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.

Exciting Efforts to Improve California Community College

Tony Bryk, new president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, announced last night he is putting community college at the top of the foundation's priority list. At a gathering of community college educators and researchers, Bryk and colleague Rose Arca, presented findings of the foundation's Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC) program, which has involved 11 colleges in collaboratively sharing strategies to improve teaching and learning in basic skills. Future efforts will focus on developmental math and supporting institutional leaders to use data to improve programs. Speakers included Myra Snell, Los Medanos Community College mathematics instructor; Frank Chong, president of Oakland's Laney College; and David Wolf, a former president of different state community colleges and an accreditation leader.

A few tidbits jumped off the page for me. First, Tom Bailey, director of Columbia University's Community College Research Center, has published a new paper that reviews some of the challenges faced by most community college students in attaining a degree. At the meeting, one of the speakers estimated that 58 percent of incoming community college students need one basic skills class and that only 29 percent in those in English basic skills and 7 percent in mathematics basic skills ever graduate. Figures like these explain why foundations are converging on community colleges as the cause du jour: the William & Flora Hewlett, Irvine, Walter S. Johnson, Lumina and, recently as mentioned in this blog, Gates. Foothill College biology instructor Celeste Carter reminded everyone about the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technological Education program and the STEM Talent Expansion program.

WestEd was handing out information about seminars into Reading Apprenticeship strategies that community college instructors in all subjects can use to help students struggling with English basic skills. Instructor professional development has become a major focus, and the trick, according to Snell, is to help instructors see it less as "tutoring for bad teachers" and more as understanding how to teach students better. At Los Medanos, they have used Japanese lesson study and, as she put it: "You pay them and hold meetings on Friday afternoons from 4-7 and give them dinner. " As noted in this blog earlier, Chabot College is now serving as the home base of "faculty inquiry" in the state's community colleges with Hewlett's support. Snell noted that it's not enough for faculty to do good instruction--they need to "document it, share it, and build on it."

Chong described ambitious efforts to invite high school dropouts to return to school through college programs and special culturally-sensitive programs focused on African Americans and Latinos. Wolf brought a dose of reality, explaining that few state legislators in California have any interest in community colleges, even though, since Prop. 13, their rules have increasingly controlled and constrained community colleges. I need to look up the "50 percent rule." A Google search yielded no answers, but apparently, this is highly problematic for community colleges.

College on less than $600 a year

California's 109 community colleges offer the most affordable option in the U.S. for students and their families. A new report ranks the state at the top of the nation, noting that more than 2.5 million students turn to the system for education. This news contrasts with the sobering announcement from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that the state's current fiscal crisis will lead to budget cutbacks and tuition increases.

The same report flunked all other 49 states for charging families too much, including the state of Washington, where it is estimated a family spends more than a third of its income on a 2-year college degree. The same state, however, offers baccalaureate degrees through its 2-year college program, often by partnering with 4-year colleges. Similar efforts are under way at New Jersey and Arizona community colleges. One report estimates that 36% of low income families' students complete college compared to 81% of high income families, figures that have inspired The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support efforts to help more low-income American students finish college.

The report ranked states on preparing high school graduation rates, college participation rates, rates of completion, and baccalaureate attainment rates.

More philanthropic interest in funding college completion

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced a new philanthropic effort focused on improving college completion rates. The U.S. leads the world in the proportion of students in college, but lags in the proportion of students finishing college. Community colleges play a key role in this battle for retention. Melinda Gates made the announcement.

Are state tests going to expand to include new skills?

Critics of state tests love to flog them for being "too narrow," and now we have the logical consequence. If you want to fix the test, make it longer! The Boston Globe reports that state educators are moving toward including tests of 21st-century skills, such as problem solving, communication, and teamwork, into the standardized state tests. Right away conservatives attacked the move as watering down state content standards and tests, but they were quickly told that the changes would "complement, not replace" the existing tests. The process to include new 21st-century skills testing is expected to take 10 years and require a complete overhaul of teacher training programs and the state's academic standards.

On a related note from post-secondary-land, you can check out this link for the debate over calls for testing and accountability. And see this link for work on greater post-secondary accountability by the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

On a different note related to the sagging economy, a community college president received a 50% raise this year, but then turned around and donated the after-tax amount ($74,000+) to a student scholarship fund. Wow! In Kentucky, another community college president recently declined a bonus and pay raise. Signs of difficult times. A community college in Pennsylvania is offering unemployed workers up to 12 college units for free to retrain. A group in Michigan scanned public records to determine how many local students in their community were eligible for a little-known state college aid program.

Do SATs predict college graduation?

In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Peter Salins, former provost of the State University of New York (SUNY), Stony Brook, argues that while it may be fashionable to downgrade the importance of SATs in selecting college students, a recent quasi-experiment in his university system indicates that higher SAT scores do indeed predict higher graduation rates. This finding is based on comparing the relative changes in graduation rates between SUNY campuses that raised SAT scores for admission to those that did not (See related link to the left). The benefit of this comparison is that it held constant the other competing predictor of student success, GPA. The graduation rates at the more selective SUNY campuses soared relative to the less selective campuses. The findings suggest that, as a self-selection variable, SAT scores are one way that administrators can choose the most likely students to graduate.

Fair enough, but this conclusion raises troubling questions for me about the goal of post-secondary education: Is it ultimately designed for a self-selected group of students who can survive, in Darwinian fashion, all manner of instruction? As a mother who has just helped both of my sons "prep" for the SAT, I had the opportunity to observe the level of "teaching to the test" that is involved in attaining higher scores. Perhaps the latent variable here that links SAT performance to graduation is little more than the willingness to engage in focused and repetitive practice for tests. To be sure, much of post-secondary education requires little more that: Sheer persistence. Taking this notion a step further, it has become commonplace to hear how a college education "predicts" higher salaries in life. I wonder. I am unfamiliar with the studies underlying these claims, but I suspect, they are grounded in correlation, which is not the same as identifying causation. It may be that something else is at work here. Perhaps the same tenacity and persistence that permits one to engage in grueling SAT prep and all manner of college classes--including the most inconsiderate and Darwinian--might truly predict success in life, perhaps even more than a college education.

Keeping community college learning expectations high

A big part of my work with the Domain-Specific Assessment project funded by the U.S. Department of Education involves trying to help community colleges set a higher bar for student learning. Today some reports came out based on national survey data that provide some more insight into the problem of low expectations in community colleges. I have put the links here on the blog for your review. I will comment more after I read them!