By Bill DeBaun, Senior Director of Data and Strategic Initiatives
Reading time: Two minutes
Get students the right supports at the right time, and they’ll succeed. That banal statement is at the heart of much of our field’s work supporting students with getting to and through college, and there’s a substantial body of research supporting the
premise. The State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) adds to that body with a recent analysis titled, “How College Access Services Close the Gap in College Enrollment.”
The analysis focuses on students served by GEAR UP Virginia, which is a cohort model starting in 7th grade. The most recent GEAR UP cohort graduated in 2020, which, given the
COVID-19 pandemic, was a notably bad time for postsecondary matriculation. Statewide, 65% of students from the class of 2020 enrolled in a college within 16 months of high school graduation. For economically disadvantaged students, that rate was 49%.
However, for students who received college access services from GEAR UP, the 64% 16-month enrollment rate as almost indistinguishable from the statewide average.
“The more services students participated in as part of the GEAR UP programming, the more likely they were to go to college,” the analysis notes. The authors consider enrollment rates by intensity of students received: either “none,” “low” (less than 1.55
hours), “medium” (up to 10 hours), or “high” (more than 10 hours). The 16-month enrollment rates for these categories were 49%, 57%, 64%, and 66%, respectively.
Notably, about 90 minutes of programming was associated with an eight percentage point increase in enrollment. There’s also an apparent drop-off in return on investment around the 10-hour mark. Keeping in mind, “more than 10 hours” could be any amount
of time (it could even be infinity hours!), there’s a long tail here in the “high intensity” category, but it only yielded a 2% increase to the enrollment rate.
The National College Attainment Network (NCAN) has previously considered the postsecondary outcomes of students receiving college access and support service in our Benchmarking Project.
This series has consistently found that students being served by the NCAN members in the sample outperform students from low-income and high-minority high schools and have enrollment and completion outcomes approaching those from better-resourced
communities. Interested in reading more on data and outcomes in the field? Check out NCAN’s blog.
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