OHIO PUBLIC COLLEGES Report shows lack of readiness

Thousands of high school grads waited a year before entering college.
COLUMBUS -- An Ohio Board of Regents report shows that not all first-year students attending Ohio colleges are fully prepared for college once they get there.
The finding was released Wednesday in the regents' second annual report on "Making the Transition from High School to College in Ohio."
Federal government figures indicate that 70,885 of an estimated 120,393 Ohio high school graduates in 2002 attended college immediately after high school graduation, for a 59 percent college attendance rate. An additional 29,689 Ohio freshmen in 2002 waited at least a year after high school to begin college.
"Their figures tell us two things," said Roderick Chu, chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents. "A fairly high proportion of high school graduates start college at some point in their lives, and the older student is a big part of the college participation picture in Ohio."
Although many students begin college, preparation for college varies widely, and not all students are prepared to succeed. Thirty-nine percent of the recent graduates of Ohio's high schools who attended public colleges in fall 2001 enrolled in at least one remedial course in their first year of college. Remedial courses in math and English are taken by students who are not prepared to take regular college courses in these areas.
The type of course work taken in high school has a great deal to do with how well prepared students are for college, the report says.
Other findings
Other highlights of the report:
UStudents who take four years each of English, math, and social studies and three years of science that include biology, chemistry and physics have average first-term college grade point averages of 3.0 on a 4.0 scale and remedial course enrollment rates of only 14 percent.
UStudents who take a somewhat less rigorous set of courses that includes four years of English but only three years each of math, science, and social studies have average first-term college GPAs of 2.8 and remedial course enrollment rates of 32 percent.
UStudents who report taking less than these minimum core courses have average first-term college GPAs of 2.5 and remedial course enrollment rates of 52 percent.
"All of the basic measures of early college success are higher for students who take more rigorous courses while in high school," Chu said.
Two versions of report
The transition report is available at the Board of Regents Web site at www.regents.state.oh.us/perfrpt/2003HSindex.html. This year the report is divided into two formats. A statewide version shows enrollment patterns for all Ohio. A second version provides results at the district and high school level.
Reports at the district and high school level should be interpreted with some caution, however, as they do not reflect outcomes for all students who go to college, said Darrell Glenn, director of Performance Reporting for the Regents.
"We do not have college attendance data by district and high school for students going out of state, and the academic outcomes information is only available for students attending Ohio public colleges," Glenn said. "So these results might not be representative for districts that send a lot of their graduates to out-of-state colleges and Ohio private colleges."