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The Most Important Factor in a College Student’s Success / WALL STREET JOURNAL ON LINE
DOMINIC BARTON / September 16, 2015
DOMINIC BARTON:
All around the country right now, college students are moving into dorm rooms and beginning classes for the new academic year—but a distressingly high proportion of these students will not make it all the way through to get their degree.
Though the number of Americans enrolling in college continues to grow, graduation rates remain distressingly low. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, just 59% of full-time students seeking a bachelor’s degree in 2006 had graduated by 2012.
We worked with a large Southern state university system on a study pointing to a new way of identifying students who are most likely to drop out. The findings can help higher education officials get a much clearer picture of which students need support and how best to provide it.
The new analysis found that “mind-set”—a student’s sense of social belonging or grit, for example—is a stronger predictor of whether a student is likely to graduate than previously believed. So powerful, in fact, that it counts even more than external factors like standardized tests scores, income levels and whether the student’s parents are college graduates.
In other words, the most important factor in a student’s success is malleable. Income and whether or not your parents went to college can’t be changed. But how someone engages with their work and institutions can.
This research has significant implications on efforts to prevent dropouts and boost graduation rates. It’s also timely. A decade ago, the U.S. ranked seventh globally in educational attainment—that is, years of formal schooling completed—among young adults. It has since fallen to 14th. With an economy increasingly dependent on an educated workforce, we simply can’t afford to continue this slide.
Our study, which surveyed more than 3,500 students, dug deeper into the underlying reasons for why students drop out. A fifth of those surveyed that did not complete their degree cited an inability to afford tuition as the primary cause. And a fourth cited conflicting commitments to a job or family.
But the researchers also discovered that more than 50% of the likelihood that a given student drops out is related to mind-set.
An essential mind-set characteristic is grit, which basically means the willingness to work hard for an extended period in search of a long-term goal. Most problems can be overcome with effort. Talent alone is insufficient for success. Grit measures the ability to continue to persevere day in, day out and power through distractions and failures.
A different body of research from Angela Lee Duckworth at the University of Pennsylvania tracked thousands of Chicago public school juniors and found that grit levels were directly tied to graduation rates, even controlling for family circumstances, standardized test scores and individual intelligence.
Likewise, a student’s sense of belonging at their institution is a strong predictor of their eventual success–stronger, in fact, than conventionally accepted factors like high-school G.P.A. or whether a student’s parents went to college. The first semester of school can be intensely isolating, particularly for low-income, minority and first-generation college students who may have fewer immediate social or emotional supports to help them through the process of planting roots in a new community.
A growing number of intervention programs that aim to improve student mind-sets are dramatically boosting graduation rates and demonstrating how we can close achievement gaps—and at surprisingly low costs.
For example, Middlesex Community College in Connecticut recently launched a program that regularly sends personalized text messages to students’ smartphones based on individual student needs, activities and performance. For example, messages will remind a student about an impending financial aid deadline or remind a student before an exam about available tutoring resources.. These messages are specifically designed to foster individual grit and a general culture of achievement. And it has improved retention rates by seven percentage points.
Another program at a California college designed to cultivate a sense of social belonging asked incoming students to reflect on their own journey in a structured manner. The program included: reading a narrative in which older students talked about the initial challenges they faced when starting college, then writing about their own aspirations, and finally recording messages of encouragement for future students. The program tripled the percentage of black students earning a G.P.A. in the top quarter of their class. And it cut the black-white G.P.A. gap in half.
This new body of thinking reveals an important truth about improving college graduation rates: Students might not be able to influence the structural barriers that stand in their way, but they can alter their mind-sets. And by cultivating specific frames of mind, educators can empower students—particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds—to withstand the inevitable difficulties of postsecondary education and earn the reward that can transform their future: a college degree.
Dominic Barton is the global managing director at McKinsey & Co.
DOMINIC BARTON / September 16, 2015
DOMINIC BARTON:
All around the country right now, college students are moving into dorm rooms and beginning classes for the new academic year—but a distressingly high proportion of these students will not make it all the way through to get their degree.
Though the number of Americans enrolling in college continues to grow, graduation rates remain distressingly low. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, just 59% of full-time students seeking a bachelor’s degree in 2006 had graduated by 2012.
We worked with a large Southern state university system on a study pointing to a new way of identifying students who are most likely to drop out. The findings can help higher education officials get a much clearer picture of which students need support and how best to provide it.
The new analysis found that “mind-set”—a student’s sense of social belonging or grit, for example—is a stronger predictor of whether a student is likely to graduate than previously believed. So powerful, in fact, that it counts even more than external factors like standardized tests scores, income levels and whether the student’s parents are college graduates.
In other words, the most important factor in a student’s success is malleable. Income and whether or not your parents went to college can’t be changed. But how someone engages with their work and institutions can.
This research has significant implications on efforts to prevent dropouts and boost graduation rates. It’s also timely. A decade ago, the U.S. ranked seventh globally in educational attainment—that is, years of formal schooling completed—among young adults. It has since fallen to 14th. With an economy increasingly dependent on an educated workforce, we simply can’t afford to continue this slide.
Our study, which surveyed more than 3,500 students, dug deeper into the underlying reasons for why students drop out. A fifth of those surveyed that did not complete their degree cited an inability to afford tuition as the primary cause. And a fourth cited conflicting commitments to a job or family.
But the researchers also discovered that more than 50% of the likelihood that a given student drops out is related to mind-set.
An essential mind-set characteristic is grit, which basically means the willingness to work hard for an extended period in search of a long-term goal. Most problems can be overcome with effort. Talent alone is insufficient for success. Grit measures the ability to continue to persevere day in, day out and power through distractions and failures.
A different body of research from Angela Lee Duckworth at the University of Pennsylvania tracked thousands of Chicago public school juniors and found that grit levels were directly tied to graduation rates, even controlling for family circumstances, standardized test scores and individual intelligence.
Likewise, a student’s sense of belonging at their institution is a strong predictor of their eventual success–stronger, in fact, than conventionally accepted factors like high-school G.P.A. or whether a student’s parents went to college. The first semester of school can be intensely isolating, particularly for low-income, minority and first-generation college students who may have fewer immediate social or emotional supports to help them through the process of planting roots in a new community.
A growing number of intervention programs that aim to improve student mind-sets are dramatically boosting graduation rates and demonstrating how we can close achievement gaps—and at surprisingly low costs.
For example, Middlesex Community College in Connecticut recently launched a program that regularly sends personalized text messages to students’ smartphones based on individual student needs, activities and performance. For example, messages will remind a student about an impending financial aid deadline or remind a student before an exam about available tutoring resources.. These messages are specifically designed to foster individual grit and a general culture of achievement. And it has improved retention rates by seven percentage points.
Another program at a California college designed to cultivate a sense of social belonging asked incoming students to reflect on their own journey in a structured manner. The program included: reading a narrative in which older students talked about the initial challenges they faced when starting college, then writing about their own aspirations, and finally recording messages of encouragement for future students. The program tripled the percentage of black students earning a G.P.A. in the top quarter of their class. And it cut the black-white G.P.A. gap in half.
This new body of thinking reveals an important truth about improving college graduation rates: Students might not be able to influence the structural barriers that stand in their way, but they can alter their mind-sets. And by cultivating specific frames of mind, educators can empower students—particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds—to withstand the inevitable difficulties of postsecondary education and earn the reward that can transform their future: a college degree.
Dominic Barton is the global managing director at McKinsey & Co.
