By MorraLee Keller, Senior Director of Strategic Programming, and Elizabeth Morgan, Chief of External Relations
Reading time: 7 min.
The pandemic has caused an unprecedented disruption in the high school to college pipeline. Immediate postsecondary enrollment for the high school class of
2020 dropped by an average of 6.8%, plunging 9.4% or more at high schools serving many students of color or students experiencing poverty.
In response, the Kresge Foundation supported NCAN grants in 12 cities last year to help more high school
seniors and recent graduates enroll in college for the fall 2021 semester. NCAN is grateful to the grant recipients for their commitment to students and is pleased to share three strategic themes that arose from the grantee’s work.
We encourage all school districts, partner nonprofits, and higher education institutions to consider how these ideas could inform their own efforts to keep students on track to postsecondary education.
Strategy 1: Maximize data and technology to reach high school seniors or recent grads who need help.
Targeted one-to-one communication is the best way to assist students who have graduated from high school but not yet enrolled in college. But in order to help, first we must know students’ names and how to reach them. This point sounds obvious, but there
are no federal or state data systems with comprehensive contact information for K-12 students.
The best source of names and contact information for graduating high school seniors is the school district. Districts can provide that information to nonprofit college access providers and/or to local public colleges and universities for outreach purposes.
These organizations can then contact recent graduates and ask if they need help with postsecondary planning or enrollment steps. Of course, district personnel can also use the contact information to do this outreach themselves if they have sufficient
staff capacity.
To ensure they have the most current information, high schools should conduct exit surveys of high school seniors in the months before graduation. These surveys are useful for 1) obtaining students' most up-to-date contact information and 2) customizing
supports for students based on where they are in the college-going process. Questions to ask seniors include:
What are your cell phone number and email address?
What are your plans after graduation?
Have you completed the FAFSA or accepted an offer of postsecondary admission?
For example, in 2021, NCAN grantee the Regional Learning Collaborative developed and administered the first senior exit survey for Pomona (CA) Unified School District students. The survey provided information on
students' postsecondary plans that allowed the Regional Learning Collaborative to differentiate its outreach. It also provided the organization with the most current contact information for students.
Other smart uses of data and technology:
Compare “intended institutions” reported in the high school senior exit survey with an actual fall enrollment report from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) StudentTracker for High Schools.
Contact students who did not enroll to offer assistance, perhaps prioritizing those who had completed a Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) before high school graduation or who reported their intent to enroll at the local community
college or other nearby public institutions. Throughout NCAN’s grants, the use of NSC enrollment data was the key to targeted, continued outreach to students who did not immediately enroll in the fall following high school graduation.
For students a year or more out of high school, use a data services company to acquire updated addresses, cell phone numbers, and email addresses. In Columbus, Ohio, the nonprofit I Know I Can updated the contact information for high school class of 2020 graduates to increase the likelihood of reaching them to offer assistance.
Strategy 2: Reconfigure staffing to provide more help to recent high school grads during the summer and right up to the beginning of the fall college semester.
Before the pandemic, many high school seniors completed the college planning, application, and financial aid processes before the end of the school year. Due to the stresses of the pandemic, however, that pattern changed.
To facilitate the postsecondary transition for 2021 high school graduates, NCAN’s grantees had to provide all supports needed for every aspect of the postsecondary planning and application process during the summer and right up to the beginning of the
fall college semester.
The summer was not just about campus orientation, housing, and understanding bills. Instead, it involved convincing students who had experienced massive disruptions to their educations and lives to pursue postsecondary education, helping with admissions
applications, completing FAFSAs, and educating students on the enrollment process. In other words, the postsecondary planning and application timeline that previously began in the fall of 12th grade and continued for the better part of a year was
compressed into a few months in the late spring and summer.
The biggest barrier to scaling summer postsecondary transition support is staffing. There have always been students who needed postsecondary planning support during the summer, and school districts and their partners can consider different ways of meeting
today’s even greater needs.
For instance, several NCAN grantees ramped up the use of temporary student employees or interns (near-peers) or graduate students during the summer of 2021 to conduct targeted student outreach. As one near-peer navigator from Be A Leader Foundation in Phoenix observed, “I think connecting with them and letting them know that I am also a student and have been in their shoes and letting them know that although it’s overwhelming at the beginning, it is well worth it in the end. I think most students
just feel overwhelmed and need to be reassured. Being patient, understanding, and validating are very important traits when talking to students.”
Other smart summer postsecondary transition ideas:
Recognizing the large drop in seamless high school-to-college enrollment, make summer support available to the prior year’s high school graduates as well as current-year graduates. For example, the School District of Lancaster employed
a graduate student support specialist to lead the outreach to high school graduates from 2020 and 2021. Thanks to various outreach methods and incentives, 75% of the students who met with the specialist enrolled in the fall.
To make the most of limited summer staff time, implement a texting system to automate reminders and routine postsecondary matriculation
tasks for students, as Springfield (MA) Public Schools and others have done.
Strategy 3: Increase and institutionalize collaboration between school districts, local public higher education institutions, and nonprofits.
Partnerships among school districts, college access organizations, and postsecondary institutions existed long before the pandemic. But the work of NCAN’s grantees in the summer of 2021 seemed to deepen and increase the effectiveness of those relationships.
Overwhelmingly, grantees identified community colleges as the most significant partners in this work.
Strategies implemented by the various higher education institutions included:
Establishing regular team meetings with local school district personnel, nonprofit organizations, and representatives from the colleges.
Sharing data about potential enrollees and current students to facilitate outreach.
Initiating outreach to non-enrollees.
Offering incentives for student participation in orientation/enrollment workshops.
Creating customized enrollment checklists to guide students.
Sending campus representatives to high schools to help students with the enrollment process.
Waiving application, orientation, and enrollment fees.
Offering individual FAFSA completion assistance through workshops, drive-thru events, and virtual platforms.
For example, Collegiate Academies in Louisiana hosted a dedicated orientation session
for their New Orleans and Baton Rouge students with Delgado Community College, an institution where a high number of students enroll.
LEAP Tampa Bay College Access Network used incentives such as gift cards and earbuds to entice students to participate in the Enrollment Days events offered by Hillsborough Community College. Students were required to go to the campus
and meet college personnel in order to pick up the incentives. Among the students who attended Enrollment Days, 79% enrolled compared to 60% of students who did not attend the events.
Milwaukee Public Schools worked with its partners the Milwaukee Area Technical College and the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to form a Transition Success Subcommittee that meets every two weeks and adopted practices such as waiving application fees, simplifying the enrollment process, and eliminating deposits for new students.
In sum, targeted one-on-one communication and support, especially during the summer, will help students get back into the postsecondary education pipeline. Investing today in additional staffing, data-sharing, and cross-sector partnerships will yield
lifetime benefits for students, their families, and communities.
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