Community college students use Pell, not loans

Few community college students benefit from subsidized loans, I write in U.S. News and World Report. “Community college students, who tend to come from low- and moderate-income families, rely on need-based Pell grants, which, unlike loans, don’t need to be repaid.”

While President Obama — and Mitt Romney — call for spending $6 billion to subsidize Stafford loans for another year, Pell is expected to run $7 billion short next year. This year, the maximum grant amount was saved only by cutting aid for year-round students and limiting eligibility.

“Targeting a precious $6 billion right now to borrowers who have jobs and incomes high enough to cover the higher rate seems out of touch, especially when the Pell Grant program needs approximately that much next year to stave off a massive cut to the aid it provides,” writes Jason Delisle, director of the Federal Education Budget Project at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. Stafford borrowers already can postpone payments if they fail to find work or earn too little, he notes.

Lots of middle-class and affluent families benefit from federal loan subsidies and tax credits — and they vote.

Great Books belong in community college classes

Community college students should study the great books of western civilization, writes J.M. Anderson, dean of humanities, fine arts, and social sciences at Illinois Valley Community College, in a Chronicle of Higher Education commentary.

President Obama’s stress on community colleges as job-training centers  encourages students to think community colleges are  ”a means to a credential or a steppingstone to a four-year school,” not a place of learning, he writes. Colleges should provide a ”streamlined curriculum centered around the great books” to establish “the unity of knowledge and purpose that is missing in community colleges.”

Now curricula are diffuse, and course catalogs encourage students to think of education as a smorgasbord rather than a holistic undertaking.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard students say, when they see literature under required readings on my course syllabus for Western Civ, “I thought this was a history class, not an English class.” A streamlined curriculum would highlight the interdisciplinary nature of great books while combining both the particular information and the general knowledge they provide.

A great-books curriculum enables students to connect ideas across curriculum areas, Anderson writes.

Because great books are inherently challenging and complex, they are well suited for developing cognitive abilities and stimulating higher-order thinking. They expose students to momentous ideas while teaching them how to penetrate to the root of things, follow their intellect, and acquire genuine understanding. They force students to stretch their minds by thinking through complex arguments in all fields of inquiry.

A liberal education isn’t a luxury, Anderson argues. Studying the great books teaches “all the skills that corporate America now clamors for in college graduates,” such as “effective communication, critical thinking, ethic and civic responsibility, problem solving, quantitative literacy. . . . In tough economic times especially, community college students need great books, not simply to train them for careers, but to train them for life.”

Where workers come from

Community colleges are Where the Workers Come From, according to The Street.

The dizzying increase in college tuition has opened a debate about whether higher education really pays off. What’s not debatable is that many jobs do require specialized training beyond a high school degree. And that training includes technical skills that aren’t taught at Harvard or Yale, such as how to process paperwork at a busy medical practice, or troubleshoot a robotic arm on an automated assembly line.

As many as 1 million jobs are going unfilled for lack of qualified applicants, estimate economists at the New York branch of the Fed.

President Obama proposed an $8 billion Community College to Career Fund in his 2013 budget to held colleges partner with employers on job training, though it’s not clear the funding will get through Congress.

Community Colleges Offer Cheaper Alternative to Grad School, suggests U.S. News. I think the idea is that four-year graduates who need to switch careers can learn new skills at a community college, rather than investing time and money for a graduate degree.  It’s not an uncommon strategy for people with bachelor’s degrees in Canada.

Lumina: U.S. needs more college grads

Despite the rise in college graduates, employers will need 23 million more college-educated workers by 2025, concludes a Lumina Foundation report based on 2010 Census data. “We are nowhere near at the pace that we need to be,” said Jamie Merisotis, Lumina’s president.

The foundation wants to increase the percentage of working-age Americans with high-quality degrees and credentials to 60% in 2025 — a goal similar to one set by President Obama in 2009. Obama said he wants the United States to reclaim its position as the world leader in the proportion of college graduates by 2020. If the current pace continues, that figure will reach just 46.5% by 2025, the Lumina report says.

More Americans are earning college credentials:  38.3% of Americans ages 25 to 64 had at least an associate’s degree in 2010, up from 38.1% in 2009 and 37.9% in 2008. For the first time, more than 30 percent of adults have earned a bachelor’s degree or more.

Turning out more college graduates won’t make us prosperous or productive, writes Peter Wood.

A nation’s economic growth certainly depends on the productivity of its people, but productivity and national prosperity have a limited relationship to higher-education attainment. Some countries with relatively low post-secondary degree attainment rates (e.g. Germany, Switzerland) have very high rates of productivity and prosperity. Some countries with high college degree attainment rates (e.g. Russia) have low productivity and less prosperity. What a nation needs to thrive economically is not necessarily a population where college degrees are commonplace, but a hard-working, ingenious, and versatile workforce.

As more people get college degrees, higher education will “have to conform itself to the abilities of a lot of students who aren’t very bright or ambitious,”  Wood writes. The workforce will be flooded with graduates with dubious credentials. The college advantage will “evaporate.”

What about liberal arts?

“President Obama and many governors are pushing the idea of community colleges becoming workforce training centers,” writes Community College Dean. Funding is being shifted from general budgets to favored programs in “STEM fields or fields with presumed local employability.” It’s all about jobs,  jobs, jobs. But, what about liberal arts? What about higher education?

If community colleges fail at their academic mission, it will increase social and economic segregation, argues Diverse Issues in Higher Education.

Literature, philosophy, art history, political science, and economics shouldn’t be the privilege of those who have money.  They’re the shared (if contested) heritage of a culture, and they bespeak possibilities beyond the present.  . . .

Community colleges’ vocational mission is important, he writes, but so is educating students who will transfer to complete a bachelor’s degree or more. Starting at a community college and transferring after two years is the best way to earn a four-year degree without crushing debt.

Politicians aren’t scheming to keep the poor barefoot and ignorant, whatever faculty members may suspect, the dean writes. To “keep the liberal arts available for students of limited means,” academics should frame their arguments around “cross-class contact, transfer and student debt.”

Workers need skills — and a credential

Skills, With No Credential, Are No Longer Enough, writes Ed Sector’s Kevin Carey in the New York Times‘ Room for Debate.

“There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor,’’ Rick Santorum said. The important word in that sentence is skills. It is very difficult to earn a decent living in the modern economy without a concrete set of skills and a credential to back them up. And the more complicated the world gets, the more complex skills the job market requires.

Take auto mechanics. According to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, in the early 1970s, most auto mechanics had never finished high school. One in three had a high school diploma, and a scant 7 percent had been to college or earned a degree. Then automobiles became increasingly complicated. So auto mechanics began going to school to learn advanced skills and get credentials. By the late 2000s, only one in five had dropped out of high school. By contrast, more than one in three had gone to college.

The Obama administration “has worked to boost need-based financial aid and invest in community colleges,” which serve adults, laid-off workers and other non-traditional students, Carey writes.

Obama: Invest in education, job training

States should spend more on education, President Obama said at the National Governors Association luncheon. ”The countries who out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow.”

President Obama is a “snob” for pushing the college-for-all message, said GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum last week. (Remember “egghead?”) Not everyone wants or needs college, said Santorum, who complained of indoctrination by liberal academics.

In his speech Monday, Obama stressed workforce training at community colleges.

“The jobs of the future are increasingly going to those with more than a high school degree.  And I have to make a point here.  When I speak about higher education we’re not just talking about a four-year degree.  We’re talking about somebody going to a community college and getting trained for that manufacturing job that now is requiring somebody walking through the door, handling a million-dollar piece of equipment.

The president also urged states to mandate school attendance through age 18.

“I think that we all realize that everybody’s not going to be headed to college, that we have to have … community colleges and good job training,” said Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, after the luncheon.

“We want someone to be career ready or college ready,” said Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia. “If we haven’t done one of those two things for the young people, we’ve failed you. You don’t have access to the American dream.”

Training 21st century workers isn’t fast or easy

Is Investing in Community Colleges a Good Idea? asks Charlotte Allen on Minding the Campus.

President Obama’s $8 billion program Community College to Career Fund assumes colleges can partner with employers to train 2 million workers for high-demand jobs in health care, technology and “green” industries.

Most community college students aren’t prepared for college-level courses, especially in math, Allen points out.  Developmental classes don’t seem to help much.

. . .  most of the anticipated job openings in the U.S. during the near future will require workers who possess exactly the sort of math and reading-comprehension skills that most community-college students these days seem unable to master. There is currently a shortage of skilled employees in high-tech industries, and some two million manufacturing jobs are expected to open up by 2018 thanks to expected retirements–but most of those jobs require workers who can operate sophisticated machinery, follow complex instructions, and demonstrate some facility at math and statistics. The training itself for 21st-century jobs can be expensive.

Successful job training programs at community colleges tend to be “small-scale, dependent on modest grants from the involved industries themselves, and centered around nationally recognized certificates,” Allen writes.

Key to many of the programs was ACT’s National Career Readiness Certificate (NCRC), which measures recipients’ math and reading abilities. . . . Shoreline Community College near Seattle . . .  used a grant from the Manufacturing Institute, a nonprofit affiliate of the National Institute of Manufacturers, to integrate the NCRC and certification from the National Institute for Metalworking Skills into a three-quarter-long manufacturing program. The program’s retention rate (95 percent) and job-placement rate (100 percent) were stellar–but it was also a small, highly focused program with only 50 students per cohort.

Allen wonders whether small, focused training programs can be “replicated on a large scale with widely varying students, faculty, and educational standards — along with the potential for waste that a spigot of federal dollars always presents.”

Time, not tuition, is the enemy of completion

Time, not tuition, is the enemy of college completion, writes Stan Jones, president of Complete College America, in a Washington Postop-ed. President Obama’s campaign to limit tuition increases misses the real challenge, which is getting students to graduation, Jones argues.

Today, most college students commute to campus while juggling part-time classes, jobs and often family obligations.

The longer it takes to graduate, the more life gets in the way and the less likely that one will ever graduate. More time on campus also means that more is spent on college, adding high costs as another driver of dropouts. In this instance, time is money.

Less than half of U.S. college students complete a degree, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

 Because cutting time cuts costs, the president can achieve the savings he seeks for students and taxpayers by linking federal investments to college results and targeting the greatest obstacles to graduation: failed remediation programs that waste time and money; broken policies that make it hard for students to transfer credits; students roaming the curriculum excessively instead of following structured, career-focused programs; creeping credit requirements; and schedules designed more to please faculty than to help working students.

$8 billion for ‘community career centers’

An $8 billion Community College to Career Fund will reward colleges that partner with local employers to train 2 million workers for high-demand, well-paying jobs in advanced manufacturing, information technology, health care and “green” tech. That’s if President Obama persuades Congress to pass his budget.  In a speech at Northern Virginia Community College yesterday, the president linked “America’s comeback” to investing in education.  ”We can’t just cut our way into growth,” he said.

A key component of the community college plan would institute “pay for performance” in job training, meaning there would be financial incentives to ensure that trainees find permanent jobs – particularly for programs that place individuals facing the greatest hurdles getting work. It also would promote training of entrepreneurs, provide grants for state and local government to recruit companies, and support paid internships for low-income community college students.

Despite the recession, some high-tech industries report shortages of skilled workers. As the economy recovers and baby boomers retire, there will be 2 million job openings in manufacturing through 2018, according to the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown. But there’s a catch, reports AP.

. . . these types of jobs frequently require the ability to operate complicated machinery and follow detailed instructions, as well as some expertise in subjects like math and statistics.

. . . Mark Schneider, the former U.S. commissioner of education statistics who now serves as vice president at the American Institutes for Research, said there’s no doubt that high-tech companies need skilled workers. But he said there are challenges with leaning heavily on community colleges. Many students enter community colleges lacking math skills. The sophisticated equipment needed for training is expensive, and there’s little known about the effectiveness of individual community colleges programs across the country, he said.

In particular, “green” job training programs have produced disappointing results.

Community colleges have been partnering with industry on job training for many years. “Community colleges understand the needs of local employers,” said Labor Secretary Hilda Solis in a White House press conference yesterday. The fund would allow colleges to hire staff, buy equipment and develop curriculum, she said.  (I wanted to ask why taxpayers should fund training for employers, but I was too far back in the phone queue.)

“We will give community colleges the resources they need to become community career centers,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan, echoing President Obama’s line from the State of the Union speech.  We will create “an America built to last,” said Duncan. Also “an economy built to last.” And a workforce “built to last.”

President Obama’s past budgets have been “rife with unfilled promises” to community colleges, notes Inside Higher Ed.