Here are three reports you should know about this month.

• High school counselors generally feel prepared to advise students about community colleges, but, according to a new NACAC study, fewer than 40 percent felt very prepared about important topics such as local community college transfer policies and for-profit college comparisons. Also according to the study, slightly more than half of counselors (55 percent) had received professional development on advising students for community college enrollment in the past three years. Another finding: Counselors at more than half of private, non-parochial schools indicated that community college transfer was very stigmatized among parents/families and students. Nearly a quarter of survey respondents from those schools also reported that community college transfer was very stigmatized among the administration, compared to only 10 percent of private, parochial schools and four percent of public schools.
• The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released data about dual enrollment from its High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09), a study of more than 23,000 ninth-graders in 2009. About a third of the students took courses for postsecondary credit in high school. Students whose parents had higher levels of education were more likely to take courses for postsecondary credit in high school: 42 percent of students whose parents had earned a bachelor’s degree or higher took these courses. That’s compared to 26 percent of students whose parents’ highest level of education was lower than a high school diploma. Asian and white students also were more likely to take dual enrollment courses (both 38 percent). A lower percentage of Hispanic students (30 percent) and black students (27 percent) took the courses. The study also found that a majority (80 percent) of the students took the dual enrollment courses at their own high school.
• A National Student Clearinghouse Research Center study looks at completion rates for the fall 2010 cohort of public two-year college starters. At the end of six years, the completion rate was 39 percent. That rate increased 6 percentage points to 45 percent at the end of eight years. The study also examined completion rates by race and ethnicity. Asian students’ completion rate increased from 43.8 percent at the end of six years to 54.5 percent at the end of eight years, representing an 11-percentage point total increase. Hispanic students had a 7.2 percentage point increase (from 33.0 percent to 40.3 percent), white students with a 6-percentage point increase (from 45.1 percent to 51.1 percent), and black students with a 5.1 percentage point increase (from 30.9 percent to 33 percent).