88 percent of District 207 Graduates Opt for College

About 88 percent of Maine Township High School District 207’s 2011 graduates told their high schools that they intended to enroll in either two- or four-year colleges, according to a report presented to the District 207 school board Monday night.

More than a quarter – 443 of 1,623—said they would be attending Oakton Community College, according to the report presented by Barb Dill-Varga, the assistant superintendent for curriculum. The four-year institution with the highest enrollment from District 207 is the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, with 87 students.

Overall, the percentage of District 207 students attending college is down about 1 percent, but is still well above the national average of 68 percent, Dill-Varga said.

There are significant differences among the district’s three schools. Nearly all the students at Maine South High School in Park Ridge – 96.1 percent – said they would enroll in college, while 88 percent of graduates from Maine West said they would enroll in college. At Maine East High School in Park Ridge, 75.3 percent of students said they would go to college.

Of course, the statistics rely on what students told career counselors their plans were, Dill-Varga said. Those plans do not always work out, and even if students enroll the fall after leaving high school, that does not mean they will earn a degree.

To better track students, District 207 has contracted with the National Student Clearinghouse, an organization that maintains records on more than 100 million U.S. students in more than 3,300 institutions of higher learning. It covers the schools in which about 96 percent of District 207 graduates enroll, Dill-Varga said.

The National Student Clearinghouse has already given the district information about its graduates from the classes of 2003-2010, she said, and the district is in the process of reviewing it to eliminate duplicate records and find any mistakes in the data, she said.

For example, district staff have found some students from 2010 who were not listed as being enrolled in college this year; when their parents were contacted, they reported that the students did enroll in the colleges they intended to.

“It might just take a little while for the data to catch up,” Dill-Varga said.

However, a spot check of students from previous years showed that several of them took different directions than they intended when they left high school.

“I don’t know whether the reasons are purely economic or if they found their original choices were not a good fit for them,” she said.

She said she will give the board a more complete report after reviewing all of the data.