After years of flying under the radar in discussions about education, community colleges have become formidable players on the national stage, and it’s time they stepped up their game by improving “unforgivable” program-completion numbers, the longtime leader of the League for Innovation in the Community College told a conference audience here on Sunday.
“As community colleges, we are now out of the closet,” Terry O’Banion, president emeritus of the league and chair of the graduate faculty at National American University, said. Once dismissed as “high schools with ash trays,” two-year colleges have become ground zero in the national completion movement, which has “taken on a life of its own” since the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation called on the nation to double the number of students who, by 2020, earn a certificate or associate degree or transfer to a four-year college or university.
President Obama, the Lumina Foundation, higher-education associations, and individual states and colleges have all announced their own goals that two-year colleges are now struggling to reach.
“This is our Andy Warhol moment,” Mr. O’Banion told a group of educators attending a breakout seminar as the League for Innovation’s annual conference kicked off. He urged them not to blow their “15 minutes of fame.”
But while two-year colleges have greatly expanded access to higher education through their open-door policies and aggressive outreach, “we don’t bring a great record of success” in seeing them through, he said. Among the statistics that should be giving them heartburn, he said, were that:
- Fourteen percent of community-college students do not complete a single credit in their first term.
- Nearly half of them drop out by the second year.
- Sixty percent of them need at least one remedial course, and on some campuses as many as 90 percent do.
- A third of the students recommended for placement in remedial courses never take them.
Concerns About a Short-Term Focus
Critics argue that the activist push by major foundations has drowned out other voices and elevated short-term employability above broader education goals. Mr. O’Banion said he also worried that the completion agenda had focused too narrowly on technical and career success. And he predicted that the completion movement would ultimately fail to achieve its goals largely because faculty members were not adequately involved.
His co-presenter, Allatia Harris, vice chancellor for strategic initiatives at San Jacinto College, in Texas, said that when she began teaching, professors measured their success by how students performed in their own classrooms. Today, they need to look at the bigger picture, she said.
But tying their evaluations to colleges’ completion outcomes could prompt faculty members to lower standards to get more students through, one participant noted.
“There is great concern that the completion agenda translates to an erosion of rigor,” said Mary Hatch, dean of liberal, visual, and performing arts at Elgin Community College, in Illinois.
In addition, she said, some faculty members worry that “if you have to do a lot of hand holding to get students through, how will they perform when they’re out in the workplace?”
Ideally, Mr. O’Banion said, the student-success pathway would start when a young child started thinking about what he or she wanted to be, and would continue with a diary of goals, steps, and accomplishments that would follow the student through school and college. Milestones, like the point when a student has earned 15 college-credit hours, would be recognized, and when a student stumbled, someone would immediately intervene.
Instead, what many community colleges offer are worthwhile strategies like student-learning communities and first-year support groups that fail to move the needle on overall success rates because they operate in silos.
A report published in 2013 by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center showed that despite the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been poured into helping students succeed, the nation’s six-year graduation rate hasn’t budged.
Having a declared major or a program of study when a student enters college doubles his or her chances of success, Mr. O’Banion said. For students who want time to explore options, a college can offer a program of study that includes career exploration, skills assessments, and study techniques.
Other strategies include making sure every student has a “significant connection” with another person as soon as he or she arrives on a campus, whether it’s the security guard showing students where to park or a professor greeting them at the classroom door.
