Sunday, September 16, 2012

Prospects for DACA GED graduates

The White House and USCIS has made a decision to exercise prosecutorial discretion and exempt certain illegal immigrants from deportation procedures.  The beneficiaries of this policy, known as Deferred Action for Child Arrivals, are individuals who came to the United States as children.


The complete fact sheet on DACA (courtesy of the New York Immigration Coalition) can be viewed or downloaded here.  
Deferred Action_Info Sheet 8.30.12 Extended Ed

The seventh criteria includes those who may be enrolled in adult education programs.  The current period of deferment is two years, after which the participants can apply for another two years.  However, for young adults enrolled in adult education programs, the criteria for continued deferment is that they should have gotten their GED.  


Is two years enough for adults to get their GED while participating in a GED prep program?  We decided to take a look at ASISTS data to see what it tells us.  


Using the ASISTS database, we looked at all GED graduates over the years to look at the length of time they had spent in programs before getting their GEDs.  

This is a pretty large group of students, nearly 40,000 students over the past 12 years.  We included all students regardless of the instruction they received who had achieved the outcome of obtaining a GED.  Below are some of the statistics we were able to determine:

  • An overwhelming percentage of the students (97%) were Adult Basic Education students, which meant that they received instruction on reading, writing and math.  Some students were in classes specifically designed for GED instruction.  It is hard to determine the number in GED prep classes because many adult education providers categorize their classes as ABE classes, not GED offerings.  
  • Contrary to expectations students entering classes at all levels (based on their pretests) received their GEDs.  Students entering at level 4 (grade levels 6 - 8.9)  formed the largest contingent of successful GED test takers at 42%.




  • We also looked at the length of time these students spent in their program before getting their GED.  The average number of months before these students got the GED was 9 and the median number of months was about 5.  The disparity between the mean and the median indicates that there is a great deal of variability in this measure.  But all but 9% of the students got their GED in less than 2 years.  

However, the analysis itself ignored some key facts.

  • DACA beneficiaries are more than likely to be ESL (English as a Second Language) students.  However, most of the students recorded as getting the GED in ASISTS tend to ABE (Adult Basic Education students) who receive instruction in reading, writing, math and GED preparation.  In fact, the data shows that only 3% of GED graduates ever participated in ESL instruction.  
  • ESL students participate in adult education programs for very different reasons than getting their GED.  Do they come back to these programs to get their GEDs?  That is a question that is beyond the scope of ASISTS data to answer.  
We are working with the New York Immigration Coalition to further refine our analysis.  Accordingly, we are looking at the data from another angle.  The next step for us is to take a closer look at students from Mexico and their experiences in adult education programs.  More to follow.  

Friday, September 14, 2012

Census Training Powerpoint


This is the Powerpoint for my Census Training that I did at the LAC on the 13th of September.