Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Examining Issues of College Access and Readiness in New York City: Lessons from a Research-Practitioner Partnership

(Education)

Success in post-secondary education is increasingly recognized as the primary gateway to a successful career. While the proportion of students entering college in the U.S. has gone up dramatically in the last three decades, particularly for traditionally disadvantaged students, gaps in access to college remain. More troubling, the rates of college completion by race/ethnicity and income have remained large over the last couple of decades. The purpose of this session is to examine potential barriers to access and success in college for students graduating from the largest K-12 school district in the country and students entering one of the largest college systems in the U.S. This session is born out of The New York City Partnership for College Readiness and Success, an Institute for Education Sciences-funded Research-Practice Partnership. The partnership explicitly links researchers and practitioners and is designed to produce high quality research that informs the actions of both the New York City Department of Education and the City University of New York. The first paper in this session investigates how neighborhood characteristics might predict non-enrollment and delays in post-secondary education, among students who have similar academic credentials. The second paper in this session reports on a simulation of a Texas-style top-10% admissions plan for New York City’s public colleges, and the extent to which such an admissions policy might contribute to the enrollment of more under-represented minorities at the most selective colleges. The third paper bridges the K-12 and post-secondary worlds by examining how the predictive validity of a variety of college readiness indicators vary across student subgroups, and the extent to which the use of particular indicators might exacerbate or ameliorate barriers to postsecondary access. Broadly, the papers in this session will contribute to the growing body of literature that aims to understand the how to close gap between students’ college aspirations and their eventual attainment. More so, the work presented in this symposium will not only provide the NYC-specific context on the multiple barriers to college access and success, but it will also illustrate how comprehensive data systems can be used to track students throughout the education pipeline and how strategic research-practitioner partnerships can speak to similar research goals but from multiple lenses.