Students at Phoenix’s Metropolitan Arts Institute, a charter school located on Seventh Avenue and McDowell Road, enroll in post-secondary institutions at a much higher rate than state averages, according to an Arizona Board of Regents report.
Less than 53 percent of Arizona high school graduates enrolled in college in 2017 — a rate that has remained static since 2013. Meanwhile, the national average hovers around 70 percent, according to an ABOR College Enrollment and Completion report.
But Metropolitan Arts Institute, an independent charter college preparatory arts school, blows these numbers out of the water. According to Matt Baker, the head of the Institute, the school has a graduation rate of nearly 100 percent with 75 to 85 percent of its students enrolling in a post-secondary institution right after high school.
Baker said the school introduces the idea of college to students starting in the seventh grade, the lowest grade level the school offers. Every junior and senior meets one-on-one with a school counselor to discuss post-high school plans and college advisers send out emails to upperclassmen and parents regarding FAFSA, scholarships, summer programs and internship deadlines.
In 2016, Governor Doug Ducey endorsed Achieve60AZ, a community-based alliance dedicated to bringing the number of of Arizona residents with a professional certificate or college degree to 60 percent by the year 2030.
Baker said in an email that if the state wants to encourage post-secondary school, it needs to pay for it.
“The easiest way to increase the numbers of people in post-secondary education is to pay more to the universities so that they can lower tuition or offer a simple grant and loan package to any high school graduate,” said Baker. “In essence, we need to step up as a state and offer the very same thing to our citizens that Starbucks is offering to its employees.”
Phoenix Union High School District has a graduation rate of 82 percent, but only 50 percent of those students enrolled into college immediately after high school in 2017, according to a spokesperson for the district.
But the Phoenix Union High School District, or PUHSD, says they are making efforts to improve.
Craig Pletenik, the spokesperson for PUHSD, said the district’s schools give free ACT testing to all juniors; students take a college readiness class called Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID); and run a college application and FAFSA campaign that uses contests to challenge students to apply for college with the help of local organizations, colleges and volunteers.
Pletenik attributed the district’s low college-attendance rate to the cost of post-secondary education.
“All you have to do is look at tuition expenses over the last five to 10 years, particularly in the four-year universities,” he said. “A lot of students in Arizona can’t afford to go to college.”
According to a report compiled by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, average college tuition in Arizona rose more than $5,000 per student since the recession in 2008, making the average tuition at a four-year university more than $11,000 a year.
Baker and Pletenik both mentioned that one key factor of why college enrollment by Arizona high school students hasn’t risen is a lack of school counselors to help students apply to college.
“I think that the reason that Arizona high schools have not risen with the national average is perhaps a general lack of financial resources to hire school counselors who hold the primary job of helping students apply to college,” Baker said.
According to a state-by-state student-to-counselor ratio report compiled by the National Association for College Admission Counseling and the American School Counselor Association, Arizona’s student-to-counselor average ratio was 924 students to 1 school counselor in 2014, a 20 percent increase since 2004 and the largest ratio of all 50 states.
“A lot of times you have to convince the kids that they’re good enough and smart enough and can find the money to get to college,” said Pletenik.
PUHSD seniors earned a district record of $102.5 million in post-secondary scholarships and merit grants in the 2017-2018 school year, topping the previous year’s record of $93 million, according to a PUHSD press release from July.
According to the ABOR College Enrollment and Completion report, if educational attainment doesn’t improve, only 17.2 percent of today’s ninth graders will graduate from a four-year college by 2028.
The board of regents report did not include how many graduates out of the 47.4 percent who didn’t enroll into a two- or four-year institution enlisted into the military or enrolled in vocational trade schools instead.
Contact the reporter at jpbeltra@asu.edu.
