Kay M. McClenney has a term for what happens when a college student contemplates thousands of course offerings and tries to schedule her year.
It’s the same thing that happened to a foreign faculty member who told her she had tried to buy toothpaste at Walgreens and got lost in the oral-care aisle.
“Brain freeze,” Ms. McClenney told fellow attendees at the annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges, which continues here this week.
Ms. McClenney, a longtime national community-college leader, was moderating a discussion about structured academic and career pathways that are designed to reduce the confusion and clutter that flummox students when they face too many choices.
An effort to expand the approach nationwide is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and led by the community-colleges association, where Ms. McClenney serves as a senior adviser. The Pathways Project is one of the topics generating buzz at the annual convention, which attracted more than 2,000 educators here.
It’s not about doing away with the humanities. It’s about getting rid of the default of students going into liberal arts because they don’t know what else to do, and then pouring coffee.
The need for a more-efficient course-selection process is clear at a time when dropout rates and debt levels are disturbingly high, panelists at the Sunday session agreed.
In Texas, students earning an associate degree accumulate, on average, 91 college credits when they should be able to graduate from a two-year program with just 60, Ms. McClenney said.
But who gets to decide which courses are cut when thousands of choices are narrowed into a more manageable pathway?
And how does a college reassure faculty members that it’s not going to gut liberal-arts offerings when focusing more intently on career outcomes?
The panel, as well as the hundreds of people in a packed ballroom, were mostly administrators, so the faculty perspective was largely absent.
But those who are promoting the pathways approach insisted that faculty members, including the adjuncts who teach most community-college courses, play an important role.
In order for pathways to take hold, faculty members, deans, and advisers need time to reflect on how courses should be aligned in ways that help assure that students can transfer, with majors, to four-year institutions, said Davis Jenkins, a senior research associate for the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Mr. Jenkins is an author of a book, released last year, that makes the case for simpler, more coherent programs of study.
Finding the time to devise those pathways isn’t easy, some audience members suggested, when budgets are being slashed and faculty members face increasing teaching loads.
All the talk about limiting choices is making many faculty members uncomfortable, Mr. Jenkins acknowledged.
“It gets to fears,” he said, “that they’re going to do away with my courses.”
‘Meta Majors’
At Indian River State College, an open-access institution in Florida that offers both two- and four-year degrees, students can choose from eight “meta majors,” including business, public safety, and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Once they click on an option on the college’s website, they can find the specific courses they need to take, the jobs that are available in the area, and what those jobs pay.
“There’s a myth out there that students enjoy wandering,” said Rob Johnstone, a consultant who advises colleges that are trying to restructure their offerings.
He said he’s been accused of trying to kill a liberal-arts education. In fact, a coherent structure of courses strengthens general-education courses by showing how they tie together, said Mr. Johnstone, who is president and founder of the National Center for Inquiry and Improvement.
At the Alamo Colleges, in Texas, students in work-force areas like welding and nursing already follow prescribed pathways, said the colleges’ chancellor, Bruce H. Leslie.
What’s different now is that the approach is being extended to the humanities. But one default category is no longer being offered.
“We’ve done away with liberal arts,” Mr. Leslie said.
“Don’t say that out loud!” Ms. McClenney said.
“I have to,” he answered. “It’s not about doing away with the humanities. It’s about getting rid of the default of students going into liberal arts because they don’t know what else to do, and then pouring coffee.”
Instead, liberal-arts courses are integrated into other structured sequences.
One way Prince George’s Community College, in Maryland, added more flexibility to its work force and its curriculum is by offering buyouts to 180 faculty and staff members, the college’s president, Charlene M. Dukes, said. About 50 people accepted them, and, depending on where the college decides to focus, not all of those positions will be refilled. The result, she hopes, will be a much more efficient system.
“We know students need English,” she said, “but we don’t necessarily need 100 sections.”
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
