Honesty is the first step

Reclaiming the American Dream, the new American Association of Community Colleges‘ report, is brutally honest about community colleges’ shortcomings, writes Richard Kahlenberg in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“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.”  The report concedes that “developmental education as traditionally practiced is dysfunctional, that barriers to transfer inhibit student progress, that degree and certificate completion rates are too low, and that attainment gaps across groups of students are unacceptably wide.”  These problems may seem obvious to the casual observer, but for a commission of the AACC, a group which describes itself as “the primary advocacy organization for the nation’s community colleges,” to openly admit such failures is remarkable.

Reclaiming the Dream recommends requiring orientation, first-semester counseling to get students into a structured program of study and embedding basic skills instruction into credit-bearing courses. It also calls on four-year institutions to agree on transfer courses, so students won’t lose credits as they move toward a bachelor’s degree.

The AACC report “plants the seed” for The Century Foundation’s Task Force on Preventing Community Colleges from Becoming Separate and Unequal, writes Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the foundation. The task force will pose critical questions:

Can we expect to provide equal educational opportunity when higher education is so deeply stratified – with the most selective four-year colleges educating 14 times as many rich kids as poor kids, while community colleges have almost twice as many poor students as wealthy ones?

Why does our system of public funding of higher education provide the fewest resources to the student most in need?

. . . can we call a system where 65 percent of students who start at a community college fail to earn a degree or credential after six years either efficient or equitable?

Community colleges can solve some of their own problems without more dollars, the report said. Funding should be structured to provide “incentives for promoting student success.”

California colleges may limit recreation subsidies

California’s community colleges may limit access to low-cost P.E. and fine arts classes to focus scarce resources on students seeking degrees, certificates, transfer or job training. Under the proposal, students would be barred from repeating the same P.E. or fine arts class more than once, reports California Watch. Instead, colleges could create “community education” enrichment classes: Students pay the full cost and can take the class as often as they like.

The Foothill-De Anza Community College District, for example, offers a $60 class called Total Body Workout for Older Adults, which receives no state subsidies. Foothill College’s state-subsidized Aquatic Fitness class costs $36, by contrast.

College athletes would be able to repeat courses in their sport and music majors would be allowed to repeat choir class if needed to meet transfer requirements.

College heads see privatization as inevitable

Community colleges will rely on tuition, not state and local funding in the future, leaders said at the annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges.

“My own college behaves much more like a private college these days than a public,” said Stephen M. Curtis, president of the Community College of Philadelphia, reports Inside Higher Ed. By next year, nearly two-thirds of the college’s revenue will come from tuition.

His fellow panelist, Rufus Glasper, chancellor of the Maricopa Community Colleges,  said, ”We have no choice. The state funds are gone forever.”

Sources of Support for Community College of Philadelphia

There are advantages to privatization, Curtis said.

. . . he does not need state approval for new degrees or curricular changes, that tuition increase are controlled by his board without state or local authorities having veto power, and that his board also has final say on use of budget funds. While tuition increases raise concerns about access, he said that the Community College of Philadelphia just finished its first fund-raising campaign, significantly exceeding a $10 million goal and raising $3 million for scholarships. And he read a long list of operations at his college and elsewhere that he said should be outsourced and could be in a private model: cleaning services, child care, snow removal and more.

Glasper doesn’t foresee more state funding for 7 to 10 years.  He hopes to raise revenue by providing specialized training to businesses.  He also suggested it’s time to look for ways to bring down costs of expensive responsibilities, such as remedial math instruction, by replacing teachers with computers.

This embrace of privatization amounts to giving up on an accessible college education for all, responds Daniel Luzer.

Frankly, if you’re the head of a community college, one of your primary responsibilities is to keep your college really, really cheap for students. Don’t call it accepting reality if you’re just giving up on doing your job. Yea, it’s harder to security funding in this economy. So work harder.

State funding doesn’t recover naturally. Funding “rebounds” when citizens and community leaders demand it. Community colleges are public institutions. Go ahead and demand adequate funding.

In California, where I live, community colleges can demand all they want. The money isn’t there. Students would have more access if tuition were raised — and retained at the college — to pay for more classes.

Community colleges face Catch-22

Community colleges, which are “given fewer resources to educate students with the greatest needs,” face a Catch-22, writes Richard Kahlenberg of the Century Foundation in The 2-Tier-Tuition Controversy in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

(Colleges can) raise prices, which creates new inequities, or don’t raise prices and perpetuate huge waiting lists for courses. In practical terms, as Nate Johnson of Postsecondary Analytics notes, when students eager for education are shut out of community-college courses, they tend to enroll in for-profit colleges, where they pay far more per credit than the proposed expensive tier at Santa Monica. Many students exit these for-profit institutions with few marketable skills.

“Charging different amounts for the same general-education courses at a community college would have set a bad precedent,” Kahlenberg writes. But it’s just the tip of a giant iceberg of  inequalities in higher education.

Redesign, reinvent and reset

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 21^st-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 21^stCentury Center to help colleges with strategic planning, leadership development and research to reach the goals.

What works now to improve student success

In What Works Now, the The Campaign for College Opportunity profiles programs or practices at five California community colleges that are moving more students to a degree, a four-year university or the workforce.

City College of San Francisco gives students a “personalized educational home” during the first two years of college. Chabot College is moving students more quickly through pre-college level English. Chaffey College and Long Beach City College have expanded success centers to help struggling students.  Los Medanos College‘s Equity Scorecard “uses data, broken down by race and ethnicity, to identify campus-wide barriers to student success and to pinpoint areas for improvement.”

Each college started by analyzing data to understand the problems. All tried to remove “barriers that were preventing colleagues from talking to one another” to encourage “cross-campus collaboration.”  While working on improving curriculum and instruction, the five colleges also looked at ways to improve out-of-classroom supports, such as access to tutoring labs, counseling and orientation. Finally, it’s essential to have a community college leader who sets priorities and targets,  the report found.

None of the “what works now” colleges is waiting for better funding or better students, the Campaign observes.

We recognize that California’s colleges and universities are struggling with decreased state funding and we must continue to demand adequate support. We also believe that the practices highlighted in this report, and all other efforts to improve college completion rates, are good for students, good for future state revenues, and in some cases actually save the state money through innovation and efficiency. Practices such as utilizing data to target academic interventions, prioritizing enrollment for students with a goal of degree, transfer, or vocational certificate, requiring students to complete an educational plan, streamlining the assessments for English and math across the system, and accelerating progress for students through basic skills or remedial courses, are just a few proven innovations that can get significantly more students across the finish line.

More than 70 percent of California’s postsecondary students are enrolled in community college, the Campaign estimates, but only 30 percent will earn a certificate, degree, or transfer to a four-year university in six years.

Board: 2-tier tuition is ‘Robin Hood’ plan

Robin Hood was the model for Santa Monica College‘s plan to charge higher tuition for added classes, say members of the very liberal college board. Those who could afford it would pay more, opening up space in classes for low-income students. “It’s an opportunity to make a very progressive policy, an opportunity to be Robin Hood,” trustee Rob Rader told the Los Angeles Times. 

For many on the eight-member panel, which includes a humanities professor, an ACLU board member and a college counselor, the plan was conceived as a progressive response to drastic state funding cuts and was intended to increase access and allow more students to graduate and transfer.

The plan, said one, was socialism in action. But just an hour before, angry demonstrators had nearly beaten down the door, hurling accusations that a two-tier pricing system would shut out low-income students and lead to privatizing public education. A campus police officer used pepper spray to stop the surging crowd.

The board planned to add sections of English, math and history at $180 per unit for students willing to pay more for immediate entry. Regular courses, which cost $46 per unit, often have wait lists. A  scholarship fund was set up to help low-income students afford the higher-priced classes.

Trustees canceled the summer launch after California Community Colleges Chancellor Jack Scott said this version of two-tier fees appears to be illegal. 

The college already charges higher fees to foreign students. With an excellent record of transferring students to nearby UCLA, Santa Monica College enrolls more international students than any community college in the nation.

About 3,300 students from Korea, China, Sweden and other countries are enrolled in the college. They pay the nonresident rate of $275 per unit and generate annual revenues of $13 million, which had allowed the college to offer a higher level of services such as counseling and more classes until recent budget cuts forced severe reductions.The success of the international program provided an impetus to expand the scope of so-called contract education, and in fall 2010 the college offered 18 extra sections of courses such as English, economics and art history open only to international students.

College trustees still hope to work out legal issues with Scott’s office.

State funding cuts are driving community college students to much higher-priced for-profit colleges, which speed the path to graduation, Rader told the Times. “Private, for-profit universities are targeting many of our students, and they don’t do as good a job as we do…. We were going to take their business model and make it progressive. It’s progressive jujitsu.”

Crunched

Across the nation — but especially in California — community colleges face a financial crunch, reports NBC News.

Iowa: 21% funding cut, 60% more students

State funding for Iowa’s community colleges dropped by 21 percent while enrollment increased by 60 percent, reports the Des Moines Register, citing a report by the Iowa Fiscal Partnership. From 2001 to 2012, colleges survived by raising tuition. Inflation-adjusted tuition has increased by more than half, according to the report. “In 2000, an Iowan earning the statewide weekly average wage could have paid for a year of community college tuition in about 3 1/2 weeks. But in 2011, an Iowan earning the statewide weekly average wage would have needed to work nearly 5 1/2 weeks to cover tuition.”

To boost clout, enroll middle-class students

Community colleges “remain the stepchildren of higher education, and lawmakers continue to shortchange them,” despite their vital role in providing “postsecondary education to low-income and minority students who might not otherwise obtain it,” writes columnist Bill Maxwell. To boost political clout and funding, community colleges should cast a wider net, recruiting more affluent students, he writes.

The economic, social and racial divide is growing, argues a Century Foundation task force. Rising college costs are pushing more middle-class students to start at community colleges, but the number of low-income students is growing even faster.

In a U.S. News story, I look at the pros and cons of recruiting affluent students to avoid “separate and unequal” status.