Zone delay degrees

The region of St. Louis is pretty average when it comes to the percentage of residents with a high school diploma. But when it comes to the part of residents with a bachelor's degree, the region sank near the bottom of the list, compared with large metropolitan areas. "It's a classic story of Louis," said Terry Jones, University of Missouri-St. Louis political scientist, who recently a study on access to university in the region. "We're not deep in the pack, but we are in the bottom half. And in most years, most indicators, we are far from the national average." A new coalition of business executives and nonprofit organizations, is trying to change that. The Louis Regional College Access Pipeline Project, which got off the ground on the first half of the year, has the lofty goal of nearly doubling the rate of completion of college in the region from 28 to 50 percent by 2020. MORE EDUCATION COVERAGE bullet Get educated in schools, the page STLtoday education, a permanent site for news of education, in St. Louis bullet following the Grade, Louis premier blog on education. The first initiative of this project was to commission the report of Jones to assess the current state of the region and efforts to address the post-completion of high school. With the data now in hand, the project is hosting a symposium average today at St. Louis Art Museum that organizers hope will be a call to action. Faith Sandler and Jane Donahue, co-chairs of the committee's project pipeline of the steering wheel, met after noticing an increase in programs to improve access to university in the region. The amount of federal and private money for such efforts has also increased. Programs for access to universities often offer students classes, test preparation and intensive counseling faculty who could not get in their schools. Donahue, but said the region lacks the coordination to ensure these programs are as effective as they should be. "There was no coordinated strategy and discussion of the community," said Donahue, who is also vice president of the Deaconess Foundation. "This is about aligning the efforts of good out there." In all, Jones identified 35 organizations - nonprofit groups and universities - in the region that are doing the work of university entrance or retention. But he found that these services are not evenly distributed throughout the region. The 25,000 low-income students in the neighboring county of seven, only about 1 in 3 of them are exposed to these programs. This is largely because many of the programs focused on the urban core in 25 schools. Meanwhile, about 57 schools in the region are not served by any of these programs. "Everybody tends to gravitate towards a relatively small number of public schools," said Jones. But many low-income students, parts of Warren, Jefferson and Franklin County, which are not the way to go to college is to receive the programs, he added. And in some cases, Jones found that various groups were doing similar work in the same school - the efforts of seven in Welding High School, for example - but were not necessarily aware of each other, he said. The Louis region ranks 24th of 35 metropolitan areas, the vast proportion of residents with a bachelor's degree, according to U.S. Census cited by Jones in his study. While the proportion of university graduates increased between 1990 and 2007, Jones said the increase would have been out of the increased secondary school completion and the performance of other metropolitan areas. Jones compile data from various sources, also points to well-established results, such as people with postgraduate school, on average, earn more money, healthy lifestyles and are more likely to participate in civic activities such as voting and volunteering. One of the speakers listed in today's event is Greg Darnieder, which was hit earlier this year to become special assistant to E. U. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in access to university. It is the first position of its kind and is focused on the goal of President Barack Obama in the U.S. regain its place as the country with the highest percentage of university graduates throughout the world by 2020. Darnieder, a graduate of St. Louis University, praised the efforts of Louis gas pipeline project to date and noted that the philanthropists, business, education and legislative communities need to work on it together. "This work must be done in partnership," he said. "The challenge goes beyond the capacity of any K-12 system to solve this." Communities need to address the crisis of abandonment at the same time, encourage learning in the classroom and making sure more students from college to do so, he said. In the region of St. Louis, there was some anecdotal evidence and statistics that college programs access and province have been paying great efforts. The proportion of the region's high school graduates taking the ACT rose to 69 percent, up from 60 percent between 2004 and 2008, according to the study of Jones. And more students are filling out the software free of Federal Student Aid, which has been criticized for being too complicated. "It used to be a false barrier because that was so stupid the way," said Sandler, who is also executive director of the Foundation scholarships Louis. But much remains to be done. Jones and others, I regret that there is a good monitoring system to follow students through the pipeline from school to university to gauge the effectiveness of these efforts. "We have unemployment measure very carefully, but do not measure access to university," said Jones. "We do not have a tracking system. What inhibit our ability to know how we're doing."