The results from the tests, which were performed in MassBay’s state-of-the-art biotechnology and environmental science labs, were recently published in the prestigious Journal of Biological Chemistry.

The scientists discovered that exosomes—a cell marker or vesicle released from cells—containing tau and other proteins is an indicator of Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive and irreversible neurological disorder for which there is no known cure. Exosomes can be found in the cerebral spinal column and can be examined through a spinal tap. High levels of tau found in the exosomes are an indicator of advanced stages of the disease.

“The result of our work may become revolutionary in diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease in its early onset,” said Sudad Saman, an adjunct professor of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) at MassBay, who wrote the article. “We believe our discovery is quite significant.”

Early detection will allow patients to start taking medications earlier, “extending the life of the individual, as well as delaying the degenerating effects of the disease,” Saman said.

“Promising practices” to improve success rates include grouping students in a “learning community” that takes several courses together or a “first-year experience” program that creates a small community including faculty and staff.  Student success courses that teach time management and study skills also help students make the transition to college life.

Few students study for placement tests. As a result, 72 percent test into remedial courses. Once there, most don’t seek tutoring or extra instruction.

Advising is hit or miss. Nearly half of new students don’t seek help in choosing classes and even fewer talk to a counselor about balancing academics with work and family commitments.

“Students don’t do optional,” says Kay McClenney, director of the CCCSE. In some cases, colleges should make participation mandatory, she argues. In others, colleges can integrate “student and academic supports into classroom experiences,” such as teaching study skills or use of the library as part of academic courses. “Colleges should provide more structure, fewer options and clearer pathways for students,”  she concludes.

Brazosport College in Texas requires all new students to take a success course.

Zane State College in Ohio requires “instrusive counseling” — personal meetings, phone calls, e-mails and Facebook conacts — to keep high-risk students on track.

“This report powerfully demonstrates that our community colleges play an important role in driving the region’s economy,” said Francisco Rodriguez, superintendent/president of MiraCosta College and president of the association. “The dollars invested in community colleges are investment in the future of San Diego and Imperial counties.”

Community college leaders are campaigning for the tax increase proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown to fund K-12 schools and community colleges.

However, Richard Rider, chairman of San Diego Tax Fighters, called the study  a “bogus” report “done by hired guns.”

Instead of raising taxes, California should raise fees, said Rider.  At $36 per unit, California’s community colleges are the cheapest in the nation and will remain below the national average when fees go up to $46 a unit in the fall.

“California’s tuition is about one-third the national average,” Rider said. “It’s absurd to continue this policy when the state is already billions of dollars short and already has some of the highest taxes in the nation. The students should pay.”

Needy students can apply for a fee waiver. Some 44 percent of community college students qualified for a waiver in 2010-11.

Canada is second in the world, after South Korea, in young adults with college degrees. Half of college-educated Canadians went to community colleges.

While U.S. community colleges enroll many poorly prepared students, Canada’s K-12 graduates typically are prepared for college. Graduation rates are high.

The bottom line, said Scott McAlpine, president of Douglas College in the Vancouver suburb of New Westminster: Community colleges in Canada “are not an inferior good.”

The rate at which students in Canada complete credentials at colleges, as opposed to at universities, is more than double that of most other OECD countries, including the United States. And their market share is growing—it’s now 61 percent in Ontario, for instance, up from 57 percent in 2005—while university market share in that province has fallen from 43 percent to 39 percent, according to the Ontario College Application Service.

“The collective wisdom is, if you want to get a job, going to a college will mean nine times out of 10 you’ll be employed in your area of interest six months after graduation,” said James Knight, president and CEO of the Association of Canadian Community Colleges.

Universities have protected their turf by refusing to accept community college credits for transfer into graduate and professional programs, notes the Hechinger Report.  Alberta and British Columbia now require universities to accept college credits. In other provinces, community colleges have started adding their own four-year degree programs.

In this year’s State of the Union address, President Obama emphasized the role of education, and community colleges in particular, in creating equal opportunity, Kahlenberg writes.

A coveted seat next to First Lady Michelle Obama was reserved for Jackie Bray, a single mother from North Carolina who attended Central Piedmont Community College in order to get the skills necessary to work at a Siemens gas-turbine factory. Obama pledged to “give more community colleges the resources they need to become community career centers.”

As open-access institutions with lower tuition levels than four-year universities, community colleges are at the heart of the president’s larger goals of restoring social mobility and making the U.S. the most educated country in the world. But at the very moment that community colleges are being asked to do more, they are the subject of budget cuts and are facing demographic changes that make their job more difficult.

Upper-middle-class students are less likely to use community colleges than in the past, he writes. This may be “weakening the political and social capital of two-year institutions, which historically have educated a broad cross-section of students.”

The Century Foundation, where he works, is assembling a blue-ribbon Task Force on Preventing Community Colleges from Becoming Separate and Unequal. It will be chaired by Anthony Marx, president of the New York Public Library, and Eduardo Padron, president of Miami Dade College.

“They’re sending a strong signal about where the second Obama administration, if we have one, is likely to go,” said Kevin Carey, policy director at Education Sector, a think tank. “They’re not going to just keep putting millions of dollars into the Pell Grant Program and letting the chips fall where they may.”

Expanding Pell Grants would do more to make college accessible, said Sara Goldrick-Rab, an associate professor of higher education policy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

“I don’t have high hopes for [the new plan] being very effective in helping him achieve what I thought his goal was, which is getting more students from low-income families to be college graduates,” Goldrick-Rab said, describing the plan as “a little all over the place.”

“This is going to cause problems for the institutions that have the least resources to begin with.”

Judging whether a college provides “good value” is complex, writes Robert Sternberg, provost of Oklahoma State, in an open letter to the president.

Open-admissions colleges with many disadvantaged students won’t have the same graduation rates as elite institutions, he writes. “Over-focusing on completion can lead one to disregard the important issue of whether the education being completed is of the best quality our institutions of higher learning can provide.”

In addition, job preparation isn’t the only mission of colleges, Sternberg writes.

Rising tuition isn’t the biggest scandal in higher education, writes Jonathan Zimmerman, an NYU education and history professor, in the Los Angeles Times. It’s college’s failure to figure out whether students are learning. “Millions of American students and their families are mortgaging their futures to pay for a college education. We owe them an honest account of what they’re getting in return: not just what it costs, or where it will take them, but what it means.”

I graduated in May with honors, but even with an advanced degree in a technical field, I still haven’t found full-time work. I’m doing everything I can to avoid defaulting on my loans, but Sallie Mae has charged me hundreds of dollars in extra fees because I’ve had to delay my payments (called forbearance).

While federal loans let the unemployed defer payments without fees, Sallie Mae charges $50 per loan every three months, writes Gray, who has three loans that can’t be consolidated. Meanwhile, interest is accruing.

If I don’t find full-time work before the end of January, Sallie Mae is going to charge me another $150 in “forbearance fees” — while my total debt continues to grow by approximately $1,200.

Please join me in asking Sallie Mae to stop double-dipping. Sign my petition calling on Sallie Mae CEO Albert Lord to stop charging forebearance fees to unemployed students wishing to avoid default.

Sallie Mae spokesperson Patricia Christel described the fee as “a good faith deposit that acknowledges the importance of and commitment to resuming payments in the future,” reports the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“When I pay a deposit on my apartment, I get my money back at the end of the lease,” Gray responds. “If this were a ‘deposit,’ borrowers would either get their fees back at the end of the forbearance or the money would be applied to the loan’s balance. Neither of these is true.”

President Obama wants two-year colleges to help train an additional two million Americans for  jobs.

”I can’t overstate how important the role community colleges are going to play, helping our country get back to where we want to go,” Duncan said.

Many students in adult education and non-credit training programs don’t qualify for financial aid and scholarships, despite their need, said Kristina Pereira, an adult education specialist at TCC.

People seeking short-term job training should be eligible for aid, TCC President Jim Murdaugh told Community College Times. For example, a TCC student was enable to enroll in a certificate course that would have lead to a good job because he didn’t have the $500 fee and didn’t qualify for student aid, Murdaugh said.

“There is no mechanism to provide any help to these folks,” Murdaugh said, noting that current rules on federal student aid eligibility “disadvantage” part-time and non-credit students enrolled in courses that can usually be completed in 90 days with jobs waiting for them. Eligibility requirement should factor in programs that successfully lead to employment.

“That should be the litmus test for success,” Murdaugh said.

Many laid-off workers seek short-term training to get back into the job market quickly.

Less than 2 percent of Americans work in agriculture. However, the environmental movement has rekindled interest in the field. A growing number of colleges are starting or planning agriculture programs, writes Rosenfeld. Many are members of the Alliance for Sustainability, “a network of community colleges dedicated to sustainable rural development funded by the Ford Foundation.”

Johnson County Community College in Kansas cooperates with Kansas State University to teach sustainable and organic farming to meet the demand for local and organic foods in Kansas City.

Alfred State College in New York has a Center for Organic and Sustainable Agriculture, as well as the Pioneer Farm, which teaches about sustainable farming and grazing and humane animal husbandry.

Marshalltown Community College in Iowa claims the Midwest’s first degree program in sustainable agriculture, which began in 2004 and is supported by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University.

Seattle Central Community College is just starting a new 19-credit “emphasis” within associate degree and certificate programs in sustainable agriculture.

Mesa Community College​ outside of Phoenix has a new urban-oriented certificate and an associate degree program in sustainable food systems that integrates organics, culinary arts, food disposal and direct sales.

However, most community colleges that offer degrees in agriculture stress conventional farming, preparing students for careers in agribusiness.

For the first assignment, Anonymous asked students to summarize the first three chapters of Girl, Interrupted in a few sentences. Jacob filled nearly half the page:

“There was a girl. A girl wrote this. A girl says what she did. The girl was stupid.”

The professor gave no credit and asked Jacob to see him during office hours. He didn’t show up. The next two papers received no credit.

Jacob was registered with the Office for Students with Disabilities. His counselor had recommended “special provisions and supplementary resources.”

The list of accommodations to which he was entitled was extensive: designated volunteer note-taker to be secured by instructor, extended time — up to double — for exams and in-class assignments, ability to complete tests and written work in a distraction-reduced separate location, transcriptions of all audio and video and materials, alternatives to oral presentations, preferential seating near the front of the room, permission to record lectures, and tardiness leniency.

The professor did everything required, but wondered if he should do more. He believed Jacob “lacked the intellectual capacity to either benefit from or pass the course” and sensed that Jacob’s “limitations prevented him from fully understanding his situation.”

He phoned Jacob’s counselor, who had no advice to offer.

I did not want confirmation that the work I had asked him to do was beyond his abilities. I did not want to know that he was, most likely, unable to average his grades or grasp their significance. I did not want to hear that he was a senior and scheduled to graduate in December. I did not want to listen to her say ,”The only thing I can tell you is that you should hold him to the same standards as his peers.” I did not want learn that both Jacob and I had been set up for failure.

Professors are able to talk about student preparedness and ability, even when it involves “such thorny matters as race, ethnicity, class, and gender,” he writes. “But we seldom mention one of the fastest-growing groups on campus: students with disabilities.”

Roughly 11 percent of first-year college students identify as having a disability of some sort. What responsibilities do instructors have to our students? Anonymous wonders. Among his other questions:

• Is it possible to hold a student to “the same expectations as his peers” while, at the same time, making substantive modifications and adjustments to grading structures and assignments?
• How can admissions criteria and course expectations be modified so that we remove barriers to learning for those who are qualified, while simultaneously maintaining academic rigor?

More broadly:  ”Is it realistic, or even desirable, to make the attainment of a college degree a requirement for full membership and recognition in society?”

It’s time to start talking about these issues, Anonymous writes.

Anonymous marked Jacob’s papers and exams according to the guidelines set for the class as a whole, with words of encouragement, when possible. On the eve of the final, Jacob was certain to fail.