Schools
District 207 Has 88% of Seniors Opting for College
Many in the 2010 graduating class intend to enroll at nearby Oakton Community College.
A high majority of seniors who soon will be graduating from Maine Township High School District 207 plan to further their education, according to a report to the school board.
About 88 percent of the district’s 2010 graduating classes intends to enroll in either two- or four-year colleges, board members learned this month.
More than a quarter–4 43 of 1,623—said they would be attending Oakton Community College, reported Barb Dill-Varga, the assistant superintendent for curriculum. The four-year institution getting the highest number of enrollees from District 207 is the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, with 87 students.
Find out what's happening in Niles-Morton Grovewith free, real-time updates from Patch.
Overall, the percentage of District 207 students planning to attend college is down about 1 percent, but is still well above the national average of 68 percent, Dill-Varga said.
There are significant differences among the district’s three schools. Nearly all the students at Maine South High School in Park Ridge– 96 percent–said they would enroll in college. It drops to 88 percent at Maine West in Des Plaines and 75 percent at Maine East in Park Ridge.
Find out what's happening in Niles-Morton Grovewith free, real-time updates from Patch.
Dill-Varga noted that the statistics were based on what students told career counselors but their plans could change after they graduate or while in college.
To better track students, District 207 has contracted with the National Student Clearinghouse, an organization that maintains records on more than 100 million U.S. students at more than 3,300 institutions of higher learning. It covers the schools in which about 96 percent of District 207 graduates enroll, Dill-Varga said.
The National Student Clearinghouse has already given the district information about its 2003-2010 graduating classes, Dill-Varga said. The district is reviewing the records to eliminate duplicates and to find any mistakes in the data, she said.
“It might just take a little while for the data to catch up,” Dill-Varga said.
However, a spot check of students from previous years showed that several of them took different paths than intended left high school.
“I don’t [know] whether the reasons are purely economic or if they found their original choices were not a good fit for them,” the curriculum official said.
Dill-Varga said the board would get a more complete report after all of the data were reviewed.
