For the Poor, the Graduation Gap Is Even Wider Than the Enrollment Gap

Susan Dynarski on inequality in education:

For the Poor, the Graduation Gap Is Even Wider Than the Enrollment Gap: Rich and poor students don’t merely enroll in college at different rates; they also complete it at different rates. The graduation gap is even wider than the enrollment gap.

In 2002, researchers with the National Center for Education Statistics started tracking a cohort of high school sophomores. The project, called the Education Longitudinal Study, recorded information about the students’ academic achievement, college entry, work history and college graduation. A recent publication examines the completed education of these young people, who are now in their late 20s. ...

Thirteen years later, we can see who achieved their goals. Among the participants from the most disadvantaged families, just 14 percent had earned a bachelor’s degree. That is, one out of four of the disadvantaged students who had hoped to get a bachelor’s had done so. Among those from the most advantaged families, 60 percent had earned a bachelor’s, about two-thirds of those who had planned to. ...

And the gap looks just as bad when students with similar academic achievement in high school are compared, e.g. among the "teenagers who scored among the top 25 percent of students on the math test..., the students from the top socioeconomic quartile had very high bachelor’s degree completion rates: 74 percent... But only 41 percent of the poorest students with the top math scores did so. That’s a completion gap of 33 percentage points, not much smaller than the overall gap of 46 percentage points."