Study says students short on initiative Mitchell Institute offers recommendations

BANGOR – Many Maine students who say they want to go to college aren’t always taking the steps to make it happen, according to a study released Wednesday by the Sen. George J. Mitchell Scholarship Research Institute.

“The aspirations are there – kids say they want to go to college,” Colleen Quint of the Mitchell Institute said.

“But the closer they get to going and the more things they need to get there, the less they’re really doing. Their actions aren’t reflecting their aspirations,” she said.

Students are waiting too long to start college preparation, taking a reactive instead of a proactive approach, Quint said. Her report, called “Barriers to Postsecondary Education in Maine,” contains a list of 10 recommendations “that will make going to college the obvious and attainable next step for more Maine students.”

Among the recommendations, the report suggests giving students more individual attention to help them better plan for college, encouraging businesses to open their doors more to students to let them explore career opportunities, and urging colleges to expand programs to get more high school and middle school students to visit campuses.

Quint said the recommendations are much more specific than those of previous studies.

“We wanted to make it feel hands-on and manageable so that people could look at it and say, ‘you know what, I could do that.'”

The institute, which awards college scholarships to Maine students, hopes the recommendations will help close the gap between the state’s favorable high school graduation rate and the low number of residents who have bachelor’s degrees.

Maine has the 11th-highest graduation rate in the country, with 76 percent of all students who started high school four years earlier graduating in 2000, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. However, Maine falls to 28th among states, for percentage of residents with bachelor’s degrees. Only 23 percent of adults 25 and older have four-year degrees, according to 2000 Census figures.

The report also confirms many of the findings of previous studies. For instance, it shows students are less likely to continue their education if they are from a family in which neither parents nor siblings have gone to college or if their parents aren’t actively involved in school or post-high school planning.

Students also are hindered if they live in a community where a college education isn’t considered valuable or affordable or if they aren’t in the top academic track in high school. Young people from families with limited resources who haven’t planned ahead about how to pay for college also are less likely to continue their education.

But the new report is different because it involved “more of the hands-on, practical pieces that students and parents experience,” Quint said.

For example, students were asked how often they met with their guidance counselors, how often they discussed life after high school with their family, how many campuses they visited, and whether they investigated the different types of financing available.

Interviews were conducted with high school teachers and guidance counselors, parents of students age 12 or older, high school graduates between 18 and 25, and juniors and seniors from 10 high schools including those in Bangor, Presque Isle, Machias, Rockland, Guilford and Millinocket.

The report and its recommendations can be found online at: www.mitchellinstitute.org.