A chart published in today’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette painfully illustrates what officials of the Asa Hutchinson administration are reluctant to acknowledge: The college-going rate in Arkansas is dropping, as measured by public high school graduates.

Having become accustomed to alibiing from Arkansas officials in support of political aims — more charter schools, more interdistrict transfers, looser education standards, fewer course offerings, the value of discriminating against poor and minority children in lottery scholarships — I can’t say I was totally surprised to see the response to the facts reported by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

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Data excluding private school and home-schooled graduates make for flawed comparisons with national rates, said Sonia Hazelwood, the department’s associate director for research and analytics.

Out of the about 3 million U.S. students completing high school in 2015, the most recent year with data available, about 2.1 million, or 69 percent enrolled in college by the following October, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. [I checked with NCES and learned this number is based on Census household survey data, not individual state reports, and thus includes both public and private schools.]

“By no means are we more than 20 points behind the national college-going rate,” Hazelwood told Department of Higher Education Coordinating Board members at a meeting held on the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville campus. “We’re missing a lot of data points that would raise our rate.”

Problem: Hazelwood said “missing data points.” She seems to presume they’d inflate the college-going rate substantially, a presumption based on faith more than available facts.

The state does precious little accounting of home-schooled students.  There are only 1,350 of them as high school seniors at last count.  Credit every single one of them as a college goer, just for the sake of argument, and you have increased the college-going rate to only 50.3 percent combined with public school students. Based on lackluster standardized test scores back when the state still required them of home-schooled students, I think it would be a stretch to guess a 100 percent college-going rate for this cohort. But I don’t know. So count them all.

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What about private school enrollment? National data does suggest that most private school graduates go on to post-secondary education. The enrollment isn’t growing nationally data show, so a recent exodus doesn’t seem likely to explain the drop in the state’s college-going rate among public high school graduates.

There are roughly 20,000 students who attend private schools that offer the 12th grade, which means roughly a graduating class of 1,500 or so in Arkansas (presuming equal grade distribution of students in each school). National surveys by the Education Department and in 2016 by a conservative group that backs school vouchers found a college-going rate from Arkansas private school students to be about 68 percent, right at the national average for all students, public and private.

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But I don’t know for sure.  So go ahead, ignore available data and presume a 100 percent college-going rate for the 1,350 home-schooled students and 1,500 private school graduates. That would produce a bit more than 34,000 Arkansas high school graduates, with about 18,000 going to college. That would bump the overall state college rate up to 52.9 percent, still a whopping 16 percentage points behind the national average.

We are the last state to play arithmetic games, given our test scores. Let’s stop kidding ourselves.

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Our college-going rate sucks. It isn’t improving.  Making up excuses looks an awful lot like playing politics for a governor who’s claimed great advances in education that recent standardized test scores and these latest numbers don’t reflect.

PS: It’s true that the figures don’t include students who go outside the state to college, but that has always been so. Absent a sudden tidal wave of people leaving Arkansas for college this is unlikely to account for the recent drop in the college-going rate.

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PPS: Let me take a stab at explaining the bad news in the educational field. We are a poor state and the poor are getting poorer.

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