Community colleges must “redesign, reinvent and reset” themselves, concludes Reclaiming the American Dream, a report for the American Association of Community Colleges by the the 21st-Century Commission on the Future of Community Colleges. “We need to completely reimagine community colleges for today and the future,” said Dr. Walter G. Bumphus, AACC’s president and CEO.
The dream is at risk, the report warns.
What we find today are student success rates that are unacceptably low, employment preparation that is inadequately connected to job market needs, and disconnects in transitions between high schools, community colleges, and baccalaureate institutions. Community colleges, historically underfunded, also have been financed in ways that encourage enrollment growth, though frequently without adequately supporting that growth, and largely without incentives for promoting student success.
Community colleges must make “hard choices” about priorities and the most effective use of limited resources, the report concludes. While community colleges should remain open to all, the mission must be expanded to include success as well as access.
Access without support for student success is an empty promise. If the door is to remain open, virtually everything else must change.
“Community colleges are not funded at a level permitting them to perform the monumental tasks expected of them,” the report finds. However, it’s not likely that will change, so colleges must “make better use of the resources they have.” Funding must be linked to measures of success in addition to enrollment.
The report calls for increasing completion rates by 50 percent by 2020, working with high schools to reduce by half the number of unprepared student, doubling success rates for developmental students and focusing career and technical education on the 21st-century workplace. In addition, it urges community colleges to redefine their mission, mobilize private and public support and “implement policies and practices that promote rigor, transparency, and accountability for results.”
AACC will establish the 21stCentury Center to help colleges with strategic planning, leadership development and research to reach the goals.
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Redesign, Reinvent, and Reset
May 1, 2012 — Veronica Van RyCommunity Colleges Deny Access to 400,000 Students
April 24, 2012 — Veronica Van RyCommunity colleges across America are denying access to hundreds of thousands of students, threatening the nation’s economic future, according to the first report from the Center for the Future of Higher Education, the research arm of a new faculty coalition.
The report, Closing the Door, Increasing the Gap: Who’s not going to (community) college?, found that more than 400,000 prospective students are being turned away from community colleges due to funding cuts, despite an increase in student demand.
Those factored out tend to be low-income or minority students, the core demographic of community colleges.
“At this moment in our history, with the growth demographic being lower-income students and students of colour, when our social, political and economic future depend on contributing to this community’s upward mobility, it is national suicide to be denying these students access to higher education,” Gary Rhoades, author of the report and professor of higher education at the University of Arizona, told University World News.
According to the report, severe state and federal funding cuts in public higher education have led to enrolment caps at community colleges nationwide.
In California, where more than 140,000 students were turned away in the 2010-11 academic year, more than three-quarters of college deans blamed the decline in enrolment on a lack of funding, citing as a primary reason insufficient funds for hiring faculty .
Community colleges have been hit the hardest. Spending per student at community colleges is less than any other sector of not-for-profit tertiary education, and is less than a third of spending at private institutions, according to the report.
Rhoades said this pointed to a worrying trend – that college is becoming the realm of the privileged. (Read more.)
Two-Fifths of High School Graduates Are Unprepared for College or the Workforce
December 13, 2011 — Veronica Van RyTwo-fifths of high school students graduate prepared neither for traditional college nor for career training, according to a study from researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Arizona.
College-preparatory programming has expanded dramatically in the past decade, with participation in Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate more than tripling. Career-preparatory programs have evolved, as well, and school-to-work “pathways” have replaced tired old vocational programs.But they are not enough. One-third of high school students complete the modern college-preparatory track, and another one-quarter graduate from career-preparatory programs. The remaining high school population, an estimated 40 percent, do neither.
They are “a virtual underclass of students,” the researchers write, who finish high school with a transcript filled with watered-down general education courses and few prospects for success either in traditional college or in professional training.
The study is titled “The Underserved Third: How Our Educational Structures Populate an Educational Underclass,” and it was written by Regina Deil-Amen at the Center for the Study of Higher Education, University of Arizona, and Stefanie DeLuca, a sociologist at Hopkins. It actually published last year in the Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, but the findings were released to the general public Monday.
Many contemporary jobs require less than a bachelor’s degree; indeed, workers in high-demand fields can earn more money without a bachelor’s degree than counterparts in low-paying fields who have a degree.
But the structure of American high schools is trapped, the authors write, in a culture that “blindly advocate(s) bachelor’s degrees as the only valuable option and the cure for all social ills.”
“Tracking” is a dirty word in public education. Yet, high schools have tracked students since time immemorial, and tracking endures to this day. The approximately one-third of all high school students who participate in credible AP or IB study make up the gifted, college-preparatory track. Another group, about one-quarter of the student population, is steered instead into career preparatory study and occupies a lower track, although no career programs are ever advertized in quite that way. (Read more.)
Via Daniel de Vise, Washington Post.
Task Force Moves Toward Rationing Access to Community Colleges
October 31, 2011 — Veronica Van RyJasmine Delgado is one of the lucky ones. With advice from an older sister, the Santa Monica College student developed a plan that has helped her enroll in the classes she needs to transfer next year to a four-year university.
But many California community college students lack the motivation, guidance and resources to reach that goal. So, for the past year, a statewide task force has been studying ways to help them get there.
The panel held its first town hall meeting this week at the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce, attracting a packed audience of educators, community members and students who were given an overview and the chance to comment on draft recommendations that will be presented to the California Community Colleges’ Board of Governors.
The proposals are for sweeping reforms that would move toward rationing access to community colleges, compel students to take more responsibility for their education and prioritize the types of classes being offered.
Under the state’s Master Plan for Higher Education, community colleges have long offered an open door for anyone who sought to benefit. But the task force suggests that after years of state funding cuts, community colleges can no longer be all things to all people.
“To participate fully in education without accountability is a wonderful ideal, but that’s not the reality we’re in,” said task force chairman Peter MacDougall, a member of the colleges’ board. “How do we use our limited resources? There have to be priorities and there has to be focusing.”
The 22 recommendations seek to “reboot” the system by prioritizing registration and fee waivers for students who participate in assessment and orientation programs, and who have concrete goals, such as a degree, certificate or to transfer to a four-year college. The panel estimates that tightening the criteria for fee waivers could save about $89 million annually, which could fund new support services. [Read more.]
Via Carla Rivera, Los Angeles Times.
