The purpose of this report is to examine community level characteristics that may explain variations in postsecondary educational enrollment across Washington State communities. Previous reports in this series addressed Kindergarten school readiness and overall K-12 success and the impact of community characteristics.
We re-confirmed a key finding from the previous reports: the level of poverty and the degree to which early life adversity is common within a community are highly predictive of variations in academic success and youth wellbeing. Indeed, we previously documented that poverty and adversity as summary community characteristics subsume a wide range of economic, social, and health differences. In this report, we continued a focus on the interplay of poverty and adversity on school outcomes and youth wellbeing.
