It is going to take more than money to get thousands of Denver Public School graduates a college degree, education experts say.
First, teachers have to get them ready. About half the DPS students who go to college need remediation courses.
Then college administrators have to get them to stay. Retention rates for DPS high school students in colleges are low – only about half the city’s graduates start college, and only about 32 percent of those finish.
Programs will be needed to support these college-goers, experts say.
“If you don’t have support at the next level, you are throwing money away,” said Scott Mendelsberg, program officer at the Colorado Commission on Higher Education and former principal of Abraham Lincoln High School.
Lincoln High is one of three schools in this year’s pilot project to send any kid who needs it to an in-state college for free. By 2008, the program will be expanded to include all DPS graduates.
“Subjecting kids to failure at that level is almost like not giving them a chance at all,” Mendelsberg said. “It’s more important in the grander scheme that they actually make it once they’re there.”
At the Community College of Denver, administrators have introduced a college-orientation course that teaches kids basic survival skills.
CCD researchers, in a preliminary study, found that extra support for students whose first language is not English helped the retention rate by 40 percent.
“It’s helping students belong in college,” said Elaine Baker, a CCD administrator. “No one in your family has gone to college, your friends haven’t gone to college, your skills just aren’t that strong.”
Businessman Tim Marquez, who funded the initial $50 million to start the Denver Scholarship Foundation, said that the 33 participating in-state colleges had to promise support for DPS kids who were admitted.
“We told them that this is not an optional thing,” Marquez said. “This is something you have to do. The colleges are not only fine with that, they were actually pretty excited.”
