America's Forgotten Student Population : Creating a Path to College Success for GED Completers

Constituting one in twelve of adult Americans, GED certificate holders comprise a major pool of underdeveloped human capital in our society. They are a resource that will be sorely needed as “boomers” reach retirement and the traditional pipeline of 17 – 23 year olds falls short of filling our growing workforce needs.

Although these nontraditional students can potentially meet our future workforce demands, and although half of them enter post-secondary education, half of those who do so drop out of college for lack of basic support systems – often at the very same institutions that provided programs of retention while they were earning their GED and completing basic Adult Education classes. Yet national data collected by the National Center for Educational Statistics reveals that GED certificate holders who persist to their second year of community college studies accumulate grade point averages equal to high school graduates, refuting widely held beliefs that GED earners are not capable of rigorous academic work.

This is the first book to remedy the dearth of data on this forgotten population, to present original research on these students, describing their characteristics and motivations, and to provide proven models for identifying, retaining and graduating this under-counted and underestimated cohort. It addresses the issue of the pipeline from GED centers to postsecondary education, and includes first-person narratives that offer vivid insights into GED earners’ resilience and needs.

As this book reveals, more than 40 percent of community colleges responding to a 2010 ACT survey have no one responsible for coordinating retention efforts; and more than half have no goals for first-year student retention; and estimates that community colleges are cumulatively foregoing over $1.5 billion in revenues as the result of failing to retain their GED populations.

This book is a comprehensive resource for college administrators, and for educational policy makers and researchers, offering both broad policy recommendations and tested ideas and models that can be implemented at the state and institutional level.

Angela Long is an educational researcher, educator, and author who currently serves as an independent consultant in higher education, as well as co-editor of the “Innovative Ideas for Community Colleges” national book series through Stylus Publishing.

She has participated in three White House summit meetings on Educational Excellence for Hispanics and has shared her findings before participants at the Achieving the Dream national conference, Florida Association of Community Colleges, U.S. Department of Education, the White House Summit Meeting on Educational Excellence for Hispanics in Miami, FL, the Consortium for Student Retention and Data Exchange, the American Association of Community Colleges, and the Florida Council of Student Affairs to name a few. In 2011, she worked with student leaders to found the Pathways to Persistence Scholars program at Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida. She has experience teaching and working in the K-College setting and collaborates with leaders across the nation to publish groundbreaking data and retention metrics for at-risk student populations attending community colleges..

Christopher M. Mullin is Executive Vice Chancellor of the Florida College System, Division of Florida Colleges at the Florida Department of Education, having formerly served as the Program Director for Policy Analysis at the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) in Washington, D.C. His research has focused on the evolution and development of state postsecondary education systems, with specific focus on community colleges and fiscal policy.