A New Way of Looking at Completing College

An article, New National Tally of College Completion Tries to Count All Students, by Katherine Mangan in The Chronicle gives many community colleges some hope that the statistics on college-completion rates may come closer to the realities of our many students who can only attend one or two classes per semester. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center released a report that looks at the non-traditional path many of our students take toward a college degree.

The report, "Completing College: A National View of Student Attainment Rates," concludes that when such nontraditional but increasingly common patterns of enrollment are considered, the national completion rate jumps to 54 percent, from 42 percent. Among full-time students, 75 percent earn a degree or certificate within six years.

While those numbers are lower than most educators would like, they aren't as alarming as the figures that state and federal policy makers have decried in calling for policies that tie budget allocations to colleges' graduation rates.

Many students who are balancing classes with family and work obligations attend more than one institution and take longer to earn a certificate or degree, the report points out. "Conventional measures of success, such as graduation rates for institution-based, first-time full-time degree-seeking cohorts, are insufficient for recognizing the distinctive pathways these students take, or for understanding the particular risks and supports that shape their academic careers," it says.

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How Big Is That Community College Pipeline?

Although it may not be their only mission, community colleges have always been an important way to start students on a path to a four-year degree. New data from the National Student Clearinghouse shows how big the two-year institutions are in starting towards a bachelor's degree.

With information from more than 3,000 colleges, the study finds that 45 percent of all students who finished a four-year degree in 2010-11 had previously enrolled at a two-year college. Of those students, 24 percent had been enrolled at the two-year institution for just one term, 16 percent for two terms, and 19 percent for three or four terms. But a full 12 percent were enrolled for at least 10 terms, suggesting that even students who spend a significant length of time at a community college might eventually go on to a four-year college.

 We hear a lot about completion rates being low and students being too slow in completing 2 or 4 year degrees. This study shows that more than half of the community college students earn their bachelor's degrees within three years. In that cohort that completed a four-year-degree but started at a community college, 16 percent earned their bachelor's degree within one year of enrolling at the four-year institution, and 36 percent had earned a degree within three years of enrolling.

Here in New Jersey, there were 52,003 students who in 2010-11 completed degrees at 4-Year Institutions, and 19,750 of them were previously enrolled at 2-Year institutions

Sources:
insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/10/data-show-key-role-community-colleges-4-year-degree-production

studentclearinghouse.info/snapshot/docs/SnapshotReport6-TwoYearContributions.pdf

Non-Traditional Students

Nontraditional students - adults who attend college part-time - are a large and growing segment of American higher education. They figure into the “completion agenda” (or lack of completion) that has gotten more national attention the past year.

According to some news reports, it seems that many colleges do not really track the graduation or retention rates of these adult students. Why? Currently no one requires it.

According to a survey conducted jointly by InsideTrack, a student coaching service, and the University Professional and Continuing Education Association Center for Research and Consulting.
77 percent of institutions do not know the graduation rate for their adult students.

But that may change. Why? Because someone may require it. It might end up being the federal government that wants that information. But, for now, it might start with accreditors.

The Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) is in the process of requiring institutions to report detailed information about those two key measures of student success, for all student populations, including the nontraditional ones.

Another finding from the survey looks pretty bad for the colleges. Adult students “tend to be viewed as cash cows” by colleges and 43 percent of colleges said their central administration values the money that adult programs bring in, but that the administration provides little support to those programs. So, colleges keep enrolling adult students, even if those adult students aren’t earning degrees.

This group is also rather difficult to track. They often “stop out” multiple times, and move from community college to 4-year institutions several times. It may take this adult student eight years or more to earn a bachelor’s degree, and that's a number the degree-presenting institution doesn't really want to tout.

cross-posted from Serendipity35 

Redefining Community Colleges (Whether They Want It Or Not)

I'm seeing a lot of articles this summer about the changing mission of the community college or redefining that mission. Some articles portray this as a natural process that is occurring. Others see it as something the colleges need to do deliberately.

On Chronicle.com, Richard Kahlenberg titled a post "Defining Community Colleges Down." He notes that even the media that rarely gives attention to two-year colleges seems to be picking up on these stories.

For example, the Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews wrote a post telling why he avoids community college pieces: "page view totals and e-mail traffic indicate readers move on quickly … whenever they see the words ‘community college.’”

The New York Times column, “Filling the Skills Gap,” is on the side of community colleges being places to prepare students for “middle-skill jobs.” The author associates the earlier mission to prepare students for a university degree as what they did in the days when they were known as “junior colleges.”

What is the community college mission? Skills, certificates, AA degrees that improve employment prospects, or preparation for the 4-year college...

Federal education data shows 81.4% of students entering community college for the first time say they eventually want to transfer and earn at least a bachelor’s degree. Unfortunately, only 11.6% community-college students get that baccalaureate degree within six years.

On the other end are colleges like Miami Dade College and some other community colleges "upgrading" by promoting “high skills” as well as “middle skills and offering baccalaureate degrees.

The Century Foundation Task Force on Preventing Community Colleges from Becoming Separate and Unequal is one group that rejects "downgrading" two-year institutions - although that downgrade might just be a return to its original mission.

Access Versus Success

The open-door policy at community colleges is unique in American higher education. It's all about broad access and it has prepared hundreds of millions of people for entry into the work force or to transfer to four-year colleges. Community colleges serve about 30 percent of all students in higher education.

But now we have less state and local/county money available and that requires painful choices.

Add to that a nationwide effort that is supported by the Obama administration to boost education levels, speed up the time it takes to get through a program, and to use resources for degree programs rather than for basic and developmental (remedial) and ESL courses.

The focus has moved to getting students who are most likely to graduate in three years (the magic number of years for two-year schools - it's 6 years for 4-year schools).



Some stats: Community college three-year graduation rates average in the low 20 percent range and a good number, including PCCC, are below ten percent. In 2009, the last year for which the federal government has reported data, close to 400 community colleges had graduation rates less than 15 percent.

Many people see the future as as a time when access to all is not the mission of the community college.

Earlier this year, the American Association of Community Colleges reported that this national completion agenda is starting to affect community colleges.

"Community colleges are being hammered to increase graduation rates," says Gary D. Rhoades, a professor of higher education at the University of Arizona, who also works with the Center for the Future of Higher Education, a research group. "One way to do that is to change the sort of student you serve."

What happens to the millions of low-income and minority students who look to attend community colleges every year, many of whom need remedial education first?

Nationally, more than 60 percent of students at two-year colleges are put into developmental education. Those students will usually take a year or more to catch up before taking their first college-level course. Unfortunately, many of them fail, or do not progress, and just drop out.

Although we spend more than $2-billion a year helping these students in English and mathematics skills (according to the Community College Research Center at Teachers College) the results are not impressive and don't justify the expenditure to those who provide the funding.

At PCCC, we are looking to separate our ESL and developmental students (currently, about 75% of our student population) from the college-level prepared students. It makes sense if you are trying raise the rate of students who graduate in three years because the clock starts on a student as soon as they take classes. If they spend a year in ESL and another year in developmental studies, even if they shoot through their college classes in two years, it's a four year run.

PCCC and other schools are looking at approaches such as moving those non-college-level students to units such as Continuing Education. There they may get remediation in computer-based adaptive learning classes. 

There are also financial considerations. Students who take developmental and also college level courses several times without passing still pay tuition each time. We are getting five times a single tuition rate for that student to get through one class.

And the land of financial aid is changing too. Pell Grants, which many of our students obtain, are changing and it seems that if students use their aid for remediation, there will be nothing left for them when they reach college level.

Success is important. So is access. Can we have both, or do we need to choose?


Some other related thoughts:

Education for All? 2-Year Colleges Struggle to Preserve Their Mission
http://chronicle.com/article/2-Year-Colleges-Fight-to-Save/131608/


Is Privatization the Answer? http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/23/community-college-leaders-told-privatization-wave-future

Completion Rates and the Uncounted

"Traditional" college students from a 1950s LIFE magazine

There was a time when almost every college student was a "traditional" student who finished high school, went to college full time, spent 2 or 4 years there and graduated.

There is plenty of data-collection on students and at the state and national levels there is a lot of interest in how many students are first-time, full-time students who enroll in the fall and get degrees from the places they started, in at most three years for an associate degree or six for a bachelor's.

The Chronicle of Higher Education even has a "College Completion Web Site" about these kinds of issues.

Who graduates from college, who doesn't and why are big questions for colleges these days.

Of the five million students who started college in the fall of 2009, 2.4 million of them didn't fit the federal definition, according to the U.S. Education Department. Almost 40% of all students in college then were enrolled part time, and many of them have probably since transferred. (According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, a third of students who started college in the fall of 2006 transferred at least once in the five years that followed.)

And what about our adult students who earned some credit in the past and are now back to try to finish a degree? Add them in with the transfers, part-timers, and students who take a break and re-enroll either later or elsewhere.

According to a recent Chronicle article, even if they graduate, they don't count.

1.2 million aren’t counted. It’s impossible to know whether many freshmen graduated or not, because the U.S. government simply doesn’t track them. Part-time students are among those not counted.

2.1 million didn’t officially graduate. This number isn’t exact, because it includes both drop-outs and students who started at one college and graduated from another.

Anecdotally, the article notes that President Obama would have been an uncounted student. He started at Occidental College in 1979, but as a rising junior, transferred to Columbia University. He got his diploma in 1983, but by today's national standards (first used in the mid-90s), he wouldn't even be a graduate.
Same goes for the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney. He went to Stanford University in the fall of 1965, but he left the following summer on his Mormon mission, spending more than two years in France. Back in the United States, he enrolled at Brigham Young University in 1969 and graduated two years later. But he wouldn't count either.

Solutions? Every school is looking at ways to improve completion rates. And most schools are hoping for a different way of looking at student success. Our own PCCC President, Dr. Steve Rose, likes to comment at graduation that a student who working full time, running a family and taking classes for 6 years to complete their A.S. degree IS a success story, despite what the data may say.

Sometimes the possible solutions that digging deeper into the data suggests are not what you might expect.

The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system used to allow students to apply for enrollment until the Friday before classes began. But then administrators at one college looked at what happened to those students and discovered a pattern: Students who enrolled closer to the start of the semester didn't do as well as those who had signed up earlier. As a result of that finding, the college required new students to apply at least 10 days before the start of the semester, and similar efforts are being studied at other institutions in the statewide system.

Further Reading

Do College-Completion Rates Really Measure Quality?

The Rise and Fall of the Graduation Rate

NJEDge.net Faculty Showcase

PCCC faculty and staff are presenting at the NJEDge.net Best Practices Faculty Showcase on March 16, 2012, held at William Paterson University in Wayne, NJ.

The Best Practices Faculty Showcase is a place for NJ faculty and academics to share innovative teaching methods that involve technology. Each year, over 20 sessions are presented at this one-day event.

PCCC will have the following presenters this year.

Kenneth Ronkowitz, "Unintended Consequences: Measuring Faculty Buy-in to Instructional Technology"

"Besides redesigning 25 GenEd courses across disciplines to include more writing, an initiative at PCCC has been to introduce instructional technology into those same courses. Now in its fifth year, we have found varied success with the six technology components. This presentation looks at the assessment of "faculty buy-in" (or lack thereof) for e-portfolios, video lecture capture, supplementary websites, streaming media, reusable learning objects and online gaming. Through surveys of faculty and students and focus groups, we have tried to determine the best practices that led to faculty using technology in the intended and some unintended ways. Through data from institutional research, we have determined what impact the initiative has had on overall student success. Our efforts have been the 2012 National Council of the Teachers of English (NCTE) Award for Two-Year Colleges in fostering student success."

Elizabeth Nesius, "Creating a Helpdesk Where None Exists"

"As the use of technology in education continues to increase, so does the need to train people to use it effectively. When an institution cannot provide a 24/7 helpdesk to assist students, faculty are often level one support for students, although the faculty themselves may not know how to help with technological issues students have. At PCCC, one way we have found to address the growing need for technology training is through the use of "lecture capture" software like ECHO 360 or Camtasia Relay to create short training videos on specific topics. Not only have training videos reduced the amount of technology training faculty need, but they also have had the unintended consequence of reaching a broader audience than a help desk or in-person training session, which has allowed for broader adoption of new technology. It can also reduce costs, as it provides an alternative to a help desk when dealing with common problems. In the future, we intend to develop short videos not only for technology training, but also for concepts that apply across disciplines so that some content can be offloaded from the classroom, giving faculty more time to spend on course content."

Richard Lauria, "Wiki-fy Your Class"

"A wiki is web page that you create and use to help you teach your classes. It's more than a blog and less than a LMS (Learning Management System). At a minimum, wikis can be used for organizing your class: an electronic bulletin board with your syllabus, course schedule and contact information posted. Another possibility is to use it as a resource: a repository of links, articles and videos to supplement what gets taught in the classroom. To truly wiki-fy your class, you let the students build it. You start with an address and a skeleton structure, but you give students access and let them populate the pages of the wiki. Regardless how you decide to use it, a wiki can be a very powerful tool. I will demonstrate how to create your very own wiki and start using it in your class today."


NJEDge.net is a consortium of academic and research institutions in NJ. Their main focus is innovative uses of education technology and the development of new technologies.

For more information on NJEDge.net, go to http://njedge.net/. For more information about the Best Practices Faculty Showcase, go to http://njedge.net/activities/facultyshowcase/2012/index.php.

Community Colleges on the Screen

It's a holiday weekend and you will be seeing ads for the new movie with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts called Larry Crowne. And the only reason for it to appear on this blog is that it concerns a community college.

If you teach, most movies and TV shows about teaching make you cringe. Something in me just won't allow me to go to the movies this weekend to see Bad Teacher, another summer offering.

I do watch the NBC sitcom Community and though the situations (thankfully) bear little resemblance to PCCC, we are not without our own absurdities.

What that program and Larry Crowne do share is a plot that follows an adult who is forced out of a job and turns to a community college as the way to gain further education as a way to get a better job.

That is a very real situation for many of our students.

Of course, Larry's first teacher is played by Julia Roberts. Ms. Tainot teachers Speech 217: The Art of Informal Remarks. That's a speech course I've never seen in a catalog. Larry connects - with his teacher, and eventually with the course - and he gets to give his speech and even quote the wise words of George Bernard Shaw.

The movie is summer fluff so the very real issue of today’s hard economic realities, which has triggered greater community college enrollments and even increased federal funding, gets no real treatment.

The old movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn once said about an artsy film that he was shown, "If I want to send a message, I'll use Western Union." As reviewers have suggested, this is a film in the Frank Capra/Preston Sturges mold, so don't expect much social commentary. Still, Larry's class is a cross section of the varied community college population found in most urban schools.

Larry also takes an economics course. I hated economics as an undergrad and his overinflated professor, Dr. Matsutani (played by Star Trek's George Takei), is a poke at the teacher who probably thinks he should be at MIT rather than at a two-year college. Does Larry get some practical economic knowledge in the class?



Here's hoping that for those of you in community colleges, you find your connection to the courses, fellow students and teachers.