Joel Vargas

Helps 'near miss kids' land in college

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By JAMILAH EVELYN

Even though Joel Vargas qualified for reduced-price lunches growing up, he says he never felt poor until his high school was dubbed one of the worst-performing in San Francisco. He was a straight-A student and at the top of his class. His parents thought he was bound for Harvard.

When he landed at a local summer program that helped prepare kids for rigorous college courses, he realized how much he didn't know.

"I met young people who were just so far ahead of me, who were not at the heads of their respective classes," he says. "It made me a little angry and mostly it motivated me."

It still motivates him today.

Through his research, advocacy, and grass-roots work at Jobs for the Future, Mr. Vargas looks for "better ways to move kids through the pipeline," and pushes higher-education officials to have a louder voice in the conversation about high-school reform.

One of his favorite subjects is early-college high schools and other hybrid programs that he says have promise for allowing more students to get a postsecondary credential.

In recent years he has made a name for himself as a leading advocate for harmonizing high school and college curricula. He was an author of a policy brief, "Integrating Grades 9 Through 14: State Policies to Support and Sustain Early College High Schools," that has been widely cited and used to inform a handful of states -- including Georgia, Ohio, and Texas -- about ways to make the transition from high school to college more seamless.

In other briefs, Mr. Vargas has encouraged states to create joint legislative committees that govern both secondary and postsecondary education, give colleges incentives to convince professors to help improve high schools, and allow students to fulfill high-school credit requirements with college courses.

Early-college high schools, now established in 19 states, combine high school and the first two years of college so that students graduate in four or five years with a high-school diploma and college credits or an associate degree. Either way, they are eligible to enroll in a bachelor's degree program as a junior. While the schools have not been around long enough to produce definitive success rates, Mr. Vargas points out that in one study of 10 such schools, 81 percent of students were enrolled in college courses, and 96 percent of them passed those courses.

"The comprehensive high schools of today were not built with the assumption that every kid could or should go to college, and that's fundamentally a problem," he says. "In early-college high schools, the assumption is you're not going to fall through the cracks."

He is now working on a policy paper that will analyze data that has tracked students from high school through the college years to try to determine where state policy makers should direct their limited resources and which policies and programs are most promising.

"The programs and practices and the policies normally don't talk to each other," he says. "But when they do, we'll do a better job of making sure that near-miss kids don't become fall-through-the-cracks kids just like I could have been."