Public speaker who has given talks on four continents. He is also advised governments both domestically and abroad and even served in president obamas education policy team. Lastly, david kirp is a contributor to the New York Times and awardwinning author of 17 books including improbable scholars, kids first, and the sandbox investment. The College Dropout scandal, the authors latest work, exposes several Shocking Facts about the Higher Education system today. Almost 40 of students leave university with no degree. Almost 60 of Community College students drop out without an associates or transferring within three years. The author especially highlights students of color, those from poor families and those who are the first generation to attend college as these Group Situation is particularly dire. In order to solve this crisis the author proposes several solutions and in particular he emphasizes the necessity of making students feel like they belong and giving them the essential personalized and caring support they need in order to succeed. With this support more and more students can graduate continuing their journey toward achieving the american dream. Here to tell us more about the the College Dropout scandal is the author himself, david kirp. [applause] if you have questions just let me know. Its a bookstore so it seems to me its appropriate to begin with a little reading. Besides, i think the six most irresistible words in the english language is let me tell you a story it works for threeyearolds and b,83. This is the beginning of a story about City University new york Community Colleges. Which you have done amazingly innovative things but let the story speak for itself. New semper fi this square root, ergo sales asked her class . A host of hands shoot up. All but one of the 25 students believe that in this instance it cannot be done. The dissenter ablays out her argument but the rest of you think of leslies reasoning moving away from the blackboard glasses perched on her nose scanning the room, do you guys agree . Everyone wants to speak at once. After some back and forth they concur, leslie is correct stop then ms. Phelps points to another square root. You guys are great, what about this . And once again the students clamor to respond. In an ordinary college math class students are expected to memorize whats being spoonfed to them. Repeat the answers on the exam, students in ms. Phelps class must puzzle out the right answers for themselves and only when they reach an agreement do they move on. While this repartee sounds like a prep session for the gre, which requires perspective grad students perform the sink ab perform the same calculation. The grand concourse borders the school but while a handful of the ornate turnofthecentury movie palace survived the neighbor turned it into one of the poorest in the city and one of the most violent in the nation. This is the new jen education world. Where almost everyone is nonwhite, almost everyone receives federal and state aid earmarked for needy students. Like most abnationwide poor students are three times more likely than their welltodo classmates to start here. Its the collegiate home for half of all black and latino freshmen but just a third of white students. In first jen students are twice as likely to attend Community Colleges with College Educated parents. Students i met are survivors thats how they made it here. Most of them are juggling to compete for scarce time. Lunch time expressing breastmilk and studying student on call susanna g tells me i work full time husband requires kidney dialysis. These students have accomplished in less than three months the students in the break the mold program called cooney start is almost beyond belief. At the outset of the semester they were cowboy decimal points and negative numbers since then have power through Elementary School arithmetic to basic algebra and ready to tackle collegelevel math. Another minor miracle was unfolding in christopher enniss reading and writing class there students initially had a hard time interpreting short story of any kind parsing the figurative language in the start story. It might well read in freshman english. In a space in the classroom like a panther using his voice as an instrument cocking his head to listen. How do you know he probes never student has an interpretation. With the evidence from the text plainly whats happening in these classrooms. Hold some clues on how to solve the problem of College Dropout. I want to say one additional word about this teaching, one of the joys of spending time listening and talking and watching stuff, its very special moments. I was there for the better part of the day watching these two teachers and students. Neither teacher ever uttered the abhighlighting some things in the literature class. They are remarkable. And they are not the only students who i thought were remarkable. The students in a program that is next Level Program for students in the regular Community College system whomever you just heard a second ago that the graduation and transfer rates from six years from Community College is 39 percent. The Graduation Rate and b,60abs years is 13 percent. They are the graduation is 15 a ageorgia State University which is a big urban school 40,000 undergraduates the Graduation Rates doubled in the course of eight years and the opportunity gap shrunk in fact poor kids minority students, first generation College Students and immigration students are all grudging at rates higher than the overall student population. Its a very different story nationwide. I set out to try to figure out whats going on. The book begins with a jock loose. Its very simple. You have these abysmal Graduation Rates and they are especially bad for nugent students. About 10 lower than 1970 the consequences are dire. Particularly for poor and workingclass Students College really is the ticket of mobility. Unfortunately, they are the students who fare worse. They wind up leaving with debt they dont have a lot to show for it their lifetime earnings overall are not going to be immensely greater then if they just stayed in college and got a bunch of debt. The graduate from college on average their Lifetime Income goes up by 1 million. More in certain fields. Otherwise they wind up with debt and three times more likely to default on their debt. They default on their debt that means they have a harder time buying a car, a harder time buying a house and the effects ripple out from there. They are less likely to stay married. They are less likely to participate in politics. They are less healthy. Also they earn a lot less than they otherwise would. American institutes of research estimated one class one year the cost to the economy in terms of lost earnings is 4 billion. When i go out and i talk about this not infrequently a question i will be asked and anticipated these students are not College Material. Thats a phrase i feel. Certainly the kids describing to you a class of a not College Material student. One of the girls they are said to me describe what happened when she was in ninth grade her High School Counselor called her in and said said you just can get pregnant and dropout want you just leave now and save the taxpayers a bunch of money. The fact that these kids are there says a lot about their survival or skills. I have here they blown it its their fault case closed, you get administrators and professors thing you want to improve Graduation Rates give us better students will graduate more of them. There is an empirical answer to this question and that is if you look at colleges with the same Graduation Rate. Same overall Graduation Rate. Big difference is in terms of the percentage of students students im calling new jen students are the poor students of underrepresented minority students. There are huge gaps between the Graduation Rates of two colleges the same overall in the Graduation Rates for new jen students value enormously. Let me give you a couple examples of places that you might well not have paid any attention to but they are the places that American Kids go to school. Old Dominion University in virginia big Public Institution they graduate about 45 percent of their students. They have twice as many aare sorry they graduate 54 percent of their students and twice as many minority students of the university of toledo. The grip the minority Graduation Rate is 50 university of toledo with the same entering credentials its a 41 percent overall Graduation Rate. 18 percent minority Graduation Rate. In other words, same student goes to old dominion she has 2. 5 times better chance of earning a degree its also the case but if you look at the entering profile of students there is huge difference in the overall Graduation Rates and schools that look the same but day one look very different in terms of his causing them. I was in new york at one point i thought let me have a look at what the new york figures are like for a couple of state universities. Imagine mario who is thinking about where he wants to go in college who lives in the bronx and thinking about two of the sunni schools old westbury only alluded nobody and same entering criteria. Goes to sunni old westbury fewer than half the students graduate and fewer than half the minority students graduate. Heads up state to albany the overall Graduation Rate is 70 and 75 of the minority students graduate. So hes got a 50 chance of graduating. One of the hopes i have in the book is that you get parents and students to think about lots of things whether its sushi bars or the quality of their major and deciding on a college to just Pay Attention to the likelihood they will make it out the other end based on what the data look like. If you have high schools with the same Graduation Rate as Public UniversityPublic UniversityGraduation Rate is 30 . High school with 50 Graduation Rate would be labeled a dropout factory the principal would be looking for other employment but there is no accountability in the Higher Education world. Nobody loses a job because of the fact that the statistics are as women as they are. I teach Public Policy and Public Policy is all about solutions. If i was a sociologist might stop there but im not him you will will i often do when im writing i went looking for examples of places that look like cooney look like Georgia State try to figure out what are they doing. What explains those differences. What explains the wires in this case. What are they doing to beat the odds . For starters, i learned something that i wouldve thought was terribly obvious which is that the president of the institution has to say Student Success is my top priority. I started out thinking, of course, what else might be the top priority . The answer is, making alums happy, placating the state lawmakers and the professors, getting them some razors and most important moving up the u. S. News and world ranking. How do you move up the rankings . You become more selective and how are you more selective . You reject more students. Thats the criteria of success. Long beach state is one of the institutions i featured in the book and the provost is a guy who used to be at the med school at one point a fellow named brian jeske. Long beach state nearly half minority students. Nearly half pell grant students it has three times more applicants than harvard the seventh largest number of applicants in the country 70 of the students graduate and one of the reasons it so successful is how closely is tied into long beach and everything from the preschool through the universities. Elementary high school Community College. It really is a system in fact and not just a name. Heres brian jeske we dont want to be harvard and we could be harbored even if we admitted the top people among the 96,000 who apply. We dont want to play in that pool. We cant. We want to be the best in our pool and we think we are. Indeed in a recent study in the operator of social mobility, long beach is among the nations best and moving students from poor families into the middle class. If our president is going to take seriously the idea of Student Success, what she needs to do in collaboration with somebody else in the administration who is entire job is producing more graduates. Thats the mission of that person. You need to look from the very first day from the day the student accepts to the day they walk across the stage or try to ajust try to figure out where the roadblocks graduation. Here are a couple of examples. I never heard of summer melts when i wandered into this project. I remember summer melt was the goodhumored truck came by and he picked up your ice cream by the time you got home that was summer melts. Thats not summer melt in this context. At the school and talking about which are the big regional public universities the schools that American Kids go to 20 to 30 of the students who are accepted by university and paid her first payment never show up in the fall. So whats that about . Partly its going to be about the fact that they decided they are not ready for college or theyve got family obligations that they didnt anticipate. A lot of it is about the fact that the paperwork theyve got to go through between the time they are accepted in the fall is huge. It got to get the high schools to turn in their last semester grades. Theyve got to decide what theyre going to do an orientation. Pick first semester they have to fill er philip financial federal aid applications. I dont know how many of you have ever seen a fafsa application. Lets put it this way, it is not student friendly. Its not me friendly either. I was having a hard time figuring out what i would do if i had to fill it out. If youre a middleclass student or upperclass come from a family where the parents are going to college and you got all sorts of advisors around somebody can sit down and help you with the paperwork. The students dont have anybody. To help them. They really are on their own. So how to deal with that problem pee dee its a newfangled low cost way. He sent Text Messages to the students and you say you are fafsa application is due next week. By the way, if you need help just text the following number and we will get you help. That little innovation costs approximately nothing. Text messages are essentially free. At Georgia State which was the first place to do this, cut the summer melt problem by 40 . By the way, Little Things make a huge difference. When california took the letter it sends to High School Kids encouraging them to take the first step in register the process thats going to make them participants in the funding for the california fafsa when they change the wording of the letter. They read it in english and then says something and the effect of this is the first step on the road to your college success. That little tiny bit of tinkering, just that one sentence increased by two percent and the change of language plus that tinkering about eight or nine percent. It doesnt take a whole lot to engage students in this story. The other end of the process, the universities are noticing that surprising number of students who are in their last year or maybe even their last semester, dropout. When they look figure out whats going on what could be going on . The answer is, they run out of money they havent been able to pay their bills because the College Loans are run out of there in a state that has often the state guaranteed loans are good for four years and now in their fifth or six year, what to do . And they are not out a ton of money. If you give these students, give them 500 or thousand dollars, Georgia State one of my hero institutions pioneered this program. Say here it is. You need this go graduate. By the way, the students first reaction was, this was a scam. Like my cell phone i dont even answer the phones unless i know who is calling because they now invaded my phone. If youre a student, hello are about to give you 1000 but in fact thats what happened. In a class of about 10,000, they increase the number of students graduating by 400 kids. Also, when they surveyed the students and their attitudes toward the university there was a big change because the students were now getting that when the college said, we care about you, we are behind you, they really meant it. They were literally putting their money where their mouth was. The biggest stumbling block is math. College math. Whenever diane encountered this all of my nightmarish memories of a calculus cla