Hispanics double CC enrollment
More Hispanic students are completing high school, according to Census data. The number attending community college has nearly doubled in a decade.
The percentage of Hispanic 18- to 24-year-olds who are not enrolled in high school and don’t have an equivalent degree was 22 percent in 2008, down from 34 percent in 1998.
Meanwhile, the number attending a 2-year college increased 85 percent, from 540,000 in 2000 to 1 million in 2008.
More Hispanic students were born and educated in the U.S.
A majority of Hispanics aspire to bachelor’s degrees, but most choose community colleges, which have low completion rates, said Jose Cruz, an Education Trust vice president.
Frank Alvarez, president of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, himself a community college graduate, said that many students fail to finish an associate’s degree because they find themselves inadequately prepared and lacking guidance once they make their way into the system.
“What this does is create an opportunity to think about the population even more clearly as a college-going community, as a community that does have educational success,” said Deborah Santiago, vice president for policy and research at Excelencia in Education.
Arizona: CCs have 18.2% completion rate
Arizona’s community colleges are drop-out factories, charges Matthew Ladner of the Goldwater Institute. The average three-year completion rate for full-time students is 18.2 percent.
Rio Salado College, a pioneer in online learning, boasts a 45 percent completion rate; at the second-ranking college, only 26 percent of full-time students complete a credential or degree in three years.
Florida community colleges do much better than Arizona’s two-year schools, Ladner points out.
Gates to fund college completion push
In an attempt to boost college graduation rates, the Gates Foundation will $3 million each to New York City, San Francisco, Mesa, Arizona and Riverside California.
High schools will work with local community colleges to align academic expectations, collect and analyze data, develop college-prep programs and create support systems for students. Three of the cities have pledged to raise very low completion rates at community colleges.
At the City University of New York, 10 percent of the students enrolled as freshman in 2006 had earned an associate’s degree three years later. By creating a “common definition of college readiness,” the city hopes to see 20 percent earn a two-year degree.
Mesa Public Schools boast a high graduation rate. But the completion rate is only 5.4 percent for low-income graduates who go on to attend Mesa Community College. Mesa’s goal is to raise the rate to 16 percent by 2020.
The graduation rate at Riverside City College is 14 percent; the goal is 20 percent by 2013.
In San Francisco, only 27 percent of 9th graders will earn a postsecondary credential. The new funding will be used to expand access to preschool, get more students to take college-prep classes, boost pass rates on the graduation exam and the college readiness exam and allow more students to earn college credit at work, reported the San Francisco Chronicle. In addition, the city hopes to raise the number of students attending college full-time from 36 percent to 65 percent in 2020. Full-time students are much more likely to earn a degree.
NC students to discuss Target 2020
North Carolina community college students will discuss the college completion crisis at a summit on Oct. 22-24 at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte. Target 2020: My Education. Our Future also plans summits in California and Florida in 2011.
At each summit, participants will discuss barriers to completing their education and will develop solutions to address them. The top five solutions, selected by participants, will receive financial and expert support valued up to $7,500 to be implemented around the country as on-campus or online projects.
Students must apply here to participate with all expenses paid.
Invited speakers include: Alberto Retana, community outreach director for the U.S. Department of Education, North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue, Dr. Scott Ralls, President of the North Carolina Community College System, and Sen. Kay Hagan, D-North Carolina.
Mobilize.org, an “all-partisan” group, is working on the summit with funding from the Gates Foundation, the Knight Foundation and the Rappaport Family Foundation.
CCs try new ways to improve success rates
With three-year completion rates under 30 percent, community colleges are innovating to improve retention, completion and transfer rates, according to the Hechinger Report.
Several two-year colleges in Minnesota are rolling out student success programs.
At Inver Hills Community College in Minnesota, students are urged to “Finish What You Start.” Students are grouped in “learning communities” that take two or three class together, often linked to common themes or questions. Those who need remediation, take an intensive one-semester class.
Normandale Community College set an application deadline for new full-time students after realizing that students who enroll at the last minute often end up on probation.
Century College requires new students who test at a pre-college reading level to take a two-credit “New Student Seminar” and to meet with advisers twice a semester.
Five years ago, the college also set up learning communities for remedial students. Century now has 500 students in 23 groups. A community might take a joint reading and writing class and a speech class with “The American Dream” as a theme.
Developmental reading students in learning communities averaged a 2.45 GPA, compared to a 1.89 GPA for similar students who didn’t participate. Fall-to-fall retention in learning communities was up 20 percent; withdrawal was down 7 percent.
In the last year, the first- to second-year retention rate for Minnesota colleges and universities inched up by 2 percent, said Leslie Mercer, the system’s associate vice chancellor for research, planning and effectiveness. By collecting more data on what works for students, colleges hope to improve.
“If you think about what Amazon.com does when you order a book, they say, ‘People like you who read that book would like these other seven books,’ ” Mercer said. “We’re a ways away from that, but that’s what we’d like to do so that we could say to the student who’s coming in, ‘Oh, people like you who had this kind of experience in high school and want to become a nurse … do best when we do these following things for you, and you do the following things.’ ”
Achieving the Dream has named eight leader colleges that show three years of improvement in course completion, retention rates and advancement from remedial education to credit-bearing courses, reports Community College Week.
Yakima Valley Community College created an Office of Institutional Effectiveness to collect and analyze data, resulting in interventions to help Hispanic students with math and English skills.
The most recent fall-to-fall retention rate for Hispanic students is 59 percent, an 8 percent boost over the year before. Overall completion rates in developmental courses are up, and Hispanic students achieve at the same rates in those courses as white students. In addition, Hispanic students now outperform white students in college-level English classes.
At Northampton Community College in Pennsylvania, research showed that students were struggling to complete the second of three developmental math courses. Instructors were using different approaches. The data showed students did best with a project-based approach, so that was made the standard. Course completion improved by 7 percent over three years.
Funding doesn’t follow success
Kevin Drumm, president of a New York community college with an above-average completion rate, complains that funding rewards enrollment, not success, reports Inside Higher Ed.
Broome Community College’s three-year federal graduation rate is nearly 28 percent, above the national average of around 23 percent. It’s ranked 15th in the nation for student retention out of 210 colleges that submitted data in the National Community College Benchmark Project. Some 87 percent of Broome graduates who transfer to a four-year institution complete a bachelor’s degree, the best performance among New York’s 30 community colleges.
But Broome was hit by a 15 percent cut in state funding. The college’s relatively high completion rate depresses funding, Drumm argues.
“Given that we graduate 25 percent more students in three years than the typical community college our size, that amounts to 300 more graduates for us than most other colleges with [6-to-7,000 students],” Drumm says. “Three hundred students for us — who for our competition remain in the income pipeline to attend — means we start the next fiscal year with $1 million less potential enrollment revenue in the pipeline than similar sized colleges. Therefore our budget is being inadvertently punished for successful outputs because we are funded by an input model.”
Tthe foundations pushing for higher completion rates, such as the Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation, have ignored Broome, Drumm complains.
“The big foundations are spending money at lots of big schools with poor numbers when what we’ve been doing here for quite some time has been working and we’d like to figure out why. . . . Does anybody care about the 20 percent or so of community colleges that are above average and out there doing well?”
The Gates Foundation looks for “colleges that are beating the odds,” regardless of size, responds Mark Milliron, deputy director of postsecondary improvement. Gates and Lumina are funding success through the Developmental Education Initiative, which will disseminate new ideas in English and math remediation, Milliron said.
George Boggs, president of AACC, notes that if there is any bias in how grant funding is distributed, it favors those community colleges that serve large numbers of traditionally “at-risk students” — typically minority, first-generation or financially needy students.
Broome may not be able to maintain its performance if funding falls, Drumm warns.
Low-income adults in college
More young adults from low-income families are taking college classes, but the completion rate — only 11 percent — didn’t improve significantly from 2000 to 2008, concludes A Portrait of Low-Income Young Adults in Education from the Institute for Higher Education Policy.
About 10 percent who complete degrees don’t escape poverty, the report found.
That contradicts President Obama’s assertion that “the best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education,” IHEP noted. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Poor students go to college academically unprepared, the report says, and, amid competing family and work obligations, they accumulate debt “that could have been avoided by pursuing a different type of degree or a credential.”
Many go to unselective colleges and don’t prepare for high-paying careers.
Hispanic students showed the largest percentage-point increase, to 37 percent from 29 percent. Low-income Asian and Pacific Islander and white students enrolled at the highest rates in 2008, 62 percent and 51 percent, respectively; the greatest proportions of low-income degree holders were also from those groups.
On a happier note, the College Success Foundation reports that 97 percent of its low-income, disadvantaged scholars earn a high school diploma, and 68 percent of those who go to a four-year college earn a degree.
