As students and educators head back for another pandemic-disrupted school year, the third and final edition of Quality Counts 2021 provides a broad perspective on the nation's K-12 system, with summative grades and scores for the U.S. and each state on a range of academic, financial, and socioeconomic indicators that underlie student achievement…

Graduate programs in medicine and biomedical sciences have been severely impacted by the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic over the last 2 years. Following 2 years since beginning of the pandemic, data on student support, educational and academic performance as well as sentiment on changes to educational programs are starting to emerge. We performed…

Intentional and early collaboration between state and local leaders and state coordinators for homeless education is vital to developing solutions that ensure success in Career Technical Education (CTE) programs for learners experiencing homelessness. As many states anticipate the growing rates of homelessness to continue in the coming years, the…

For the March 2020 survey, AACRAO partnered with The Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice at Temple University on the March 2020 survey which recently released the results of the 5th annual #RealCollege survey of students' experiences with food and housing insecurity; it demonstrates widespread food and housing insecurity at more than…

Supporters of free college in the US often point to countries that do not charge tuition to argue for the policy. However, international examples often illustrate that free-college policies entail unintended consequences. Ireland offers a particularly apt case study on that point. In the mid-1990s, Ireland abolished tuition for full-time…

For those at the high school and college levels who have been tracking the demographic changes occurring throughout the United States during the past few decades, it came as no surprise when recent U.S. Census statistics revealed that the 2010 kindergarten class is 25% Hispanic, up from 19% in 2000, and 5% Asian, up from 4% in 2000. The class is…

In comparing one public school to another, discussions frequently include talk concerning the socio economics of a school or district, which then leads to talk about the advantages that one socioeconomic setting has over another. Educators tend to agree that low academic achievement frequently associated with a low socioeconomic status is a…

Understanding the suitability of multilevel modeling in the context of institutional research (IR) may ease the doubts of some IR professionals. However, the need for training on how to conduct and report multilevel modeling analysis remains. A major roadblock hindering the proliferation of multilevel modeling in IR is the perception that…

The issue of the "boy gap" or "boy crisis" in education has been the subject of increasing attention across a number of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Given the importance of this issue and the need to better understand the situation in boys' education, this report draws on material and…

A large majority of full-time students pursuing bachelor's degrees at four-year colleges and universities in the United States attend public universities. The struggle, therefore, to improve educational attainment and reduce the marked disparities in outcomes that lead to greater inequalities of all kinds will take place mainly within our nation's…

While access to higher education has expanded significantly in the United States over the last century, a new crisis has emerged: disturbing numbers of students who enroll in post-secondary education are failing to complete their degrees with huge consequences to them, society, and the economy. Today, more than 70 percent of high school graduates…

An important new book on improving the stagnant graduation rates of the nation's public colleges and universities suggests that one reason so many academically talented students leave college without a diploma may be that they enroll in schools for which they are overqualified. Authors William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michael S. McPherson…

Mathematics education is a critical public policy issue in the U.S. and the pressures facing students and schools are compounded by increasing expectations for college attendance after high school. In this study, we examine whether policy efforts to constrain the high school curriculum in terms of course requirements and mandatory exit exams…

When President Barack Obama unveiled his plans this summer for a $12 billion federal investment in the nation's community colleges, he said he wanted the initiative to yield an additional 5 million community college graduates by 2020. Research suggests that reaching that goal may be a tall order. Community colleges have abysmal graduation rates:…

President Barack Obama has called for the United States to reclaim its position as the nation with the highest concentration of adults with postsecondary degrees in the world. Given the changing demographics of the United States, this target cannot be achieved without increasing the rate at which Hispanic students obtain a college degree. In this…