Supports help Latinos stay in college

The youngest and fastest growing population group in the U.S., Latinos now account for more than 20 percent of K-12 students.  However, in 2012, 21.3 percent of Latino adults had earned an associate degree or higher compared to 40.1 percent of all adults. Excelencia in Education‘s national initiative, Ensuring America’s Future by Increasing Latino College Completion, is focusing on community colleges, because that’s where most Latinos start — and end — their pursuit of higher education.

In a new report, “Supporting Latino Community College Students: An Investment in Our Economic Future, Excelencia and Single Stop USA describe how innovative community colleges are changing financial aid and studentservices to help low-income students — including many Latinos — stay in college.

 . . . many Latino students are the first in their family to attend college and make choices to contain costs by enrolling at community colleges, attending part-time, and working more than 20 hours per week while enrolled. Unfortunately, data show all these practical choices by students hinder their college completion.

Too few Latino students know there are resources available to assist with college costs. They are also less likely to access financial resources like tax credits, food assistance, and public health insurance that can enable them to maintain a stable family budget while enrolled. Single Stop USA and its community college partners connect thousands of students to millions of dollars in existing benefits and services that immediately reduce the financial strain faced by Latino students.

Single Stop sites at 17 community colleges help students file their taxes, apply for government benefits, and receive financial and legal counseling. Thirty-eight percent of students served in 2012 were Latino.

The report recommends:

 Federal policy makers can utilize Higher Education Act reauthorization to incentivize colleges to implement student services that are well aligned with retention, completion and employment outcomes, such as the models being developed by Single Stop.

 Complement investments in financial aid by providing student support services that address multiple barriers that can thwart Latino student completion.

 Improve targeting of information regarding financial aid by intentionally developing dissemination strategies that will more effectively reach Latino, low-income and other post-traditional students.

 Address antiquated eligibility rules that disqualify needy students from receiving aid that can help them complete college and attain self-sufficiency.

“America’s future economic success is deeply connected to Latino college completion,” says Eduardo J. Padrón, president of Miami Dade College, which is working with Single Stop.

Structured paths lead to success

Creating structured pathways to graduation will help more community college students achieve their goals, said presenters at the American Association of Community Colleges meeting in San Francisco.

Completion by Design, a Gates Foundation initiative, is working with community colleges on mandatory student advising and  structured course sequences, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education. College leaders from North Carolina, Ohio and Florida discussed their efforts.

Jobs for the Future‘s completion campaign focuses on getting students into college-level classes as quickly as possible.

Many students who end up in remedial courses don’t need to be there, but they don’t realize the importance of the tests that colleges often use as the sole placement criterion, said Gretchen Schmidt, a program director at Jobs for the Future. ”They didn’t prepare, they had kids in the hall running around, or they rushed through the test to get back to work … and as a result they ended up two levels down” in developmental courses.

Students who start in remedial courses rarely earn a degree. Recent research has shown students placed in high-level developmental courses do just as well at the college level.

North Carolina now lets high school graduates with a 2.6 grade point average or better skip community college placement tests and start at the college level.

A new Connecticut law limits state funding for remedial education to a single course.

Florida may “cut off nearly all support for stand-alone remedial education,” reports the Chronicle.

Lenore P. Rodicio, director of Miami Dade College‘s Completion by Design effort, worries that’s going too far.

“Seventy percent of our students come in needing some kind of remedial education, many of them from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and this could close the door to them,” she said.

Her college offers a one-week boot camp for students who place into remedial education to allow them to zero in on the skills they need to improve, and it’s looking at other ways to get students into credit-bearing courses faster.

In another session, California Community Colleges chancellor Brice Harris discussed the state’s new “student-success agenda,” which includes encouraging students to develop a study plan, dropping reliance on a single remedial placement test and giving new students priority for registration over perennial students who aren’t moving toward a credential.

Prior-learning credits help vets graduate

Helping veterans get college credit for skills learned in the military – speeding their way to a degree or credential — is the aim of the Maps to Credentials project, reports Community College Times. The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL), the American Council on Education and the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) are working with three community colleges to develop a prior learning assessment model.

Inver Hills Community College (IHCC) in Minnesota evaluated the most common military occupations for Minnesota National Guard members and “cross-walked them to our coursework,” said Anne Johnson, dean of business and social sciences, at an AACC Workforce Development Institute in San Diego.

. . . a combat engineer might get three credits for the supervisory techniques in a business course at IHCC and three credits for construction management. A unit supply specialist could get three credits each for introduction to computers, introduction to business in society, and principles of management.

The average veteran or active military student is awarded 6.8 prior-learning credits, listed on the transcript by the community college course titles.

Miami Dade College (MDC) gives credits for military experience toward associate degrees in criminal justice, electronics engineering technologies and office administration, as well as certificates in medical assisting. More degrees will be added.

Fayetteville Technical Community College (FTCC), located near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, has mapped military occupational specialties to courses in general education, culinary arts, surgical technology, radiography and emergency medical science.

 Since FTCC started this program in fall 2010, veteran enrollment has increased 40 percent. The college awarded 214 degrees to veterans last spring, compared to just three in spring 2010.

Faculty are finding that “service members are great students,” said Bridget Petzold, program coordinator for business administration/operations management. “They participate in class. They are excited about learning, they bring a lot of experience to the classroom and they bring the discussion up a notch.”

College museums draw donors

Community college museums can “raise the college’s profile, help attract donors, strengthen ties to the community and enhance educational programs,” writes Community College Times.

A museum at Johnson County Community College (JCCC) in Kansas focuses on contemporary and Native American art.

The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York has a collection of more than 50,000 garments and accessories, some of them hundreds of years old.

Miami Dade College’s Museum of Art + Design presents exhibitions of notable artists and complements the college’s art galleries.

The Dinosaur Museum at Mesalands Community College in New Mexico combines fossils with artwork.

JCCC’s art museum has “brought extraordinary national and international visibility to this campus,” said Bruce Hartman, director of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. “An enormous number of people have come to campus that otherwise wouldn’t have set foot here,” Hartman said. “Some of those people have become donors or we’ve been able to otherwise engage them.”

Actor Vincent Price, known for his roles in horror films such as “The Fly,” donated 2,000 works of art to what’s now known as the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College (ELAC). Now part of ELAC’s Performing and Fine Arts Complex, VPAM’s inaugural show in the new building featured eight ELAC alumni who have become well-known artists.

In new economy, welding is a STEM job

Welding is a STEM job, says Traci Tapani, CEO of a Minnesota sheet-metal company that’s  training its workers, rather than relying on local community colleges, writes New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Wyoming Machine works on armoring Humvees.

“Many years ago, people learned to weld in a high school shop class or in a family business or farm, and they came up through the ranks and capped out at a certain skill level. They did not know the science behind welding,” so could not meet the new standards of the U.S. military and aerospace industry.

“They could make beautiful welds,” she said, “but they did not understand metallurgy, modern cleaning and brushing techniques” and how different metals and gases, pressures and temperatures had to be combined.

Moreover, in small manufacturing businesses like hers, explained Tapani, “unlike a Chinese firm that does high-volume, low-tech jobs, we do a lot of low-volume, high-tech jobs, and each one has its own design drawings. So a welder has to be able to read and understand five different design drawings in a single day.”

Unable to find qualified applicants, Wyoming Machine hired a trainer. But it was hard to find trainees with sufficient math and science skills, says Tapani.

“I can’t think of any job in my sheet metal fabrication company where math is not important. If you work in a manufacturing facility, you use math every day; you need to compute angles and understand what happens to a piece of metal when it’s bent to a certain angle.”

Many community colleges and universities can’t keep up with employers’ needs, Friedman writes.

Miami Dade College makes workforce training a priority, collaborating with more than 100 companies, says Eduardo Padrón, the president.  “Every program that we offer has an industry advisory committee that helps us with curriculum, mentorship, internships and scholarships.”

Immigrants used to take an unskilled job and work their way into the middle class, Padrón says. “That is no longer possible.”  Education is a necessity, not a “luxury for the few.”

Will 4-year schools help fill skills gap?

Angel Gavidia worked low-skills jobs. He tried community college, but dropped out after a year.  Then he discovered a learn-and-earn partnership linking an IT-services company called Atrion with classes at Community College of Rhode Island, reports Jon Marcus of Hechinger Report.

The year-long program, in which Gavidia was paid to work as an apprentice at Atrion while taking on-campus courses in networking and other IT subjects, gave him the kind of real-world skills employers say they want but often can’t find in college graduates.

Gavidia, who now works full-time at Atrion as an associate engineer, says it was the apprenticeship part of the program that taught him not just theoretical knowledge, but skills he could actually use on the job. “I came into this position feeling like, we didn’t learn this in school, and we should have,” he said.

Community colleges have a long history of job training partnerships with employers, but universities are slow to adapt to employers’ needs, writes Marcus.

Eduardo Padrón runs Miami Dade College, the second-largest U.S. higher-education institution with more than 174,000 students.

“What I hear from business leaders who come to us is that the universities place before them all kinds of excuses,” said Padrón, whose institution has hundreds of partnerships with business. The universities “want to take three years to put a program together, and then they have all these excuses for not doing it the right way. It’s part of a tradition that’s not changing with time,” he said.

Corporations such as Farmers Insurance Group, Dunkin’ Donuts and Walt Disney World, do their own college-level training and education. Many others partner with community colleges on workforce development.

A growing number of jobs reuire “middle skills” — a certificate or associate degree, but not a bachelor’s degree.  ”Nearly half of all jobs in the U.S. now require an associate degree — a greater proportion than call for a bachelor’s degree,” reports Marcus.

However,  few CEOs or policymakers attended community colleges, points out Karen Elzey, director of  Skills for America’s Future. “They’re four-year grads. All the people they know are four-year grads. They don’t have experience with community colleges.”

Community colleges fill skills gap

By filling the skills gap, “community colleges can be our salvation,” writes New York Times columnist Joe Nocera.

Gerald Chertavian’s Year Up, which helps disadvantaged high school graduates learn workplace skills and behaviors, is partnering with community colleges, such as Miami Dade College, to educate students for “middle-skill jobs” requiring a certificate or associate degree but not a bachelor’s. “Up to a third of all jobs are middle-skill jobs,” says Chertavian.

While community colleges always have helped “grease the wheels of social mobility,” their primary role today is not helping students earn a bachelor’s degree, Nocera writes.

Now with the skills gap such a pressing problem — and a high school education so clearly inadequate for the modern economy — the task of teaching those skills is falling to community colleges.

Yet many states have “ravaged the budgets of their community college systems, just as they have for many state university systems.”

In Florida, said (Miami Dade President Eduardo) Padrón, community colleges have seen their state support drop by 21 percent in three years. “State support used to account for 75 percent of our budget,” he said. “Now it is only 45 percent.” As a result, tuition at Miami Dade is $3,000 a year — a lot of money for people of little means. Given what’s at stake, it would be hard to imagine anything more shortsighted than paring back support for community colleges.

In Virginia and North Carolina, community colleges work closely with employers to design job training programs, Nocera writes. In other states, community colleges “remain the stepchildren of the educational system.”

Amnesty doesn’t require college, military service

President Obama’s quasi-amnesty for young illegal immigrants doesn’t require college attendance or military service, according to Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano’s memo. Applicants who came illegally by age 16 and are 30 or younger must pass a background check showing no felonies or multiple misdemeanors. In addition, the applicant must be: “currently in school, has graduated from high school, has obtained a general education development certificate, or is an honorably discharged veteran of  the Coast Guard or Armed Forces of the  United States.” Those who qualify will be able to get two-year work permits renewable indefinitely.

“In school” seems to refer to high school. Would dropouts qualify if they enroll in GED or basic skills classes at a community college?  Do they have to pass their classes?

The military provision is a bit puzzling: Illegal immigrants aren’t eligible to serve in the military. However, a few use fraudulent papers to enlist. The order doesn’t say whether those who qualify for temporary work permits will be allowed to serve in the military. If so, would their service qualify them for citizenship?  I can’t imagine denying citizenship to military veterans.

In May, speaking at the commencement of Miami Dade College‘s commencement ceremonies, President Obama reaffirmed his support for the Dream Act, which provides a path to citizenship for young immigrants who complete two years of college or serve in the military in the six years after qualifying for conditional legal status. The executive order doesn’t promise citizenship.

Completion by Design thinks big

Completion by Design (CbD), a Gates-funded intiative to boost low-income community college students’ graduation rates, is thinking big, reports Community College Week.  For example, one third of community college students in Texas — 289,000 in all — will be enrolled in CbD programs.

Working with the Community College Research Center, CbD colleges in Texas, Ohio, North Carolina and Florida are analyzing data on barriers to student completion, then designing solutions.

Colleges are focusing on students who start in remedial courses and students who’ve earned 30 or more credits but no credential in five years. Miami Dade College will focus on students who speak English as a second language.

Students who’ve earned 30-plus credits without a credential may be waiting for admission into a selective program, such as nursing or other allied health fields, said  Nan Poppe, CbD executive director.

“Students are doing a lot of wandering,” Poppe said, adding that when the colleges took a close look at these students’ transcripts, they found that most of them “had almost no chance of getting into one of those programs.”

“Access without success is a hollow promise,” said Poppe at an Achieving the Dream meeting. Most CdB colleges also are Achieving the Dream colleges. Students need completion-focused pathways that lead to a certificate or degree, she said.

All CbD colleges hope to redesign the entry experience for new students to help them make better choices, according to Poppe. Many propose “mandatory student success courses, individualized education plans, early selection of majors, electronic tracking, early academic warning systems, intensive advising and expansion of dual-enrollment programs.” The Lone Star College System wants to offer “success stipends” for students who complete academic milestones.

Designing a clear pathway to a meaningful credential is a challenge, writes Stacy Holliday, director of campus innovations and student success at Davidson County Community College, part of Completion by Design’s North Carolina cadre, in Community College Times.

. . . completion has to mean something. What labor market value does that credential have?  How does it translate into students successfully pursuing an advanced degree or obtaining a job?

Should we eliminate developmental courses all together, as some have suggested, or should all students complete all developmental classes before moving into their program of study?

“Instead of throwing college course catalogues at students . . . we can provide students with a roadmap that makes it clear where the program will begin and end,” Holliday writes. Students will no longer be overwhelmed by the number of course choices and will make the best choice for their future.”

The “completion agenda” has forced colleges to look at their shortcomings, noted community college leaders who spoke Monday at the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD) annual meeting. But completion can’t be the primary goal, said Sandy Shugart, president of  Valencia College, reports Inside Higher Ed. “If students learn well, deeply and intentionally, more will complete,” Shugart said.

Where the jobs are — and the training

Upgrading job skills to match job openings is requiring colleges to work more closely with employers, reports the New York Times.

“We’ve become much more focused, much more agile and much more driven by what the data is telling us on where the jobs are,” said Bob Templin, president of Northern Virginia Community College. “We’re very market-oriented now, whereas before we would offer the courses that people were interested in teaching and we’d see who would show up.

The nation’s employers have 3.4 million job openings, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Most require technical skills.

Northern Virginia Community College has added programs in cybersecurity and geospatial information systems in response to employers’ needs.

Ian Sullivan had a bachelor’s degree in geology and four years in the Army, where he used satellite and drone data to create maps in Iraq. He enrolled in NVCC to “skill up” to match geography professionals.

. . . Over two years of classes — he said he much preferred in-person classroom study to taking courses online — he learned how to use mountains of electronic data from satellites and aircraft to make elaborate two- and three-dimensional maps showing roads, buildings, railroads, even fire hydrants.

“I paid about $350 a semester, less than $2,000 to acquire the additional skills,” said Mr. Sullivan, who obtained his certificate in geospatial technology in December.

He was hired to develop maps for BAE Systems, a company that develops defense, security and aerospace systems.

Miami Dade College expanded continuing-education programs to meet the demand for health-care workers and insurance adjusters.