More Undergraduates Fit "Nontraditional" Profile, NCES Report Shows

The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has released its annual progress report on education, The Condition of Education
2002, presenting 44 indicators on the conditions and trends in elementary, secondary and postsecondary education. In one of two special analyses, the report focuses on
the experience of nontraditional college students, who comprise the majority of college students today.

Analysis of NCES’s National Postsecondary Student Aid Study shows that almost 75 percent of undergraduate students are in some way nontraditional. Only 27 percent
of college students fit the "traditional" profile of a college student: a high school graduate who has gone directly from high school to college, who attends school full-time
and does not hold a full-time job, who is financially dependent on his or her family and who has no spouse or other dependents.

Nontraditional students seeking bachelor’s and associate’s degrees are also less likely to attain their degree goal within five years and more likely to leave postsecondary
education than traditional students, the report suggests. Nearly two-thirds of the most highly nontraditional students — those having four or more nontraditional
characteristics — were found in public 2-year institutions.

The Condition of Education 2002 also highlights findings such as the mixed results in student performance on state, national and international assessments over the past
decade; the significant disparity in student performance between schools with low and high poverty populations; and the changing racial and ethnic composition of public
school students as the percentage of minority students continues to grow.

Drawing together data from NCES’s education surveys and other governmental surveys, the congressionally mandated report shows student mathematics performance
outpaces performance in science.

According to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), eighth-graders’ performance in mathematics increased over the past decade, but in
science it has remained the same since 1996. Section Two of the NCES report reveals that among the 36 states and other jurisdictions whose students took the state
NAEP (a component of NAEP that allows between-state comparisons to be made for participating states’ student scores), significant improvement in mathematics
occurred in 27 states and jurisdictions, and none experienced declines in average scores (Table 10-3). In contrast, Table 12-3 present scores in science, for which only
three states demonstrated improvement.

The Condition of Education 2002 is available at: http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/wnew.asp?1