High schools play a crucial role in helping students plan for and transition to postsecondary education and career pathways. During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, supporting all students in their transition to life after high school remains important for postsecondary success. Resources, such as school counselors and advising technologies, can affect students' postsecondary choices. Differences in access to supports in high school contribute to significant variation in student access to postsecondary opportunities; high school students experiencing poverty and students in minoritized racial/ethnic groups generally experience the largest barriers to such access. Emerging evidence suggests that high school students' postsecondary aspirations and their engagement with school counselors have changed during the pandemic. In this Data Note, the authors compare nationally representative survey response data from the 2020 and 2021 Learn Together Surveys (LTS) to examine differences in how high school teachers and principals provided supports to students for successful postsecondary transitions before and during the first year of the pandemic. Drawing on responses from 2,126 9th- to 12th-grade teachers and 702 high school principals to the 2021 LTS and responses from 2,279 9th- to 12th-grade teachers and 640 high school principals to the 2020 LTS, the authors compare educators' responses across various school-level characteristics, including student free or reduced-price lunch eligibility, enrollment of nonwhite students, and school locale. The authors found equity gaps in which groups of students reportedly received sufficient supports for postsecondary transitions and recommend strategies for improving students' equitable access to and engagement with such supports.

We study within-family spillovers in college enrollment to show college-going behavior is transmissible between peers. Because siblings' test scores are weakly correlated, we exploit college-specific admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings' college options. Older siblings' admissibility substantially increases their own four-year college enrollment rate and quality of college attended. Their improved college choices in turn raise younger siblings' college enrollment rate and quality of college chosen, particularly for families with low predicted probabilities of college enrollment. Some younger siblings follow their older sibling to the same campus but many upgrade by choosing other colleges. The observed spillovers are not well-explained by price, income, proximity or legacy effects, but are most consistent with older siblings transmitting otherwise unavailable information about the college experience and its potential returns. The importance of such personally salient information may partly explain persistent differences in college-going rates by income, geography and other characteristics that define a community.

"As this report will detail, we found significant evidence that public higher education in Virginia is falling well short in its efforts to meet broader national goals of increasing overall educational attainment and narrowing the gaps that exist in educational levels between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Declining state appropriations and increasing reliance on tuition revenue have substantially increased the cost of public higher education to Virginia students, and the trend has accelerated since the Great Recession that began in 2007"--P. 6.

Manufacturing employers often cite challenges to finding and hiring a sufficient number of highly skilled and diverse workers, so it is important to understand how pathways into manufacturing and the retention of manufacturing workers may be improved. The authors of this report address this research gap by examining the pipeline between Ohio's postsecondary education system and the manufacturing workforce. They focus on understanding potential ways to expand the supply of workers and the diversity of the manufacturing workforce. Although Ohio represents a subset of the U.S. manufacturing industry, it has a significant share of manufacturing employment and production. Therefore, it can be instructive for more broadly understanding the challenges and opportunities that workers, employers, and educational institutions in manufacturing face.

There is an emerging consensus that teachers impact multiple student outcomes, but it remains unclear how to summarize these multiple dimensions of teacher effectiveness into simple metrics that can be used for research or personnel decisions. Here, we discuss the implications of estimating teacher effects in a multidimensional empirical Bayes framework and illustrate how to appropriately use these noisy estimates to assess the dimensionality and predictive power of the true teacher effects. Empirically, our principal components analysis indicates that the multiple dimensions can be efficiently summarized by a small number of measures; for example, one dimension explains over half the variation in the teacher effects on all the dimensions we observe. Summary measures based on the first principal component lead to similar rankings of teachers as summary measures weighting short-term effects by their prediction of long-term outcomes. We conclude by discussing the practical implications of using summary measures of effectiveness and, specifically, how to ensure that the policy implementation is fair when different sets of measures are observed for different teachers.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to major disruptions in the way that teachers educate students with disabilities (SWD). Throughout the pandemic, disabilities rights advocates, teachers, families, and lawmakers have expressed concern that SWD would be disproportionately affected by school closures and the shift to remote learning. To explore these concerns, researchers analyzed teachers' reports of how they are educating SWD during the COVID-19 pandemic using a nationally representative survey of more than 1,579 teachers in the RAND American Teacher Panel, which was fielded from mid-September to mid-October 2020. This Data Note provides insights into teachers' experiences educating SWD in early fall 2020, exploring how teachers' experiences varied by instructional arrangements (e.g., remote, hybrid, in-person) and school characteristics.

This Perspective summarizes recent trends in young peoples' entrance into and completion of postsecondary educational programs. Education is an important pathway into well-paying jobs and the American middle class. Education levels have been rising for the past 50 years, including large gains for many demographic groups. But declining public support for higher education, increasing costs of college attendance, and low college completion rates threaten young adults' pathway to a two- or four-year college degree. Additional research is needed on how to bolster college success and improve our understanding of alternative college credentials.

"The Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) is a citizenship and leadership educational program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) in more than 3,000 secondary schools across the United States and around the world. Cadets who join JROTC take classes taught by former service members in addition to their regular studies and participate in out-of-school-time activities similar to a club or sport. The U.S. Army operates about one-half of all JROTC units and has units in all 50 states, several U.S. territories, and around the world. Like the other services, the Army's JROTC units are disproportionately located in the South, in urban areas, and in larger schools; this has been noted in congressional legislation and in a recent Army memo focused on modernizing the JROTC program. Changing this distribution is challenging, however, because of historical geographic patterns, funding constraints, and the need for schools and districts to apply to host a JROTC unit. The Assistant Secretary of the Army, Manpower & Reserve Affairs asked RAND Arroyo Center to inform the Army about where it might locate new, sustainable sites and how to grow the program's instructor cadre. The research team used a mixed-methods approach: a review of literature on JROTC, post-service careers, and teacher pathways; analysis of public data on school and community characteristics in conjunction with service data on JROTC site locations; analysis of instructors' prior Army careers compared with non-instructor careers; and use of counterfactual simulations to understand potential implications of recent proposed or passed legislation."--

Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions but identifying their causal effects is notoriously difficult. Using admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings' college options, we present evidence from the United States, Chile, Sweden and Croatia that older siblings' college and major choices can significantly in-fluence their younger siblings' college and major choices. On the extensive margin, an older sibling's enrollment in a better college increases a younger sibling's probability of enrolling in college at all, especially for families with low predicted probabilities of enrollment. On the intensive margin, an older sibling's choice of college or major increases the probability that a younger sibling applies to and enrolls in that same college or major. Spillovers in major choice are stronger when older siblings enroll and succeed in more selective and higher-earning majors. The observed spillovers are not well-explained by price, income, proximity or legacy effects, but are most consistent with older siblings transmitting otherwise unavailable information about the college experience and its potential returns. The importance of such personally salient in-formation may partly explain persistent differences in college-going rates by geography, income, and other determinants of social networks.

Community colleges enroll a diverse set of students who often face challenges meeting their basic needs. This report describes the potential benefits and costs of one low-cost and relatively light-touch tool that colleges might use to increase students' access to basic needs assistance. The authors focus on the Findhelp platform, which is modeled as a "social care network" that connects students through an online platform to services that provide help. Findhelp is a website that lists local resources and services, and it is available to anyone affiliated with an institution partnering with the platform. There is little research on Findhelp and similar light-touch resources, so this research documents how the resource was implemented at four community colleges in North Carolina, its implementation costs, and its impacts on student success following implementation. The authors use information from interviews with the campus staff who implemented the platform, administrative student-level data from the North Carolina Community College System on student persistence and credits attempted and completed, and data from Findhelp on how much individual students interacted with the platform. Overall, Findhelp usage rates were low, though usage varied across the participating colleges. Campus staff were enthusiastic about the potential of the platform, and there is some evidence that student success increased when the platform was implemented. In addition, the platform was relatively low-cost to implement compared with other more-intensive approaches for supporting students' basic needs.