Motivational framed posters line the hallways here at the Tennessee Technology Center. “The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers,” one reads. “But above all, the world needs dreamers who do.” In classrooms hang inspirational poems with titles like “Success” and “Don’t Quit.”
That hopefulness permeates the center, from its staff to its roughly 900 students, with measurable results.
The Nashville campus is part of the Tennessee Technology Center system, which has become something of a darling among college-completion advocates. Comprising 27 locations across the state, the system boasts graduation and job-placement rates that many colleges only dream of: 75 percent and 83 percent, respectively. Such achievements are even more noteworthy given the population the system serves: racially and ethnically diverse, low-income adults—students who tend to struggle in college.
The system’s success has caught the attention of two-year colleges, a sector in which less than a third of students earn degrees in four years, although about a fifth of them transfer to four-year colleges during that time. Administrators from community colleges around the country—the City Colleges of Chicago; the Ivy Tech Community College system, in Indiana; and the Texas State Technical College system, for example—are trekking to Tennessee to observe the centers’ rigid academic structure.
Nobody thinks community colleges should turn into technical colleges. They have a broader mission, which includes preparing students for transfer and providing enrichment classes to the community. Still, the Tennessee system’s model seems to help meet two pressing needs: to increase graduation rates, in accordance with national goals, and to better prepare students for the work force, as jobs demand more education than ever before.
The system’s highly structured academic environment, not unlike that of a high school, is key to its success, senior administrators say. Rather than choose individual courses, students enroll—the majority full time—in programs with predetermined schedules. Classes meet every day for about six hours and last from several weeks to more than a year, depending on the program. Attendance is taken. Remediation is embedded in coursework. Though grouped together, students move through programs at their own pace.
The structure is foreign to most traditional colleges, where students design their own schedules.
“We take away a lot of the choices from students,” says James King, the system’s vice chancellor. “This is not Burger King. There is no ‘Have it your way’ here.”
Mr. King welcomes all the interest in his system, but he finds its sudden novelty amusing. “We have been around for 60 years,” he says. “We are smiling a lot these days and taking the compliments as they come.”
Over time, despite administrative changes, the technology centers’ instructional model has remained essentially the same. The system was once run by the state’s Department of Education, but as the centers evolved into predominantly adult-serving institutions, the Board of Regents took over.
Lawmakers in the state are paying attention. In 2010 the Tennessee legislature passed a law intended to improve completion rates at public higher-education institutions. It requires community colleges to adopt many of the same strategies the technology centers already employ, such as block scheduling—in which students are assigned to multiple classes together—and grouping students in cohorts.
National higher-education advocates, too, are looking on with interest. Stan Jones, president of the nonprofit group Complete College America, is an enthusiastic supporter of the technology-center system. In fact, the group released a report in 2010 to promote the system’s work. “The model illustrates that institutions can graduate more students,” he says.
While an increasing number of community colleges have taken notice of the technology-center system, some are incorporating only “bits and pieces” of the model, says Mr. Jones. Some limitations are clear. For example, many community-college students attend part-time.
But a piecemeal approach to adapting the technical-system model is problematic, Mr. Jones says, because the synergy of several strategies is what makes it work. “Without that,” he says, “institutions are not going to get the results they are looking for.”
Learning the Ropes
Anybody with a high-school diploma or GED can train at a Tennessee Technology Center, in programs as varied as collision repair and practical nursing. The centers, with open enrollment and rolling admissions, serve about 30,000 students. The prevailing philosophy is that they learn by doing, at their own pace, with lectures kept to a minimum.
Graduation is practically inevitable, says Mark A. Lenz, director of the Nashville center: “We put them on that path from the beginning.” From the start, he says, they know how long their program will last, what classes they’ll take, and how they’ll find work. Costs range from $1,638 to earn a phlebotomy certificate to $7,711 for a machine-tool-technology diploma.
A hallmark of the centers is a competency-based curriculum, in which students must demonstrate their mastery of certain skills. Business-systems-technology students, for instance, take quizzes and tests, while welding students perform techniques as instructors evaluate them. The programs are based not on earning credits but on fulfilling a required number of course hours.
All instructors come from their respective industries and work closely with an advisory board, primarily of business leaders, to ensure that the students’ training matches local needs. Relationships on the boards often lead to job offers for students.
The center goes to great lengths to mimic the workplace setting. Barbering students, for example, work in a large classroom that resembles a barbershop, down to the striped pole outside the door. In the mornings, they gather in an adjacent room for “theory class,” where Jeffrey Moore, an instructor, lectures for an hour on a range of topics, such as hair tinting and identifying skin disorders.
The rest of the day is spent on the “floor,” as it’s called, where students like Kelnitra Robinson apply what they’re learning on paying customers. As Ms. Robinson, wearing black scrubs, dips her clippers into a large glass of blue disinfectant, she talks about the need for proper sanitation in a barbershop—a lesson undoubtedly repeated over the course of the program.
Ms. Robinson, 25, decided to become a barber to improve her earning potential after being stuck in what she describes as a string of dead-end jobs, like scooping ice cream at a Dairy Queen. This is her second attempt at higher education. In 2005, at her mother’s insistence, she enrolled at Volunteer State Community College, to study physical therapy. But feeling detached from the courses and the college experience, she dropped out after a year and a half. This time around, she says, she feels connected to the material, supported by instructors and staff, and eager to attend classes.
“What I’ve found out is that I learn best by doing, by working with my hands,” Ms. Robinson says. “I have big dreams now. I plan to open my own upscale salon, or even a barbershop.”
Although students progress through coursework mainly on their own, instructors are always nearby. In the business-systems-technology program, where the classroom features a receptionist’s desk, cubicles, and a coffee stand, students at computers work on basic accounting and customer-relations management.
There are no lectures, but Deanna Wallace, an instructor, roams around checking on students’ work and helping them with concepts they don’t understand. She will be their instructor for the duration of the program.
Her role is a challenging one, with students continually arriving and graduating. And the program offers not only certificates and diplomas, which vary in training length, but also several tracks for different specialties. So Ms. Wallace must follow students’ progress individually rather than moving them through coursework as a group.
Standing behind the faux receptionist’s desk, she laughs. “You have to be real organized to do this job,” she says. “The key is making sure everything is laid out for them from Day 1 until they graduate.”
Embedded Remediation
Remedial work at the technology centers is integrated into academic programs, going by the less stigmatizing name “technology foundations.”
A more traditional model, especially at community colleges, is for students to complete remedial courses before they can enroll in their chosen programs. But here at the Nashville center, students enroll in programs, then go through an assessment: an untimed, computer-based diagnostic test that evaluates them in six areas, including applied math, reading, and locating information. On the basis of the test results, each student gets an individualized learning plan to help improve any areas of weakness, such as conjugating verbs or multiplying fractions.
Students work on those plans in a “foundations lab.” The amount of time they spend there varies from a couple of weeks to several months, depending on how much help they need.
Donna M. Johnson, who is studying to be an aesthetician, spent a week of mornings in the lab, brushing up on math, especially how to decipher word problems. “Math was kicking my butt,” she says. “I had been out of school for so long. I really needed the help.”
Ms. Johnson, 41, has dyslexia, which compounds her difficulty with word problems. But the foundations lab’s senior instructor, Danny E. Gardner, helped her understand them, she says, by using familiar names and cities.
Incorporating the lab into students’ schedules is so seamless that some don’t recognize they are taking part in developmental education, says Mr. King, the vice chancellor. “For the students,” he says, “the foundations lab is just part of their academic program.”
At community colleges, students who must go through remedial courses can get discouraged and drop out. With remediation embedded, some researchers say, students may be more likely to maintain motivation and not feel as if they are losing time and money before progressing with their chosen programs.
“The model,” Mr. King says, “really makes a difference with our completion rates.”
Applying the Lessons
Elton E. Stuckly Jr., president of Texas State Technical College at Waco, says he was amazed when he first read about the Tennessee system’s high graduation rates. “How could they brag about 70-percent completion rates? It was hard to believe,” says Mr. Stuckly, who is also vice chancellor for instructional services at the Texas State Technical College system.
The Texas system’s graduation rate is only 24 percent. “We need to figure out a way to graduate more students,” he says. So with his interest piqued, Mr. Stuckly organized a visit to Tennessee. His own state’s plan to introduce performance-based financing of all public colleges next year further spurred him.
In June, Mr. Stuckly and the vice presidents of instruction at each of the Texas system’s four colleges visited the Nashville center. He liked the small classes, he says, as well as the concepts of course hours, block scheduling, and embedded remediation.
Mr. Stuckly is hopeful that he can incorporate some of those strategies on his campus. In fact, he was so impressed by how instructors in Nashville juggled students at different levels of progress that he will send several instructors from his system to visit.
Money is a constant concern in the Texas system, of course, just as at colleges everywhere, and any significant change in curriculum or instruction would certainly require more of it. Also, the college’s large enrollment would complicate the creation of smaller classes. Still, Mr. Stuckly says, there’s “a lot we can learn from Tennessee.”
A movement toward a more structured curriculum is taking hold at community colleges elsewhere, too. Those in the City University of New York are already proving how well some of the strategies employed by the Tennessee Technology Centers can work in the two-year sector.
In 2007, CUNY began the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs to increase the graduation rates of its community-college students. Now students in the programs attend classes full time, on a block schedule. The colleges also provide tutoring, career counseling, and, in some cases, tuition waivers.
A study released in June by MDRC, a nonprofit research firm for education and social policy, found that students in those programs were likelier to persist, as well as to earn more credits from their first to second semesters, than other students were. In addition, the share of students who completed developmental coursework increased by 15 percentage points.
Providing less choice and more structure may be counterintuitive to higher education’s tradition of self-exploration. But the idea is gaining ground among community-college leaders yearning for a solution to poor retention and graduation rates.
Too many students, studies show, meander through college without a plan, either dropping out or drawing out their time to degree. But here in Tennessee, there’s no meandering. Community-college leaders see promise in a model that keeps students on track to that all-important goal: graduation.
