Obama's Community College Stimulus Package

President Obama's $12 billion community college stimulus promises more funding for online education, workforce training, and program completion, and response was generally positive from the educators. The president made the speech at Macomb Community College in a Detroit suburb. Community college expert James Jacobs, recently of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University, recently became president of Macomb. The focus on community college represents another sign that this segment of higher education will receive more prominence in this administration. Earlier this year, Obama nominated Martha Kanter, former chancellor of the Foothill-DeAnza Community College District in Northern California, as Under Secretary of Education.

Accountability Analysis

States vary widely in how they track college student achievement, according to a new report cited in Inside Higher Ed. Responses to the report are mixed. While the call to account is generally lauded, but attempts to characterize progress as a horse race strike some as gimmicky. In our project, Domain-Specific Assessment, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, we are finding what cognitive scientists such as John Anderson and Richard Clark have found all along: Getting experts, such as postsecondary educators, to articulate the learning outcomes that matter is not so easy. Part of the problem is psychological: When someone becomes an expert in any field, lots of the cognitive work becomes automatic, chunked, and unconscious. Multiple steps become routines that are no longer carefully parsed. This can lead to a gap in how we articulate what it is that students need to learn in higher education. To see full report, check column to left.

Graduation rates in different colleges

A recent report reveals wide disparities in graduation rates between colleges of comparable selectivity and competitiveness. The American Enterprise Institute has published a report that identifies the colleges and their performances. Inside Higher Education has published an overview of the report.

Higher Education Accountability

In my morning reading of Inside Higher Ed, I noted that accountability for student learning outcomes was on the docket at a meeting this week among representatives of the U.S. Department of Education, various higher education associations, and accreditation agencies. The upshot of the negotiations, which have been tense in the past, was that institutions of higher learning will continue to set their own agenda for the outcomes they seek to achieve. Efforts to deputize accreditation agencies to define and collect data on other outcomes appeared to be overruled. This action may be framed as a step forward for continued higher education academic freedom or a loss for those concerned about assured consistent quality of learning across various higher education institutions.

Possible overhaul of Perkins Act and WIA?

Community colleges may figure prominently in the Obama administration's efforts to retrain unemployed workers. In a May speech described in Inside Higher Ed, the President promised to "lay out a fundamental rethinking of our job training, vocational education, and community college programs." In particular, he indicated that the various federal programs that address workforce education may be brought together or coordinated under a single policy. The announcement came in a speech announcing a new effort to make it easier for the unemployed to obtain financial aid for education while receiving unemployment benefits. A new website has been established by the departments of Education and Labor to inform the newly unemployed about educational opportunities.

College Completion Fund

Real work deadlines effectively shut down my blogging activities for the past few months, but today's reports about the Obama Administration's new College Access and Completion Fund caught my interest. The administration wants to dedicate $2.5 billion over the next five years, starting with the 2009-2010 budget, to improve low-income students' college completion rates. As reported in Inside Higher Ed, the program would channel money to states to develop and evaluate such programs. The discussion at a panel convened by the College Board favored basing state funding on completion, rather than enrollment, rates. Indiana is phasing in such an approach, while Ohio officials are discussing whether to plunge directly into it. To date, most of the discussion revolves around 4-year colleges, but there is some interest in including 2-year colleges based the successful remedial education at El Paso Community College in Texas. MDRC and The Gates Foundation were present.

Catching Up with the New Year

The beginning of the year is a time for renewed resolve, and in this spirit, I'm passing along some fundamental background reading on community colleges from the National Center for Education Statistics. This federal agency gathers data from most post-secondary institutions that participate in financial aid programs. Below are some reports based on these data, and all reminded me of my experiences as a young woman who took a non-traditional path through higher education, dipping in and out of the workplace with little financial support from my family.

Community Colleges: Special Supplement to The Condition of Education, issued by the U.S. Department of Education in August 2008, reports that 45 percent of community college freshmen drop out after two years of school, which is much higher than the 16 to 17 percent of 4-year college freshmen who drop out. About 39% of the community college dropouts originally intended to transfer to a 4-year college. Some research has noted that the federal data collection system needs to keep better track of how many of these "drop outs" in fact transfer to other higher education institutions (Cabrera, Burkum, & La Nasa, 2003). There is, it seems, a lot of shopping around and moving around among adults seeking to improve their skills.

Career and Technical Education in the United States: 1990 to 2005, another report from the Department of Education, reported that, in high school, more boys than girls focus on work-related courses, but in post-secondary schools, more women than men take the credential or work-related courses. Most women focus on careers in health fields, business, and computers. In addition, from 1990 to 2004, there were big increases--ranging from 35 percent to 66 percent--in the number of career education students who worked full-time while they studied. Part-timers have a higher chance of dropping out than full-timers.

National Assessment of Vocational Education reported the good news that U.S. colleges and universities are open to a more diverse group of students than ever, but also reported the bad news that these diverse students are not always completing their degrees.

Profile of Undergraduates in U.S. Postsecondary Institutions: 1999-2000 reported that while men can secure higher incomes with a minimum of post-secondary coursework, women do not experience the same income increases until they complete a certificate or degree.