high school.

Ranking by graduation rates

In the established Greene style, the new study uses graduation rates to rank the 50 states and the District of Columbia. North Carolina ’s 45th-place graduation ranking is based on aggregate graduation data, and uses Greene’s own methodology. Greene does not count graduation via the general equivalency method in his study, nor diplomas that take longer than four years to complete. The Greene Method “relies on enrollment data and diploma counts collected by the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Core of Data (CCD).”

Because the Manhattan researchers did not have access to race-disaggregated graduation data for North Carolina, results are reported in statewide averages only. Where disaggregated data was available, states were also ranked by graduation rates for American Indians, Asians, Hispanics, blacks and whites, in addition to the average national ranking.

The study uses estimation techniques to “smooth” some of the normal changes in enrollment from one high school year to the next by averaging enrollment over consecutive grades. The smoothed estimate of the number of entering freshman is a critical element in calculating graduation rates in the study.

The smoothing technique is “effective for large cohorts,” but “vulnerable in small cohorts,” Greene said. A smoothed ninth-grade enrollment estimate smaller than 200 caused Greene to eliminate those students from the study, as did other small sample situations. Excluding small cohorts, Greene said, reduces the sensitivity of his estimates to “enrollment anomalies.” “These rules allow us to focus exclusively on cohorts for which we have greater confidence,” he said in the report.

Among 17 states in Greene’s South Region, North Carolina’s 63 percent average graduation rate is below the national average of 70 percent. It is also below the 65 percent South Region average. The South Region’s graduation rates stretch from Florida, the lowest-ranking state in the nation at 56 percent, to West Virginia, ranked No. 5 at 84 percent. Other states measured against North Carolina in the South were Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. The top-ranking state in the United States, according to the new study, was North Dakota, where 89 percent of high school students earned a diploma in four years.

College-ready or not

Greene uses a series of three prerequisites to identify graduates who are likely to be successful college applicants. He measures them as the percentage of students who possess a “college-ready” transcript at graduation. In 2003, according to Greene, 63 percent of North Carolina’s students earned a diploma , but only 40 percent of the graduates had undertaken the appropriate courses and level of work to make them viable college applicants.

A four-year graduation rate of 63 percent, with only 40 percent of graduates college-ready, leaves about 25 percent of North Carolina’s entering freshman class from 1999 adequately prepared for college in 2003.

This means that out of a sample freshman class of 500 students in 1999, about 315 would have graduated in June 2003. Of those, 126 were college-ready. While more than 126 may have been accepted and decided to attend a college, they will need some remediation before they can assume the full rigors of a real college program.

For the nation as a whole, Greene found that 70 percent of entering freshmen graduated in four years, of which 32 percent were college-ready. The national figures also reveal that disproportionate numbers of blacks and Hispanics are not prepared in high school for college-level study. Because of this, they are under-represented in college, Greene said.

The college-readiness screens that Greene used to determine college preparedness were set at the lowest “acceptable” levels. The three screens include 1) high school graduation, 2) coursework in math, science, social science, and language to reflect “the minimum coursework a student must have to apply to four-year colleges with any reasonable hope of attending,” and 3) a National Assessment of Educational Progress reading score at least equal to the cutoff floor for “basic” proficiency.

Reform can improve readiness, Greene said. “The potential effect — positive or negative — that public schools can have on the college readiness of their students is very large,” he said, and “reform of K-12 education is the key to improving college access for these groups.”

Dr. Karen Palasek is an assistant editor of Carolina Journal.