‘Inbred’ Bergen CC allowed grade tampering

A faculty union president at Bergen Community College got his granddaughter’s failing grades changed because “the BCC community is far too inbred,” wrote Ross Anzaldi, a retired judge who was hired by the board to investigate the case. The administrative culture is unprofessional, Anzaldi wrote in his report:

“Too many people do too many favors for too many. Rules and regulations in many instances are ignored. … Accommodations must stop.”

Peter Helff, the union president, used his influence to get his granddaughter enrolled at BCC at age 16, even though she hadn’t completed high school or earned a GED, the report found. When she was failing three classes in the spring of 2010, he “allegedly intervened to improperly change three of her failing grades” to withdrawals, reports the Bergen County Record.

A math instructor, Helff has worked at BCC for 42 years. He makes more than $133,000.  Trustees suspended Helff without pay and ordered charges that could lead to his firing.

Women need a push to choose STEM majors

Recruiting community college women into STEM majors isn’t rocket science, according to Donna Milgram, who’s studied the issue at eight California community colleges. Personal encouragement from instructors or counselors is needed to get women to consider predominantly male science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs, Milgram, executive director of the Institute for Women in Trades, Technology and Science (IWITTS), told Community College Times.

 . . . women need to see—in posters, videos and career events with women actually working in STEM disciplines—what a typical day looks like for women employed as technicians in STEM workplaces.

Young women “need to understand what kind of jobs they can get,” Milgram says.

Feminizing STEM role models can be a turn-off, at least for middle-school girls, concludes a University of Michigan study  published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. From Ed Week‘s Inside School Research:

In the first experiment, 144 6th and 7th grade girls read articles about three successful female university students. In some cases these were overtly “girly,” wearing pink clothes and make-up and saying they like to read fashion magazines, while in other cases the students wore dark clothes and glasses and simply said they liked to read. The role models also either were specifically described as successful in a STEM field, math, engineering or biochemistry, or were reported as generally successful—for example called a “freshman star.”

The researchers found girls who read about the overtly female role models actually reduced the students’ reported interest, perceived ability and future expectations in math, and they showed less interest in taking math classes in high school and college than girls who read about role models in more neutral clothing or with non-STEM-specific achievements.

“Submitting STEM role models to Pygmalion-style feminine makeovers may do more harm than good,” the researchers concluded.

Colleges compete for vets — and benefits

Uncle Sam wants veterans to sign up for college! And colleges and universities are vying to create “veteran friendly” programs, classes, and centers to attract the ex-G.I.’s—and the billions of U.S. dollars provided by the post-9/11 G.I. Bill.

Onondaga Community College, in Syracuse, N.Y., uses veterans to help new G.I. Bill enrollees. “I’ve seen almost instant rapport between a work-study vet who may have already been in school a semester or two as (s)he meets with a vet applying to school, giving the new student the benefit of their experience and continuing the habit of ‘watching your buddy’s back’ that most have developed in the service,” Keith Stevenson, a college staffer and Coast Guard veteran, told the ACE.

Some colleges have created special courses to help veterans transition back into civilian life.

Sierra College, in Rocklin, Calif., offers Boots to Books, which combines a remedial English class designed for veterans with a course on study skills.

However, some colleges have dropped special classes for veterans, preferring to focus on integrating them fully into the college community.

Most veterans enroll in community colleges or for-profit colleges.

Too many credits

Many community college students earn more credits than they need on the way to an associate degree, concludes a Community College Research Center study by Matthew Zeidenberg. Excess credits cost about $6 million a year, counting only courses students passed.

New students often don’t know what they want to study, he writes. They may try courses that won’t count for the degree they eventually choose. Even when they decide on a goal, there’s “limited advising” to help them take the right courses.

Structural or scheduling barriers also play a role. For instance, a student may need to take course A, but that course may not be available or convenient in a given semester; it may be full or scheduled at a bad time for the student. Instead, the student takes course B in order to maintain full-time status and remain eligible for financial aid. Or a student may be waiting to be accepted into a program and may take other courses in the meantime. Colleges have indicated that this is common in the case of nursing programs.

In some cases, students who go on to four-year institutions can transfer their excess credits, but often students face the reverse problem: Credits that were supposed to transfer are rejected.

In some cases, students earn excess credits for useful courses, Zeindenberg writes. But others are “spinning their wheels” because of “poor advising, unstructured program pathways with excessive electives, unclear transfer policies, and structural barriers.”  Students pay in time and money.

California transfer plan helps, but not much

California community college students still have trouble transferring credits to state universities, despite a plan to streamline transfers, concludes an analysis by the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Under the new law, community colleges are supposed to create associate degrees designed for transfer to the California State University system. Students who earn these degrees should be able to start at a CSU with upper-division standing to earn a bachelor’s degree in two years.

Community colleges need to increase the number of associate degrees for transfer and CSU campuses should maximize the number of academic programs to which these degrees can be applied, the report recommended.

If voters don’t approve a tax increase in November, Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget calls for cutting $250  million from the University of California and CSU system and $300 million from community colleges.

Already, CSU enrollment freezes have blocked mid-year transfers. Community college students are taking longer to complete an associate degree because they can’t get into essential classes.

Is Community College Still a Path to Dream College? asks Sharee Lopez. She enrolled in Long Beach City College‘s honors program with hopes of transferring to her dream school, Berkeley. She’s not paying much for her classes, but she’ll need an extra year to fulfill prerequisites. A neuroscience major, she can’t get into the science classes she needs.

Tough love (but it’s really frustration)

Siobhan Curious, who teaches at Quebec’s version of community college, was having a lousy day even before a failing student walked in to make it worse.

Kalia had failed the same class in the autumn because she didn’t come to class. After skipping the first two weeks of her second try, she came to the office to ask if she had a chance to pass the course.  This time, she said, she’d come to class and do the work.

She came to the next class, but didn’t buy the books or do the homework.  She started skipping class again. Her average was 10 points below a passing grade. After cutting class for three weeks, she came in to ask Curious for help with her essay.

“Kalia,” I snapped.  ”As I instructed you and everyone, you should bring the essay to class with you on Monday and we’ll work on it some more and you can ask questions.  We have spent THREE WEEKS working on this latest essay in class, and you haven’t been in class for that work.  So you failed.  I’m not going to give you private tutoring on everything we’ve done because you couldn’t be bothered to come learn what you needed to learn during class time.  We talked at the beginning of the semester about what you needed to do to pass this course.  You haven’t done it.  You’re welcome to do this rewrite and do your grammar test and see what happens.  But I’m not going to re-teach everything I’ve taught for an audience of one.”

Kalia went quietly away.

There are all sorts of arguments for why Kalia needs tough love, for why, no matter how harsh my response may seem, it’s really for her own good.  She needs to take responsibility for her learning and fulfill requirements and deal with whatever’s preventing her from doing the most basic things she needs to  do, or she needs to get out of school and come back when she can handle it.  Coddling her is not going to help her.  And so forth.

But none of these reasons are my reasons. . . .  I snapped at her because I was exhausted and she was pissing me off.

Another post includes an e-mail conversation with an absentee who repeatedly fails to understand the assignment.

A summer ‘bridge’ to college

For students with weak academic skills, a summer “bridge” to college-level classes can improve the odds of success, reports Education Week.

“Summer bridge programs can provide an important head start on college,” said Elisabeth Barnett, a senior research associate at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Community College Research Center in New York. “They can increase the chances that students will enter college without needing remediation, and they can help students to gain comfort with the college environment and with themselves as college students.”

Such programs, which tend to run four to five weeks, offer intensive academic instruction. At-risk students are often recruited, and colleges generally pick up the tab as an enticement.

Students can come for the day or, at some institutions, live in the dorms. In developmental programs, classes focus on mathematics or English. Other campuses allow students to take a broader range of courses. Almost all find providing “college knowledge” through peer mentors is a valuable way to help students feel more confident about the transition to campus.

In Texas, 60 percent of those who apply for a summer bridge program are offered a place. Some colleges have had to cut back for lack of funding.

Achieving the Dream is studying summer bridge programs in Texas and at the University of Washington at Tacoma to see if they improve students’ odds of success. Only 25 percent of new community college students are fully prepared for college-level coursework, Achieving the Dream estimates.

Chicago will subsidize jobs for City Colleges grads

Chicago will give $2 million to companies that hire City Colleges graduates, reports the Chicago Sun-Times. “You hire one of our community college kids, we’ll pay their stipend for the first four weeks of work,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a commencement speech for the system’s graduates. “I want the rest of the country and all the people to know we got great community colleges with great kids who are ready to go to work.”

He also told the graduates — a record number for City Colleges, which granted only half that number of associates degrees a decade ago — about the importance of battling adversity.

He recounted his own near-death experience as a teen after an accident left him with a severed finger and led to multiple infections.

And he recalled his experiences handling abrupt responsibility changes in the White House.

“The truth is what defines your success will not be this moment, this milestone, this day of recognizing all you’ve accomplished,” he said. “It’s how you handle adversity that defines who you are. It is that sense of when you are set back, when you fall, how you get yourself up that determines how you’re going to be a success in life.”

The seven City Colleges of Chicago enroll more than 120,000 students each year.

After college, what will you earn?

If college is an investment, students should have some idea what they’ll earn with a degree in nursing or marketing or whatever from College X vs. College Y, writes Daniel de Vise in College, Inc. Soon more information will be available about post-college employment.

Especially as college continues to get more expensive, students rightfully want to make sure that that their investment has value. They’re asking: What are the chances I’m going to get a job earning a decent wage? And if I’m choosing between two or three schools as a prospective student, which will give me the biggest bang for my (and my family’s) buck?

The Labor Department is working with the states to share data on earnings and employment.  In addition, the Education Department will be releasing “gainful employment” reports on how for-profit and community colleges’ vocational certificate earners are doing in the workforce.

“If these reports show wide disparities among graduates from different colleges, can it be long before the same data are demanded for all bachelors’ degree programs?” asks de Vise.

The drive to raise graduation rates doesn’t address degree quality, he points out.  For most students — and especially those from low-income and working-class families — it’s important to earn a credential that puts them “on a path to earning a decent living.”

If students understood college costs and potential earnings, they’d be wary of enrolling in a high-cost for-profit college, especially for a bachelor’s degree program. They’d also avoid high-cost private colleges that don’t offer a lot of financial aid and an elite degree.

In Student Loans Weighing Down a Generation With Heavy Debt, the New York Times introduces a debt-doomed borrower: Kelsey Griffith, 23, borrowed $120,000 to earn a marketing degree from Ohio Northern University. She’s working two restaurant jobs and will move in with her parents while looking for a marketing job.

Her father, a paramedic, and mother, a preschool teacher, have modest incomes, and she has four sisters. But when she visited Ohio Northern, she was won over by faculty and admissions staff members who urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess on the sticker price.

“As an 18-year-old, it sounded like a good fit to me, and the school really sold it,” said Ms. Griffith, a marketing major. “I knew a private school would cost a lot of money. But when I graduate, I’m going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that.”

Ninety-four percent of students who earn a bachelor’s degree borrow to pay for higher education — up from 45 percent in 1993, according to a Times analysis of Department of Education data. This includes federal and private loans.

“Pursue your dreams” — but don’t do the math — is a cruel hoax being played on 18-year-olds and their financially naive parents.

Low-cost credit for free online courses

Students will be able to earn college credit for free online courses thanks to a partnership between the Saylor Foundation, which offers  free, self-paced college courses, and StraighterLine, which offers low-cost online courses.

Saylor students will be able to take a StraighterLine exam to earn credit backed by the American Council on Education, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education. Or students could enroll in a StraighterLine course but use Saylor’s free course materials to save money.

Alana Harrington, director of the Saylor Foundation, said her group’s repository of free online courses won’t go anywhere, and will still grant certificates of completion. But the partnership with StraighterLine will give students a way to get credit for low-cost online courses that’s more meaningful than a certificate.

“We understand the fact that to some students, the pure acquisition of knowledge or the certificate proving their competency isn’t enough,” she said. “Credit is a form of currency today.”

StraighterLine and Saylor will work with George Mason University and Northern Virginia Community College to help students transfer credits easily.