Students at Fresno City College
Credit: Ashleigh Panoo/EdSource
When a college student’s GPA dips below 2.0 — lower than a C average — schools often send a notice meant to serve as a wake-up call: Improve your grades or risk losing financial aid and being kicked out of college.
But the way that universities and colleges deliver this wake-up call could be backfiring and pushing students to give up on higher education altogether, according to new research.
That’s what California Competes, a nonpartisan policy and research organization, concluded in a recent report on “academic probation.” The policy report was born out of a study that relied on interviews with over 50 “comebackers” — students who returned to higher education years after stopping out — from Shasta College and Sacramento State.
Academic probation wasn’t on the radar of researchers until the comebackers, brought on to…
