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THIS GUEST POST COMES FROM ROBERT KELCHEN, DOCTORAL CANDIDATE IN EDUCATIONAL POLICY STUDIES AT UW-MADISON. In a new report, Filling in the Blanks: How Information Can Affect Choice in Higher Education , Andrew Kelly and Mark Schneider of the American Enterprise Institute examine the role that information can play in the college choice process. One thousand parents in five states were asked which of two similar colleges they would recommend to their high school-age child. Half of the parents were given information about the colleges’ six-year graduation rates, while half were not. The researchers found that parents who were provided information about graduation rates were fifteen percentage points more likely to recommend the college with the higher graduation rate to their child, with larger differentials for parents who reported having less information about colleges and who had lower levels of education. The intervention shows the importance of providing salient information to the pa...

Education Next apparently has provided a platform for school choice advocate George Mitchell to shill for voucher schools outside of the state of Wisconsin. Here is his latest spin on a study that shows the high school graduation rate to be 12 points higher in seven Milwaukee voucher schools compared with 23 Milwaukee public high schools. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story by Erin Richards provides the crucial quote regarding causation from the study's author, John Robert Warren , a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota: "We still don't know whether it's going to the voucher school that causes you to be more likely to graduate, or if it's something about the kinds of families that send their kids to voucher schools would make them more likely to graduate," he said. Then there's the whole question of which and how the voucher and public high schools were chosen for purposes of comparison. More questions than answers. Unlike Mitchell, I ...

Some members of the media are covering the release of a new Canadian study , associated with the Educational Policy Institute , that examines the effects of a financial aid program on college-going and completion among low-income students. Researchers at the Measuring the Effectiveness of Study Aid Project tried to isolate those effects by examining what happened following a change in student aid policy in Quebec that increase aid eligibility and decreased reliance on loans. By comparing student outcomes both before and after the policy change, and comparing the outcomes of similar student in Quebec to those in other provinces (where such reforms did not occur), analysts attempted to establish a causal effect of aid. They conclude that the policy affected access (increasing overall enrollment among students from families making less than $20K per year by 4-6 percentage points), and persistence (increasing retention rates by 6 percentage points) but did not affect graduation rates--...

A spate of recent articles, including those covering Bill Bowen and Mike McPherson's new book (which I promise to review just as soon as my copy arrives), have left me a bit perplexed-- wondering aloud "where have you all been?" The punchline each time is that a fair proportion of adults starting college are not finishing. Yes, and duh. This is not new, and if it's news well I guess it's only because we've deliberately kept our heads in the sand. But there's no way that folks like New York Times reporter David Leonhardt have been deliberately oblivious, and yet he's writing about low college completion rates as if they've just been unearthed. In a recent blog post , Kevin Carey implied the same-- just as he did in a recent American Enterprise Institute report . But this has been a prominent topic of discussion for years--maybe a decade plus! Just look at Kevin's own 2004 report A Matter of Degrees (which received plenty of media covera...