The Penn Foster Blog

High school graduation rates continue to improve and remain on track to meet a national goal of 90 percent by 2020, according to the latest Building a Grad Nation report, released annually by a coalition of educational organizations.1 The graduation rate for the 2012-2013 school year hit 81.4 percent, the highest since states adopted a new method of calculating graduation rates in 2010. Advances by black and Hispanic students help account for this trend. However, national gains are distributed unevenly among school districts, and graduation rates remain unacceptably low in some areas for low-income, English-language learning and special education students.

Turning promising leads into new students is a delicate process. Leads have a variety of higher education options and require a certain level of nurturing before they can choose which college to enroll in. As part of the recruitment process, your school can administer a lead nurturing strategy to help inform prospective students about your college and the programs you offer; ensuring they're choosing the school that best meets their needs. Use these six best practices to improve your school's lead nurturing process:

While warm summer days are quickly fading behind us and we embrace the change in seasons and brisk months ahead, Penn Foster continues to proudly celebrate our 125th anniversary. Over the course of our 125 years as a leader in the distance education space, more than 13 million people have enrolled in Penn Foster's high school, career school, and college.The mission remains the same, from the past to the present: provide affordable, quality learning solutions designed to augment people's skills, and ultimately improve their employability. As one of the nation's largest private high schools, Penn Foster High School enrolls 60,000 students and graduates over 20,000 each year. In order to reach such a wide-spread student base, our partnerships are pivotal to the success of our program. Our partnerships with nonprofits, youth organizations, career colleges, public and private high schools, school districts and employers work to deliver education where it is needed most.

Unfortunately, not all high school students are set up for success. Many students who struggle at school come from challenging circumstances at home, and others are facing hardships such as the death of a parent, homelessness or addiction that threaten their ability to finish high school. The national high school dropout rate, while improving, is still a crisis - according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, about 7,000 students drop out every day1. High school staff and administrators need to support students who are facing such hardships and enable them to succeed in high school and move into post-secondary education.

With the rise of the sharing and "gig" economy, along with smartphone penetration, blended learning and rapid app development changing the way we hire, myriad factors are converging together to set the stage for new company recruiting and hiring systems for entry-level employment.

The largest and longest-running investor conference devoted exclusively to the education sector was held on September 10th in NYC. The 15th annual Back to School Conference was held by BMO Capital Markets, a leading, full-service North American-based financial services provider. The conference showcased leading companies in the for-profit education industry, with the purpose of identifying trends in higher education.

Our current education system speaks to traditional in-class learning. But there are truly many ways to learn. From corporations onboarding new employees with online training, to YouTube how-to videos, to motivated learners taking at-home courses in their spare time, forms of education take on many shapes, and online learning has offered new spaces for students to learn. The area of online education continues to grow and mature, but unfortunately, it still has some antiquated legislation to overcome before alternative education can be a viable and accessible solution for students across our nation's school districts.

Penn Foster has a very unique position within the Education sector as we straddle the intersection between traditional online degree-granting programs and career-focused training for the middle-skilled worker. Lately, we've been hearing lots of buzz about "demand-driven workforce development' across multiple sectors: non-governmental organizations, youth organizations, and corporate social responsibility initiatives within the private sector. Given that we are currently living through a major transformative era in the way the world learns - education's "Internet moment' so to speak - we are curious to know what the implications will be for demand-driven workforce development initiatives.

There are 4.8 million undergraduate students currently enrolled in the U.S. who are also parents, representing 26 percent of all undergraduates, according to a 2014 report from the Institute for Women's Policy Research.1 In serving this growing student group, career colleges - known to offer increased schedule flexibility - have an advantage over traditional higher education institutions. Though student parents tend to have a greater appreciation for the opportunities that higher education provides, balancing parenting responsibilities often proves too stressful to make going back to school a viable option.

Talent shortage is the biggest hiring challenge today. In a recent Harris Poll of 515 U.S. human resources and business managers conducted for Glassdoor, 48 percent of respondents said they are unable to  find enough qualified candidates to fill open positions, and 26 percent of respondents anticipate this to become a larger problem in the coming months.1 In the face of this challenge, many employers are devoting even more resources to talent searches, assuming that finding the perfect candidate will deliver better ROI than developing existing the skills of existing employees.