Attempts to establish a national database of student transfers has met with resistance, due to federal privacy laws. We don't always know whether our students have left the college to get a job. Now that we are collecting social security numbers, there is some information being returned to us from the Educational Development Department. How do we determine whether students obtained jobs because they dropped out of college, or because they met their goals at the college, or whether the jobs they obtained met their ambitions. This definition was advantageous to Santa Monica College because we had the highest percentage in the state among participating colleges.
Every percentage needs a numerator and a denominator.
The difficult task is to define useful numerators and denominators. The numerator N consists of the above mentioned cohort students who completed 56 or more transfer units with a GPA of 2.00 or higher, and successfully completed a transfer English writing course, and successfully completed a transfer math course. By restricting the pool of candidates that meet the definition for D, we can increase the resulting percentage. In terms of our basic skills students, a measure of success might be the percentage of students who start with a basic skills course and eventually succeed in a mainstream college course. Many students didn't make the attempt.