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The Edge

Connect with the people and ideas reshaping higher education, written by Goldie Blumenstyk. Delivered every other Wednesday. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, sign up to receive it in your email inbox.

November 10, 2021
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From: Goldie Blumenstyk

Subject: The Edge: The 'Dirty Secret' That Obstructs Transfer

I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering innovation in and around academe.

Starting this week we’re making some changes in The Edge. I’ll continue to report, write, and produce this newsletter, but some weeks, it will lead off with contributions from my colleagues. This week you’ll hear from Scott Carlson, on the “dirty secret” that obstructs transfer and how good design can support students.

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I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering innovation in and around academe.

Starting this week we’re making some changes in The Edge. I’ll continue to report, write, and produce this newsletter, but some weeks, it will lead off with contributions from my colleagues. This week you’ll hear from Scott Carlson on the “dirty secret” that obstructs transfer, and how good design can support students.

Straight talk on community colleges.

Community colleges are in a strange position these days: They are the keystone for the nation’s plan to help more people earn a postsecondary credential, and at the same time an underfunded and disrespected piece of the higher-ed puzzle.

“Disrespected” is a strong word, but shouldn’t we call it like it is? Last week I co-hosted a panel discussion with Michael Sorrell, president of Paul Quinn College, where we encouraged candor on the issues facing two-year institutions — and the broader system’s narratives about them. Here is some of what we heard:

Transfer isn’t getting (that much) easier.

We have been talking about the problems with transfer from two- to four-year institutions for decades, yet it persists as a major barrier for students, particularly those who are low-income, first-generation, and unfamiliar with the ins and outs of higher ed. In a sector driven by prestige and competition, should we wonder why some states and systems continue to make that process opaque and difficult?

“Let’s just put the little dirty secret out there,” said Sorrell. “They don’t necessarily want community-college students to transfer.” For all the lip service that institutions give to student-centeredness and social mobility, many four-year colleges are still hung up on biases about rigor.

“It’s an ethos and a culture issue,” said Latricia D. Brand, chief diversity officer at Portland Community College. “Many of our four-year peers truly do understand and appreciate the mission of community college, but don’t necessarily know that it’s so clearly aligned to their mission, when it is.”

Improving transfer from two- to four-year institutions can’t be only about procedural reforms, said Shauna Davis, the Lumina Foundation’s strategy director for participation at community colleges. “If people just don’t want students to come, because they think the institution is less than, then that has to be addressed head on. And that’s not something that comes from a larger systemic policy change per se.”

At the City University of New York, “transfer students do just as well — or better than — so called ‘native students,’” said Niesha Ziehmke, associate dean for academic affairs at Guttman Community College. If data can diminish those doubts, maybe there would be more attention to broad solutions, instead of the status quo, where “we just sort of like scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape forward to try to do little fixes or improvements,” she said. (Folks in the panel’s audience shared some transfer-enabling websites they liked: NJ Transfer and the University Center of Lake County, in Illinois.)

Where there isn’t a will, state legislation or demographic challenges may force more four-years to remove barriers to transfer.

You can’t underestimate the role of good design.

During the pandemic, two-year institutions, reeling from enrollment losses, have worked to set up (and maintain) students’ access to online instruction and services and to meet their basic needs. Colleges distributed laptops and hotspots and put more resources into food pantries and other essentials (Long Beach City College is now letting students sleep in cars in a campus garage).

Government relief funds made many of those adjustments possible. A great challenge now, we heard from the audience, is finding ways to keep new practices going — and refine them — without the same level of federal support.

“There becomes the difference between making something functionally available versus good design,” said Davis. “Are we making people click through five things and, in turn, four pages, in order to get an advising appointment? There has to be a better way.” Many institutions, she pointed out, are underutilizing the technology they already have on campus.

At Portland Community College, a “tremendous amount” of relief funds are going to infrastructure, said Brand, and findings from student surveys are guiding those investments. “In some instances, we’re learning that what our students are saying is working for them is going to require a radical shift in how we deliver,” she said.

Student services that were not online pre-pandemic need to stay online now, said Ziehmke, at Guttman. Having a financial-aid or advising appointment on Zoom in the evening can make all the difference to a student who has to rush out after (an in-person or online) class to get to work or take care of family obligations, said Barbara Gooch, a student at Volunteer State Community College, in Tennessee.

She spoke blunt truths about what it was like to be a student parent — and student grandparent — working toward an associate degree and planning to transfer to a four-year university. “We talk a lot about ‘good design.’ I would rather just say, Can we just have basic design?” she said, applying that not only to support services, but to courses.

Working links help — and more emphasis on learning the material than on busywork, she said. Professors tend to think that newly remote students are sitting at home, not having to commute, so they pile on the assignments — and sometimes require students to shift across various platforms to get everything done.

Good design, said Gooch, is remembering: “Who is your audience, your online students? What are you designing for? What is your purpose? That is what I think we really need to start asking.” —Scott Carlson

Recommended reading.

Here are some education-related stories from other outlets that recently caught my eye. Did I miss a good one? Let me know.

  • Whatever the heck the “metaverse” is, the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg considers education a key piece of its future, complete with virtual-reality headsets. But even with plans by Facebook Reality Labs to invest $150 million in an education program to promote development of and training on virtual-reality tools, as EdSurge reports, the challenges ahead are many, not least that “VR headsets have failed to take off widely, despite years of attempts by Facebook.”
  • High-school quality matters in preparing students to succeed in college, but that’s hardly all, a new study argues. The communities where students live also play a large role in whether they complete a college degree. The study, by the University of Chicago’s To&Through Project, examined the impact of school choice in Chicago, and as Chalkbeat reports, the researchers said their findings “underscore the need for deeper investments in housing security, health-care access, and transportation” to support students’ progress.
  • Even as college enrollments are falling, plenty of people are still taking this moment as an opportunity to get the training they need to advance or change their careers. “Maine is like a laboratory for this,” The Hechinger Report writes in this deep look at how the state is responding to the evolving needs of its economy.

Correction: Last week’s newsletter misidentified the location of one of the colleges that received Excelencia in Education’s Seal of Excelencia designation. It was in Illinois, not Ohio (and our post has been updated).

Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, find them here. To receive your own copy, free, register here. If you want to follow me on Twitter, @GoldieStandard is my handle.

Goldie’s Weekly Picks

  • U. of Austin logo and promotional statements
    Making Austin Even Weirder

    A Planned University ‘Dedicated to Truth’ Will Welcome ‘Witches Who Refuse to Burn’

    By Katherine Mangan
    The University of Austin will promote freedom of inquiry and embrace scholars who have been “treated like thought criminals,” its backers say.
  • Rendering of a typical suite in UCSB's Munger Hall.
    Dormzilla

    Is a Massive Dorm Project ‘Inspired and Revolutionary’ or ‘Billionaire Egomania’?

    By Katherine Mangan
    Plans for a 4,500-student dormitory full of windowless bedrooms raise questions about a wealthy donor’s outsize influence on the project.
  • BudgetCuts_DeHaro H.jpg
    The Review

    College Finances Are Being Eaten From the Inside

    By Erik Gilbert
    How online-course contractors exploit vulnerable institutions.
Leadership & GovernanceInnovation & TransformationFinance & OperationsLaw & Policy
Goldie Blumenstyk
The veteran reporter Goldie Blumenstyk writes a weekly newsletter, The Edge, about the people, ideas, and trends changing higher education. Find her on Twitter @GoldieStandard. She is also the author of the bestselling book American Higher Education in Crisis? What Everyone Needs to Know.
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