Since the day that Bottom Line began supporting students it was obvious that just working with them through the college application process wasn’t good enough. The at-risk students we help “get in” are far too likely to drop out of college before completing a degree. Consequently, we built our programming model to remain connected and supportive until our students graduate from college. Until now, it wasn’t clear how big of an impact our program was having. A study released by Harvard Doctoral candidate, Kolajo Afolabi, has been able to take a comparative look at our work and the results are impressive. According to the study, students in Bottom Line’s College Success program are up to 43% more likely to graduate from college than their peers.
In 2002 Bottom Line made a few changes that set the stage for this study. That year marks the moment that the demand for our access program had grown too large for us to support every high school senior in our College Success program. It was then that our Success program began to evolve to supporting students at what we call “Target Schools”. These are the schools where the majority of our students attend. They are the schools that tend to be more affordable than others – often public colleges and universities and all in Massachusetts. This change created a unique ability to measure the graduation rates of the students who went on to our Target colleges vs. those who decided to attend another school. The populations we are comparing, while not exactly the same, have much in common. Furthermore we were able to control for variables including ethnicity, high school academic performance and type of college attended.
While I am not surprised that the students who joined our College Success program have done better, I am impressed at the size of the disparity between the groups. Students who remain in our program are up to 43% more likely to complete a college degree than those who receive our college access support and then do not join our college program.
Kolajo’s work will help demonstrate to others why it is so important to think of the college application process as a beginning and not the end. Coupling his research with our day to day work reinforces our belief that “getting in is not good enough.” Please read the full study or the executive summary, and let us know what you think.