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Why Study in the USA?

Why do so many international students choose to study in the USA? This section explains what the USA education system has to offer each international student and why you should study in the US. Discussed are common misconceptions about USA study. Why are there so many top schools, colleges and universities in the USA education system? There even is a list of some famous international students who obtained a USA education at one of the many top USA universities, USA colleges and USA schools. A must read for those considering US study.

Financing Your USA Education

Can international students work while enrolled in USA universities, colleges or schools? This section offers advice and information on paying for your education in the USA. Includes information on the cost of study in the USA and attending USA universities, USA colleges and other types of USA schools. Financial aid for US study, international student loans, grants and international student scholarships

International Student Admissions

How should I apply to study in the USA? A look at how the USA admissions process works. What do US universities, US colleges, boarding, ESL and other USA schools look for in international student applications? Plan your application in advance using our calendar. This section includes advice on choosing your major, selecting the right US Universities, US colleges or USA schools, US college entrance exams such as SAT, GRE and TOEFL, English as a second language (ESL) schools, college admission essay help, and other essential reading for students wanting to study in the USA.

Life in the USA

Provides a look into life and culture for those wanting to study in USA universities, USA colleges and USA schools. What is really it like to study in the US? Learn about starting your USA education on the right foot. Includes

international student health insurance, USA money and banking information, international student housing, dormitories at USA universities and colleges, the student culture at schools, colleges and universities in the USA, USA regions, transportation, international student life, etc. Be prepared for your USA study experience at colleges, schools and universities in the USA.

Obtaining a college degree has never been more important for America’s young people. Now more than ever, higher education is the ticket to social and economic mobility. The opportunities of a rapidly globalizing 21st century require more education, not less.

And while the higher education community has done a remarkable job of opening the doors of college to more and more students, we have not seen equal strides in the number of students who actually complete four-year degrees.

Voices from Colleges and Universities with Better Graduation Rates

Approximately one million new students start out in four-year colleges every year. Virtually all of them enter with great hopes. Six years later, though, barely six in 10 will emerge with a baccalaureate degree. Among low-income and minority freshmen, the numbers are closer to five in 10. If America’s high schools did a better job of making sure their students were prepared for further study, these numbers could be a lot higher. They’d be higher still if federal and state policymakers had kept faith with lowincome families by making sure financial-aid dollars for their children kept pace with the escalating costs of higher education.

But it turns out that practices within colleges and universities also have a big impact on student success. Some institutions, year in and year out, manage to graduate significantly more of their students than other institutions that are otherwise quite similar. Similar students, similar mission, but very different results.

To help identify unusually high-performing colleges and universities, the Education Trust created College Results Online an interactive Web tool that allows users to select any four-year college or university in the nation, and compare its graduation rates to other, similar institutions.

By putting institutional graduation rates in context, comparing a given university only to other institutions with similar students, funding, size, academic mission, etc.,1 we can help control for outside factors that influence graduation rates, and better understand the impact of the institutions themselves. Looked at this way, some colleges and universities simply stand out from the crowd, consistently graduating more students than their peers, year after year. Some, too, stand out for their success with all groups of students: Unlike most colleges, they don’t have a graduation-rate gap between White and minority students. And some stand out for the progress they are making in improving their graduation rates over time.

Learning from the leaders

Often, the graduation rates for these institutions aren’t high in an absolute sense. In fact, many within these leading institutions are still dissatisfied with their results, and working hard to improve them. But they are doing better – often much, much better – than institutions that are otherwise a lot like them.

The existence of these high performers raises an obvious set of questions: What makes them so successful? What have they done that others might do too?

The answers are not at all simple. Universities are big, complicated organizations with a lot of moving parts, not easy to change quickly. Students themselves, and their reasons for staying or not staying in college, vary tremendously. There is no one solution to the graduationrate problem, and there are many things yet to be learned. Nobody should pretend otherwise.

Over the past several decades, some scholars have studied these issues in depth. Their findings are highly useful for institutions that choose to take them to heart.

CHOOSING TO IMPROVE: VOICES FROM COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES WITH BETTER GRADUATION RATES

What does that research say? Basically, it says that three things matter a lot:

• It matters whether institutions focus on getting their students engaged and connected to the campus, particularly in the critical freshman year;

• It matters whether there is a genuine emphasis on the quality of undergraduate teaching and learning, because academic success and degree completion go hand in hand; and,

• It matters whether administrators and faculty monitor student progress, taking advantage of new data systems to tease out patterns of student success. Successful schools use that information not only to help individual students but also to make needed changes in policies and practice.

These things, of course, just plain make sense. But we wanted to find out for ourselves if these principles are borne out in actual practice. In the latter half of 2004, Education Trust staff spoke with administrators and leaders at a number of the colleges and universities identified by College Results Online as having particularly high graduation rates compared to their peers. We visited some of the campuses and interviewed senior institutional leaders, working to understand why, from their perspective, they’ve been so successful.

Each institution had its own story to tell, no two exactly alike. But some common themes emerged, very much along the same lines as in the research.

The unusually successful colleges worked especially hard at connecting students, particularly those from lowincome families, with the campus. They cared enough about the quality of teaching and learning that they did things like identify ineffective teachers and get them help. They constantly used data to identify problem areas and monitor the effectiveness of policy changes.

But what really stuck with us, and yet isn’t discussed as often, is how important campus leadership was in turning around graduation rates. The successful campuses, it turns out, don’t just add a “Freshman Year Experience” here or a retention initiative there, checking off another box on the “best practices” list. Rather, they raise increasing student success to a high institutional priority, infuse that focus into almost everything they do, and regularly monitor key indicators to see whether they are making progress.

So we will, in effect, add a fourth bullet to the list of what matters:

• It matters a lot whether campus leaders make student success a top institution-wide priority—and when they stick with that priority over multiple years.