Colleagues, here is an IDEAS project, replete with a model and a method of determining effectiveness, is both cross-disciplinary as well as scaleable and replicable.
Many of these components already exist at Parkland College. How shall we put them together?
Many of these components already exist at Parkland College. How shall we put them together?
Persistence, retention, completion -- Success.
March 1st is the next opportunity.
--Tom
_______________________________________________
How to Escape the
Community-College Trap
More than half of community-college students
never earn a degree. Here's how to fix that.
ANN HULBERTDEC 22 2013, 9:25 PM ET
Mike McQuade
When Daquan McGee got accepted to the Borough of Manhattan Community College in the
spring of 2010, he was 19 and still finding his footing after a two-year prison
sentence for attempted robbery. He signed up for the standard battery of
placement tests in reading, writing, and math; took them cold; and failed
two—writing and math. Steered into summer developmental education (otherwise
known as remediation), he enrolled in an immersion writing course, which he
passed while working full-time at a Top Tomato Super Store. Then McGee learned
of a program for which a low-income student like him might qualify, designed to
maximize his chances of earning a degree.
At a late-summer meeting, he got the
rundown on the demands he would face.
McGee
would have to enroll full-time in the fall, he was told; part-time attendance
was not permitted. Every other week, he would be required to meet with his
adviser, who would help arrange his schedule and track his progress. In
addition to his full course load, McGee would have to complete his remaining
remedial class, in math, immediately. If he slipped up, his adviser would hear
about it from his instructor—and mandatory tutoring sessions would follow. If
he failed, he would have to retake the class right away.
Also on McGee’s
schedule was a non-optional, noncredit weekly College Success Seminar,
featuring time-management strategies, tips on study habits and goal setting,
exercises in effective communication, and counsel on other life skills. The
instructor would be taking attendance. If McGee complied with all that was
asked of him, he would be eligible for a monthly drill: lining up in one of the
long hallways in the main campus building to receive a free, unlimited
MetroCard good for the following month. More important, as long as he stayed on
track, the portion of his tuition not already covered by financial aid would be
waived.
In a
hurry to make up for his wasted prison years, McGee signed up. The pace, as
he’d been warned, was fast from the start, and did not ease up after the fall.
Through the spring semester and on into his second year, his course load
remained heavy, and the advisory meetings continued, metronomically. He was
encouraged to take winter- and summer-term classes, filling in the breaks
between semesters.
McGee, a guy with a stocky boxer’s build, doesn’t gush—he
conveys low-key composure—but when I met him in October of 2012, early in his
third year, he had only praise for the unremitting pushiness, and for the array
of financial benefits that came along with it. The package was courtesy of a
promising experimental initiative that goes by the snappy acronym ASAP, short for
Accelerated Study in Associate Programs. Last winter, McGee graduated with an
associate’s degree in multimedia studies. It had taken him two and a half
years.
In the community-college
world, McGee’s achievement is a shockingly rare feat,
and the program that so intently encouraged him to accomplish it is a striking
anomaly. The country’s low-cost sub-baccalaureate system—created a century ago
to provide an open and affordable entry into higher education to an ever more
diverse group of Americans—now enrolls 45 percent of all U.S.
undergraduates, many of them part-time students. But only a fraction ever earn
a degree, and hardly anyone does it quickly.
The associate’s degree is
nominally a two-year credential, and the system is proud of its transfer
function, sending students onward to four-year schools, as juniors, to pursue a
bachelor’s degree—the goal that 80 percent of entrants say they aspire to.
Reality, however, typically confounds that tidy timeline. In urban community
colleges like the Borough of Manhattan Community College, the national
three-year graduation rate is 16 percent. Nationwide, barely more than a
third of community-college enrollees emerge with a certificate or degree within six years.
Behind
these dismal numbers lie the best of intentions. Community colleges have made
it their mission to offer easy access, flexibility, and lots of options to a
commuter population now dominated by “nontraditional” students. That’s a
catchall label for the many people who don’t fit the classic profile of kids
living in dorms, being financed by their parents.
Nearly 70 percent of
high-school graduates currently pursue some kind of postsecondary schooling, up
from half in 1980. The surge is hardly surprising: higher education, over the
past three decades, has become a prerequisite for a middle-class life. But of
course, as the matriculation rate has climbed, so has the number of students
who enter college with marginal credentials and other handicaps.
The least
academically prepared and most economically hard-pressed among them are
typically bound for community college, where low-income students—plenty of them
the first in their family to venture beyond high school—outnumber their
high-income peers 2-to-1. Many of these students are already juggling jobs and
family commitments by their late teens (McGee and his longtime girlfriend had a
baby daughter in the fall of his freshman year). This could hardly be a more
challenging population to serve.
The bet
public community colleges have made—that the best way to meet the needs of
their constituents is by offering as much flexibility and convenience as
possible—makes a certain intuitive sense in light of such complications. So
does a commitment to low cost. Give students a cheap, expansive menu, served up
at all hours; don’t demand a specific diet—that’s not a bad metaphor for the
community-college experience today.
If
anything, with enthusiasm rising for massive open online courses, orMOOCs, the
higher-education pendulum is now swinging further in this direction. The
current interest in “competency-based learning”—liberating students to earn
degrees not by amassing credit hours but by preparing for assessments of
particular skills at whatever pace and by whichever route they choose—is part
of the same trend. Some reformers see the seeds of a revolution in college
education, promising ultraconvenient, self-guided, low-cost courses of study
for everyone.
The “beginning of the unbundling of the American university” is
how one observer has described the transformation. All it will take for
students to avail themselves of this emerging opportunity is a clear sense of
where they’re headed, lots of self-motivation, and good access to information
about what mix of skills is likely to lead to a promising career. And therein,
of course, lies the problem.
If you
stop and think about it, the existing postsecondary educational hierarchy could
hardly be more perverse. Students at the bottom, whose life histories and
social disadvantages make them the most likely to need clear guidance and
structure, receive astonishingly little of either. Meanwhile, students at the
super-selective top, prodded toward high ambitions and disciplined habits by attentive
parents and teachers ever since preschool, encounter solicitous oversight every
step of the way.
Take
Harvard, where the rising elite chart their paths within well-designed
parameters: the college offers a bachelor’s degree in 48 academic fields only
to full-time, residential students, who must also fulfill carefully articulated
general-education requirements. Their first-year experience unfolds under the
supervision of an entire team—a freshman adviser, a resident dean of freshmen,
a proctor, and a peer-advising fellow. Residential house tutors and faculty
advisers lend support later.
Compare that with nearby Bunker Hill Community
College, as Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia
University, has done. Students there choose from upwards of 70 full-time or
part-time associate’s-degree or certificate programs, in more than 60 fields,
then figure out their ideal course load, and how to best mix online and
in-person classes. As to plotting a course of study and then staying on it, community-college
students are largely on their own. Student-adviser ratios in the two-year
sector are abysmal in many schools: they can run as high as 1,500-to-1. And
while spending per student has risen over the past decade at every kind of
four-year institution—private, public, research, undergraduate—it has remained
all but flat in public community colleges.
Students who are most likely to need clear guidance and
structure receive astonishingly little of either.
A surer
formula for widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots—at least while
still paying lip service to ideals like opportunity and meritocracy—would seem
difficult to devise. And the self-paced, modular ideal of college education
championed by some tech enthusiasts is unlikely to bridge that gap. Consider
the experience of Sebastian Thrun, a MOOC pioneer. His online
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course—which attracted more than
150,000 students in 2011—worked superbly for the Stanford students who went the
high-tech route instead of attending Thrun’s lectures. And it proved effective
for the well-educated and self-disciplined participants all over the world who
finished it. (MOOCs, so
far, have notoriously high attrition rates.) But a recent Thrun venture at the
other end of the spectrum is more relevant.
Partnering with San Jose State
University, Udacity, the company Thrun co-founded in the wake of his initial
success, offered three online math courses, one remedial and two introductory.
Pass rates were well below those in normal classes, as research into online
courses at community colleges might have predicted they would be. A recent
study suggests that in general, the weakest community-college students fare the
worst in the shift away from face-to-face classes. Thrun quickly absorbed the
lesson. A “MOOC alone is not likely to be a
good educational medium for large numbers of people, except for the truly
highly self-motivated,” he told a reporter this summer. “To be successful, we
need people on the ground to do things, to provide educational services.”
But what things, what
services? That is the urgent question, and it has received close attention
ever since President Obama announced his American Graduation Initiative in
2009, calling on community colleges in particular to boost their completion
rates. Yet a burgeoning array of efforts to help struggling students over this
or that hump has for the most part delivered disappointing answers. Despite
lots of pilot programs that have produced small, short-term boosts (marginally
more students passing remedial courses, or persisting for another semester),
graduation rates so far have barely budged.
The
program that enrolled Daquan McGee, ASAP,
has proved to be a remarkable exception. Launched in 2007 with funding from
Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Center for Economic Opportunity, it is an unusually
ambitious effort to propel low-income students through six of the City
University of New York’s seven community colleges. ASAP’s architects set a
goal that the program’s top administrator described to me as “insane”—a
three-year graduation rate of 50 percent—and according to the university’s
own data, the program has exceeded it. The social-policy research organization
MDRC, which began an independent study of the program in 2010, calls ASAP’s record
“unparalleled.” Researchers randomly assigned the study participants to eitherASAP or the regular community-college track, and while three-year
results won’t be ready until this summer, preliminary outcomes, just released,
show the ASAP students to be dramatically outstripping the control group on
every count—persistence, credits earned, and graduation rates. A third of the
students who enrolled in ASAP in the spring of 2010 finished in two and a half years (compared
with 18 percent of the control group). Nationwide, that’s the proportion
of all community-college students who emerge with a credential in six years.
The
secret of ASAP’s success lies
outside the classroom. The program enlists extra tutors and caps some classes
at 25 students, but otherwise doesn’t touch pedagogy. Instead it aims to
counter the community-college culture of early exits and erratic stops and
starts. ASAP is designed to instill, and make it possible to fulfill, the
expectation that college will be a continuous, full-time commitment, just as it
is for traditional, four-year students on leafy quads. Timing matters: miss out
on getting a postsecondary credential by 26, and your odds of ever earning one
drop.
ASAP offers lots of guidance, a dose of goading, and a variety of
well-timed incentives to its participants (average age at admission: 21), who
must sign on to the goal of graduating within three years. The program is
intended primarily for low-income students with moderate remedial needs, and it
accepts applicants on a first-come, first-served basis. (By next fall, ASAP expects to enroll more than 4,000 students.) The implicit
philosophy behind the program is simple: students, especially the least
prepared ones, don’t just need to learn math or science; they need to learn how
to navigate academic and institutional challenges more broadly, and how to plot
a course—daily, weekly, monthly—toward long-term success. Pushy parents, an
asset many of them don’t have, could tell you what it takes to make that
happen: a mix of enabling and persistent nudging.
Lesley
Leppert-McKeever, who has directed the Borough of Manhattan Community College’s ASAP program from the start, summed up the message to students this
way: “Look, if you do your part, we’ll do our part, and together we’ll be able
to meet your target.” The program is a two-way deal, expressly designed to
obviate the disruptions that sabotage academic momentum. Money problems are a
prime cause of interruptions and delays, so if tuition isn’t fully covered by
federal and state aid, ASAP pays the remainder. The program pays for summer- and winter-term
courses, too. Books are provided on loan—a practical answer to the problem of
students’ falling behind because they haven’t been able to buy their required
texts promptly.
ASAP also distributes the monthly MetroCards that Daquan McGee lined up
to get. It’s the perk, Leppert-McKeever told me, that many students initially
say they like best about the program—even though plenty are also initially
irked by its purpose: to prod them to make the most of the nonfinancial
supports deemed good for them. These include the College Success Seminar and
above all the biweekly advising sessions that are ASAP’s
centerpiece. This guidance, which features a student-adviser ratio of about
120-to-1, is intended to preempt academic problems, or at least nip them in the
bud, and it is mandatory—a blunt acknowledgment of the reality that “students
don’t do optional.” That motto will be “engraved on my tombstone,” says Kay
McClenney, the director of the Center for Community College Student Engagement,
which conducts a national survey of student engagement that has become one of
the most highly touted barometers of community-college success.
ASAP advisers presume that building habits of engagement takes concerted
effort. It’s not just that students are stretched thin by family and work
demands. Many also lack college-savvy guidance at home, or past school
experience to draw on. More often than not, underprepared students have drifted
through lousy schools “in a routine and superficial manner,” as the progressive
educator Mike Rose puts it in his recent book Back to School. They haven’t been taught “how to use their mind in certain
systematic and strategic ways, how to monitor what they’re learning and assess it.”
Many don’t enter community college with clear intentions or high confidence:
they’ve arrived at the bottom tier, and still it’s daunting.
During
an open house for anyone considering the Borough of Manhattan Community
College, I tagged along on a campus tour, and heard the guide tell the students
in her wake, “It’s a monocracy, as in ‘monster bureaucracy’ ”—in
other words, don’t expect helpful intermediaries. Staying on top of shifting
general-education requirements, opaque transfer guidelines, and financial-aid
complexities is not simple, even for the most-assured students. Nor is picking
a major.
Leppert-McKeever
explained her aim for the big one-room ASAP office she supervises,
which overlooks the Hudson River: that it serve as a “home base” for students,
many of whom—like lots of college students everywhere—have no idea where
they’re headed, or how to get there. She and her staff of five advisers aspire
to establish strong relationships with participants but to avoid excessive
hand-holding as they help launch them on a major and fit the right classes into
feasible time slots, which can be surprisingly difficult at many community
colleges. “You have to be stern,” one adviser told me, “because with the goal
of graduating in three years, there’s not much wiggle room.”
Nobody
in ASAP, neither staff nor
students, would say the path is smooth. Remediation in particular derails many
a community-college student, even those with comparatively little catching up
to do—so it was no wonder Daquan McGee’s adviser made sure they talked over the
hurdles awaiting him in his freshman fall semester, in 2010. With algebra to
get through, and a new baby due, McGee landed just what he didn’t need: a
foreign instructor prone to snide comments such as “This is like one plus one.”
But McGee, who emphasized to me how much he’d grown up in prison, had quickly
gotten the ASAP message: you don’t quit; you figure out how to make it work,
knowing your adviser has your back. The class felt mocked, he told the teacher,
explaining that students like him, who’d missed out on good schooling, needed
to make up for lost time. This kind of assertive self-advocacy, familiar to
more-affluent students, was just what ASAP aimed to inculcate—and it
worked. The instructor changed his style and McGee, who worked hard, excelled.
“I’m not having you drop out,” her adviser quietly insisted.
“You need to be stronger, find that confidence in yourself.”
A
strong start, though, is still just that: a start.ASAP’s design presumes
that the bumps keep coming. I watched another student surprise her adviser with
a sudden swerve at the beginning of a spring semester. She was struggling with
an intermediate algebra prerequisite and two incompletes from the previous
term, though she had seemed on top of her courses. She arrived at her advisory
session and blurted out, eyes glistening, that she was on the brink of leaving.
“I’m not having you drop out,” her adviser quietly insisted, telling the
student she owed it not just to herself but to ASAP—and
directing her to settle up with her fall professors immediately, before she
missed a deadline, and to intensify her math tutoring. It was up to the student
to follow through, but her adviser had armed her with a basic plan of action
and brusquely warm assurances that of course she could do it: “You need to be
stronger, find that confidence in yourself.”
ASAP’s structure and no-nonsense
style invite accusations of paternalism—precisely what community colleges have
been eager to avoid in the college-for-all era. Yet the prevailing model, a
Chinese-menu-style panoply of options without any real guidance, has not
empowered academically insecure students: it has failed them. Good information,
well-structured expectations, timely counsel, confidence-instilling
directives—these are essential ingredients of education, and they are all the
more important for marginal students and for those blazing a trail to college
for the first time in their family’s history. ASAPsets
out to take students’ college goals seriously, and to help equip its
participants to take those goals seriously as well. The program’s ethos of
persistence is contagious. “There’s definitely a shift, different for every
student,” Leppert-McKeever told me, “when suddenly an immature, unfocused
student gets more serious.”
ASAP isn’t cheap—the program spends roughly $3,900 annually per
student, on top of the $9,800 that the City University of New York
community-college system spends on each of its full-time students every
year—yet if you calculate expenditures per student who actually graduates, it
saves money. The program isn’t cutting-edge either, except in delivering
unprecedented completion rates. Scaling up such a comprehensive effort would be
a challenge, and full-time college, of course, is never going to be for everyone.
Yet at a moment when proponents of “disruptive” technology are promising a
transformation of higher education, ASAP offers a different path,
based on the premise that disruptions on the way to degrees are exactly what
students at lower-tier schools need to avoid. If America is serious about being
an opportunity society, Daquan McGee and students like him deserve the
advantages of the old, steady way of going to college.
Ann
Hulbert is The Atlantic’s books-and-culture
editor. She reported this piece while on a Spencer Fellowship at the Columbia
Journalism School.
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