California’s high-minority colleges have low transfer rates
Transfer rates are low at California community colleges with high black and Latino enrollments, concludes the Civil Rights Project at UCLA in three new reports.
Almost 75% of all Latino and two-thirds of all Black students who go on to higher education in California go to a community college, yet in 2010 only 20% of all transfers to four-year institutions were Latino or African American. Pathways to the baccalaureate are segregated; students attending low-performing high schools usually go directly into community colleges that transfer few students to 4-year colleges. Conversely, a handful of community colleges serving high percentages of white, Asian and middle class students are responsible for the majority of all transfers in the state. California ranks last among the states in the proportion of its college students who attend a 4-year institution, which is a key factor in the state’s abysmal record on BA attainment.
Dedicated staffers can make a difference, concudes Building Pathways to Transfer: Community Colleges that Break the Chain of Failure for Students of Color, by Patricia Gándara, Elizabeth Alvarado, Anne Driscoll and Gary Orfield. The report analyzes five community colleges with relatively high transfer rates for students of color from low-performing high schools.
However, poorly prepared students are much less likely to transfer. The report calls for outreach to low-performing high schools to prepare students for community college challenges and “a radical rethinking of developmental education.”
Unrealized Promises: Unequal Access, Affordability, and Excellence at Community Colleges in Southern California, by Mary Martinez Wenzl and Rigoberto Marquez, shows that heavily minority, low-performing high schools in Southern California feed students into heavily minority community colleges where few students successfully transfer.
Because most California students start at community colleges, college graduation rates are low, concludes Beyond the Master Plan: The Case for Restructuring Baccalaureate Education in California. Saul Geiser and Richard Atkinson recommend letting high-performing community colleges grant bachelor’s degrees to expand capacity.
“No state has bet its future so heavily on community colleges,” Gándara notes, “but these schools need resources and major reforms. Unless we make the colleges work for all Californians, we gamble with our future.”
California’s black high school graduates are less likely to enroll in state colleges and universities than in the past and much less likely than other groups to complete a degree, concludes Blacks in Higher Education, a state profile by the Campaign for College Opportunity.
. . . just over half of black students graduate from high school, few are prepared to attend a four-year university, and fewer still actually enroll in a California college. . . . Of blacks who go to a public college in California, two thirds choose to start in the California Community College (CCC) system. Once there, only 1 in 4 earns a certificate, associate degree, or transfers after six years.
Black transfer students are more likely to choose for-profit colleges, which typically have lower graduation rates than state universities.
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.
States aren’t waiting for federal leadership, Jones adds. Thirty governors have pledged to set graduation goals and develop student success plans. That includes “paying colleges for the students they graduate, not simply for those they enroll.”
Tuning up higher ed
“Tuning” – clarifying what students should know and be able to do to earn a degree in a discipline – will help students succeed, writes Michelle Kalina on GOOD. Colleges in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Texas and Utah are participating in the Lumina Foundation‘s Tuning USA initiative, which is led by the Institute for Evidence-Based Change.
Texas has tuned four engineering disciplines and plans to tune additional engineering fields, two science majors, mathematics, business, and computer and information science.
Because two-thirds of high school graduates in Texas who pursue higher education start at one of the state’s community colleges, Texas also convened representatives from more than 50 institutions to improve the transfer process. Community-college students who want to pursue a baccalaureate degree in civil engineering receive detailed guidance on choosing courses and applying to transfer. Students are informed about the knowledge and skills they will acquire in each course and are provided information about career opportunities ranging from construction and aerospace to manufacturing and public works projects.
Similarly, in Kentucky, two- and four-year public and private colleges are working together to tune high-demand programs in biology, business, elementary education, nursing, and social work. In the state’s nursing programs, courses are being tuned to help pave the way for students to transfer from one program or college to another.
Tuning is based on Europe’s Bologna Process, which is “creating a great deal more transparency with respect to what, exactly, students who have earned credits from a given program or university have actually learned,” writes Education Sector’s Kevin Carey.
‘Crazy College of Qatar’
Houston Community College helped open the first community college campus in Qatar, but the project has struggled with “disagreements over accreditation, high faculty turnover and growing worries that the dean hired by the Qataris to lead the effort was working against” HCC, reports the Houston Chronicle.
Enrollment has reached 750 students — with males and females taught separately — but students have not received HCC credits as originally promised. At this point, students can’t use their coursework to transfer to the six U.S. universities with Qatar campuses, though months of student protests forced a deal that will let community college graduates transfer to Qatar University.
Things were so bad last spring an HCC administrator in Qatar wrote HCC Chancellor Mary Spangler that Community College of Qatar, or CCQ, had become known as “the Crazy College of Qatar.”
HCC projects a $4.6 million profit from the Qatar contract by 2015. So far, the college has made $640,034 from the deal.
HCC , one of the nation’s largest community college systems, also has been involved in projects in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and Brazil.
Canada’s 2-year colleges stress job skills
Canada’s two-year colleges, which stress job training, don’t suffer from the inferiority complex that plagues U.S. community colleges, writes the Hechinger Report. Increasingly, young Canadians are choosing community colleges over universities or capping a bachelor’s degree with a vocational course at a two-year college.
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.
Massachusetts will centralize CC control
Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick proposed centralizing the state’s community college system in his State of the Commonwealth address, reports the Boston Globe.
Patrick highlighted the connection between the often overlooked schools and the unemployment problem. Encouraging more cooperation between schools and local employers, he said, would help the state’s 240,000 unemployed get the skills they need to fill an estimated 120,000 current job openings, many of which require specific training.
“We have a skills gap,’’ Patrick told the packed House chamber at the State House. “We can do something about that. We can help people get back to work. And our community colleges should be at the very center of it.’’
A November report describes the state’s community college system as “disjointed and inadequate in its preparation of students for technical careers,” notes the Globe.
Patrick’s proposal will let a central board dole out funding to individual colleges, taking into account enrollment and several performance measures. The new plan is also intended to make it easier for students to transfer credits between colleges, a frequent source of complaints.
Patrick is proposing a $10 million increase in the community college system’s budget for the coming year to fund the transition.
The workforce development fantasy
President Obama focused on the workforce development mission of community colleges in his State of the Union Speech, calling on community colleges to train two million skilled workers for unfilled jobs.
The next day, Education Secretary Arne Duncan flew to Florida to praise job training programs at Tallahassee Community College.
Workforce development is the flavor of the month, writes Community College Dean. But it’s not as easy as politicians think to turn out skilled workers.
The most predictable lower-level workforce needs are actually the skills we expect students to pick up in their general education courses: effective communication, the ability to see the big picture, enough quantitative skill to know when an answer doesn’t sound right. Those skills are evergreens, and like evergreens, they take time to grow.
There are always a few local employers who need workers who can be trained quickly, the dean writes. But those jobs get filled by the first or second cohort of trainees.
Many would-be workers need literacy or English as a Second Language classes. Community colleges’ developmental track is geared towards getting students into a degree program. Adult Basic Education is a better fit, but often is underfunded and can’t meet the demand.
The dean’s advice:
If you want to improve the prospects of the local workforce, start with adult basic education, add short-term training programs, and beef up the classic academic offerings at community colleges for transfer. . . . Otherwise, you’ll just keep cycling people through training programs every few years, every time the economic winds shift.
The second word in “community college” is “college,” the dean points out. Community colleges are in danger of being defined purely as job training centers.
Free courses may shake universities’ monopoly
Free or cheap online courses may shake universities’ monopoly on credentials, writes the Hechinger Report.
“If I were the universities, I might be a little nervous,” said Alana Harrington, director of Saylor.org, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit established by entrepreneur Michael Saylor that offers 200 free online college courses in 12 majors.
Among other similar initiatives are Peer-to-Peer University, or P2PU, which also offers free online courses and is supported by the web-browser company Mozilla and the Hewlett Foundation, and University of the People, which charges $10 to $50 for any of more than 40 online courses, and whose backers include the Clinton Global Initiative. Both are also nonprofits.
The content they use comes from top universities, including MIT, Tufts, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Michigan. Those are among some 250 institutions worldwide that have put a collective 15,000 courses online in what has become known as the open-courseware movement.
Traditional colleges and universities are reluctant to accept transfer credits from these programs, claiming they can’t judge the courses’ quality.
“Libraries are free, too,” says Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. “You can roam around, read books and study. But hardly anyone would say that spending time in the library is a good preparation to work in any economy, much less this one.”
Traditional colleges deny academic credit to squelch competition, said Philipp Schmidt, cofounder and executive director of P2PU.
Debbie Arthur, who’s taking StraighterLine courses with hopes of earning an education degree, says most university classes don’t offer more personal contact than online classes.
“The Pollyanna version of college is that you’re learning and discussing things with your professors,” said Arthur, a custom-jewelry maker who lives in Kingsport, Tenn. “The reality is that you have 450 kids in an auditorium listening to a teaching assistant. They’ve killed the golden goose themselves by being greedy, and I think people have started looking really closely at alternatives.”
After 160,000 people worldwide signed up for his free, online class on artificial intelligence, Sebastian Thrun quit his job as a Stanford computer science professor to fund Udacity, a free online university. It’s a udacious idea.
Students will be able to take tests to show mastery of critical thinking skills, writes Jeffrey Selingo. That will help the alternatively certified to compete for jobs with people who’ve spent four (or more) costly years pursuing a bachelor’s degree, adds Richard Vedder.
Illinois: Fix K-12 math to boost CC grad rate
Illinois isn’t getting enough out of its community colleges, concludes a state report (pdf), Focus on the Finish. Four out of five students fail to earn a certificate or degree within three years, said Lt. Gov. Sheila Simon, who visited all 48 community colleges in the state last year.
“We’re doing a good job of getting all types of students into the doors of community colleges,” Simon said. “But now we need to do a better job of moving them across the stage at graduation with a certificate or degree that leads to a good-paying job here in Illinois.”
Improving K-12 math instruction is critical, Simon said. Almost half of recent high school graduates test into remedial courses, often remedial math, the report found.
Simon recommends a three-pronged math reform package: (1) High schools should voluntarily require four years of high school math; (2) high schools and community colleges should partner to offer dual credit mathematics courses to all high school juniors and seniors; and (3) community colleges should redesign remediation to embed skills development into credit-bearing courses.
Simon also called for requiring community colleges to report student success rates and linking state funding to colleges’ success at helping students earn a certificate or degree or transfer to a university.
Chicago college leaders’ jobs are on the line
Very low completion rates at Chicago City Colleges will improve or college presidents will lose their jobs, reports Inside Higher Ed in a look at Chancellor Cheryl Hyman’s “reinvention” campaign.
Measurements of the plan’s goals – more credentials earned, increased transfer rates, improved remediation outcomes and better success numbers for adult students – were written into the presidents’ job descriptions. And the board has required that campus chiefs provide “strong, decisive leadership” toward “dramatically” improved student success.
Faculty also are feeling pressure to improve completion rates, reports Inside Higher Ed.
“We’re the enemy. That’s the way we feel,” said Polly Hoover, president of the district-wide Faculty Council, and a professor of humanities at Wilbur Wright College. “We have been represented as the problem.”
Only 7 percent of full-time, first-time students at Chicago City Colleges complete a certificate or associate degree in three years. But that U.S. Education Department metric excludes nearly two thirds of students. Tracking all degree-seeking students over a longer period doesn’t improve the numbers by much.
When part-time students are included, the graduation rate bumps up a tick to 8 percent. And when time to degree is doubled, to six years, still only 13 percent of City College students make it to graduation.
More than half of degree-seeking students leave City Colleges after six months, and only 16 percent of students transfer to four-year institutions.
Most City College students are graduates of Chicago’s public schools. More than 90 percent need remediation.
Under the reinvention plan, City Colleges have hired more counselors and opened wellness centers. Colleges also are partnering with employers on job training programs.
