A study of Ohio’s Post Secondary Enrollment Options program finds that nine of 10 of its participants are White, and most enrollees come from suburban rather than urban or rural high school districts. The study by the KnowledgeWorks Foundation, Ohio’s largest education philanthropy, also takes PSEO to task for lacking any data showing PSEO’s positive impact on college outcomes. The study comes as the Ohio General Assembly prepares to expand the program at the behest of Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland.

“It’s certainly worth celebrating that Ohio’s PSEO policy has allowed thousands of high school students to earn college and high school credit at the same time at no cost to them,” says Nancy Taylor, senior public policy officer with KnowledgeWorks. However, “poor data has restricted the state’s ability to track such fundamental matters as whether the policy encourages students who would not otherwise have been college-bound to attend college.”

In fact, according to the report, “The Promise of Dual Enrollment: Assessing Ohio’s Early College Access Policy,” increasing access to college for underrepresented groups is not the focus of PSEO, and KnowledgeWorks policy officer Dr. Greg Harris considers that “a flaw in the policy.”

“Ohio’s percentage of high school students is 15.5 percent African-American, but only 6.5 percent of those that actually accessed the policy were African-American. Ninety percent are White, two-thirds of those are female and the students who accessed the policy disproportionally hail from suburban districts,” Harris says.

 “We think this policy could have better impact if it was more proactively geared to districts where you don’t have traditionally college-bound populations — this is our urban districts and our rural districts,” he continues. “The people who are accessing the policy in no way reflect that population of the state, and that to us is an issue.”

PSEO was launched in 1989 to pay for tuition and books for 11th- and 12th-grade Ohio students who took college courses for high school and college credit. The program was expanded in 1997 to cover 9^th- and 10^th-graders. As part of his campaign platform, Strickland vowed to double enrollment in the PSEO program, and the report notes that the Ohio General Assembly has responded by including nearly $5.7 million for the program in its most recent budget. Harris says this is the right time to point out how the program can be improved.

“Now that Gov. Strickland is allocating more resources to this program, it is a real opportunity for us to be more proactive, to say, ‘Why aren’t rural districts or urban districts that are predominately minority accessing this policy? Why aren’t these high schools accessing this policy, why aren’t they making it available to their students?’” Harris says.

“Ohio is in trouble. We have an aging work force, we still haven’t recovered from losing our manufacturing base and one of our best opportunities for moving out of the rust belt into the new economy is increasing college access for our youth, but it can’t just be a narrow segment of our youth, it has to be all Ohioans if we’re going to have a chance,” he continues.

For a copy of the full report, visit KnowledgeWorks’ Web site at www.kwfdn.org.

- David Pluviose

© Copyright 2007 by DiverseEducation.com

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