It is a kind of Alice-in- Wonderland idea: If you don’t finish high school, head straight for college.
But many colleges – public and private, two-year and four-year – will accept students who have not graduated from high school or earned equivalency degrees.
They are students like April Pointer, 23, of New City, N.Y., a part-time telemarketer who majors in psychology at Rockland Community College, whose main campus is in Suffern, N.Y. Pointer failed science her senior year of high school and did not finish summer school. But, to her father’s amazement, she was accepted last year at Rockland, part of the State University of New York.
There are more than 300,000 students like Pointer nationwide, accounting for 2 percent of all college students, 3 percent at community colleges and 4 percent at commercial, or profit- making, colleges, according to a survey by the U.S. Department of Education in 2003-04.
That is up from 1.4 percent of all college students four years earlier. The figures do not include home-schooled students.
The existence of such students – eager, yet at high risk for failure – exposes a split in education policy.
On the one hand, believers in the standards movement frown on social promotion and emphasize measurable performance in high school. At the same time, because a college degree is considered essential to later success, some educators say even students who could not complete high school should be allowed to attend college.
Nowhere is this contradiction more evident than in California.
This year, 47,000 high school students, 10 percent of the high school population, have not passed the exit exams required to graduate from high school. They can still enroll in many colleges, although they are no longer eligible for state tuition grants.
State Sen. Deborah Ortiz, D-Sacramento, has proposed legislation to change that.
“As long as the opportunity to go to college exists for students without a diploma,” Ortiz said, “qualifying students from poor or low-income families should remain entitled to college financial aid.”
But the City University of New York requires that high school dropouts earn equivalency degrees before enrolling.
“We want students to be as prepared as possible,” a CUNY vice chancellor, Jay Hershenson, said. “And we are especially concerned that they not use up precious financial aid aimed at paying for college while learning high-school-level skills.”