Community Colleges and Press

To the editor of Education Week:

In the June 9 article by Caralee Adams titled "Popularity Offers Challenges for Community Colleges." I am quoted in a manner that implies significant disrespect for the work of community colleges. While Ms. Adams used my words verbatim, they were taken out of context and this --unintentionally--altered their meaning.

I shared in the effort to craft and pass the American Graduation Initiative intended to support the efforts of community colleges to serve students from all walks of life. When the AGI failed to become law, it meant that community colleges had been drawn into the public eye but not given the financial resources they needed to improve their outcomes. Their current outcomes became highly visible, and left some with the false impression they were attributable to a lack of will on the part of the colleges, rather than a lack of resources.

I explained this to Caralee, and in particular I said the colleges had both the "will and commitment" to succeed. I also noted that I felt partially responsible for not delivering more support to them. Those pieces were paraphrased due to space constraints, but they were essential.

My long track record of analyzing and explaining the challenges facing community colleges stands on its own. They have motivation--what they need now is money and technical assistance. I fully support efforts to deliver on the promise of the AGI.

Sara Goldrick-Rab

Building a Bigger and Better Summit

It was really hard to watch the American Graduation Initiative get cut from SAFRA. It was one of the most promising initiatives for higher education in decades, representing a real shift from a culture of focus on college access to one focused on student success. I was crushed to see it go unfunded.

Of course, I'm feeling a little better since Jill Biden called for a White House summit on community colleges, to be held this fall. An Obama conference is a decent consolation prize. It's actually a coup, when you think about how seriously community colleges have been taken by policymakers in the past (read: not at all).

Washington needs to make the most of this opportunity. Doing this requires pushing far beyond a pleasant conversation about "best practices and successful models." Because let's be honest-there aren't very many "best practices" we can feel confident in scaling up right now. That's why building the body of research evidence on effective community college practices was a goal of AGI.

Instead Dr. Biden should move the ball forward on a serious conversation about the role of the two-year colleges in American higher education by asking the toughest questions. These should include:

• What constitutes positive, measurable outcomes for students at these schools? What does "making community colleges better" mean?

• Is making community colleges "more accessible" desirable, if it means bringing into college more students with less academic and financial preparation? Under what conditions?

• Are there efficiencies that can be gained without compromising the quality of the academic experience? For example, should state systems of community colleges be encouraged to specialize their in-person academic offerings and expand (and coordinate) their online offerings?

• What role should data play in informing decision-making of community college leaders? Data of what kind, and collected by whom?

• Which additional resources will generate the greatest returns for community college students?

Dr. Biden must emphasize that the entire sector needs to work together, across geographic boundaries (such as urban/rural and state lines), to come up with some common answers. Sure, community colleges grew out of independent communities but they now serve a much larger, national role. Collective thinking about solutions will benefit them, and help them to establish greater visibility and a more powerful voice.

This serious day will be a very important one. We can't be naïve. Even those who think the nation needs more college-educated adults and believe in accessible higher education openly discredit the work of community colleges. Know a kid who wants to earn a bachelor's degree? Some folks will counsel that kid to avoid community colleges. Their advice is based on pretty rock-hard statistical data, but its implications are troubling. Have we basically given up on a two-year route to a four-year degree? Or can we do more to change those numbers in the near future? I hope the answer from the Summit is a convincing "yes." We need the Obama Administration to lead the way.

The Sky is Falling

As a child growing up inside the Washington Beltway, I learned early never to have much faith in politicians. Every few years new folks came to the city, promising "change" and leaving without having done much at all. The candidates and officials I did like never got the attention and promotions they deserved. And worst of all, those who claimed to be on my side were everlasting disappointments (read: Bill Clinton).

Somehow that cynical base inside me melted a little with the election of Barack Obama, and became a tiny puddle when he announced the American Graduation Initiative. Finally, a president who "got" it! As educators we were all working to prepare children for a full life, and that had to include a real shot at higher education. That meant finally giving sufficient resources to the colleges where the majority of those looking longingly at the American Dream were going to end up: community colleges.

My heart went pitter-patter when I heard Obama call community colleges an "undervalued asset" to the nation, one often treated like a "stepchild" and an "afterthought." I felt real hope for the world my kids would grow up in when he summoned the "can-do American spirit" of community colleges everywhere to help transform the American economy.

I thought things had really changed.

Well, it looks like I was completely and utterly wrong. Today the American Graduation Initiative sits on the chopping block, thanks not only to the money-grubbing hands of banks but also to the Democrats' fears of their powerful colleagues who throw their primary support to the nation's Historically Black colleges and universities. Community colleges will soon learn that their place in this society hasn't changed a bit-- they are expected to accomodate our national desires for widespread college-going while getting next to no support in return. The students they serve-- those without BA-educated parents or beaucoup bucks-- will get a worse fate-- locked out of the courses they need, crammed into overcrowded classrooms, expected to learn without any of the technological advancements of their counterparts.

This country has no heart for these kids. We claim to care enough to prepare them, to try and reform the k-12 system to get them ready for college-- but we won't take the necessary action to make sure college is ready for them. We're rethinking NCLB to set them up for what, exactly?

So here I am, back where I started. Deeply suspicious and cynical, wondering what all the work was for. And hoping, really hoping, that I'm wrong. Maybe the Senate will come to its senses. Maybe.

College Completion Rates: Up, Down, and Sideways

I love a good controversy about an important higher education topic. What better way to enjoy a Wisconsin snowstorm than to sit cozily inside, trading emails with knowledgeable folks who are trying to sort out why it appears college completion rates have declined in the U.S. over the last 30 or 40 years. I'm hard-pressed to think of one (well, maybe, after a long day of work having this 38-week fetus out of me would be nice). So, thanks to Sarah Turner, John Bound, and Michael Lovenheim for giving us such a nice meaty analysis to chew over this week.

There's already been a good bit written about and commented on this report, particularly by Cliff Adelman, the man who gave the world America's longitudinal transcript data and a robust series of reports on what they tell us about colleges and students. The fact that so many people find so many different messages in the analysis actually bodes well for the paper--it's partly a story about trends in completion rates (are they really down, or just stagnant?), partly a story about potential reasons for declines in rates (is it all about inadequate student preparation?), partly about differences among 4-year institutions (e.g. public flagships vs. other nonselectives), and partly about community colleges (are they "doing harm?" Why don't their outcomes seem affected by resources? etc).

As a sociologist, I see questions about inequality pervading all of these issues, and nothing tickles me more than to see economists writing about stratification. If completion rates really declined in the face of efforts to expand overall participation, we can anticipate political pushback against advocates for greater efforts to enhance access-- regardless of the reasons for the decline. If the reasons for decline (or stagnation) have anything to do with compositional changes on either the supply or the demand side (and the answer really is "both") then that's a story about inequality too, since those changes accompanied expansion. And any story about differences among institutions or effects of institutions is really about the functions or unintended consequences of institutional differentiation itself, a key facet of our higher education "opportunity" structure.

All that said, here's what I think we should take away from this paper:

1. It's nearly impossible to expand participation in any program without affecting the outcomes of that program. For too long some people have talked about changes in access and completion in U.S. higher education without sufficiently acknowledging that compositional shifts in who attends college will (almost without a doubt) affect graduation rates. Let's hope this paper gets the basic discussion back on the right track.

2. That said, changes in composition of the student population did not occur in a vacuum. As the student body changed, so did many of our policies and practices. More states came to rely more heavily on the community colleges to serve those deemed "unsuitable" for 4-year institutions (see Brint and Karabel, and Dougherty for more). With increased institutional differentiation came a greater need for states to choose how to distribute scarce resources, and evidence suggests that oftentimes a decision was made to give less money to sectors serving needier students (e.g. public 4-year nonselective and 2-year colleges). That didn't go unnoticed by students and families themselves, whose perceptions of resources and status affect their college choices (see Cellini for a recent paper demonstrating this). Furthermore, other policies changed at the same time--including federal financial aid--in ways that promoted shifts to less-expensive colleges.

3. As a nation we relied on community colleges to absorb much of the growth in enrollment. To what end? While some will read this paper and decide that community colleges have screwed up, that's a flat-wrong and oversimplified conclusion. It's also not one intended by the authors. As table 4 in the paper shows, we treat community college students like they are cheap to educate. Median per-student expenditures during the 1990s were just $2,610 at community colleges, having declined 14% since the 1970s. In comparison, spending at public 4-year "non-top 50" colleges was 52% higher. What's the expression I'm looking for here? Oh yes, "crap in, crap out." (Hold on-- I will clarify-- I am not saying community college students are crappy or that all community college outcomes are crappy!) We pushed lots of students in the door, gave the colleges little money, and were surprised that when faced with paltry resources, crowding, and a growing abundance of missions things didn't go so well? Shame on us. Take a look at CUNY's faculty, students, and classrooms a few decades after the 1970s open-admissions experiment there and you'll see the relationship I'm describing. You simply cannot install a massive policy change without proper supports, no matter how good the intentions are.

But let's be honest--the paper doesn't demonstrate a strong relationship between resources and outcomes, in the community college sector or elsewhere. In fact, it indicates a weaker relationship in that sector compared to others. But as the authors have acknowledged (in personal correspondence), endogenous state behavior would bias them against finding a larger effect, and measurement of resource effects is perhaps more problematic in the 2-year sector, for many reasons including how and under what conditions (e.g. governance) resources are allocated, costs may be greater, and there is overall less variation in resources. So, this paper isn't the greatest test of whether money matters for college completion (not that a good direct test exists). It is, however, pretty good at showing that fixing k-12 isn't going to be a sufficient solution to the completion problem.

I will be the first to admit that the paper doesn't provide sufficient evidence to support all of the relationships I've laid out here-- and therefore many remain partially-tested hypotheses. Mostly, the authors didn't test them because of methodological challenges that could be hard to overcome since changes in student characteristics, sectoral enrollments, and resources are highly interrelated and operating bi-directionally. If that's true, teasing out what matters most using the logistic regressions employed in this paper becomes much more problematic. I've also got to note that given the methods used here, it's also not appropriate to use the findings as evidence that one sector is outperforming another.

So in the end, here's the punchline: if we want graduation rates to improve, we need to pay attention more attention to how we structure college opportunities. This is a multi-sided process, with states, colleges, parents, and students all making decisions, and often in an information-poor, resource-deficient environment. No single approach (e.g. high school preparation, financial aid, college accountability, etc) targeting a single group is going to work.

The Invisible Institution

Community colleges have been called many things-"junior," "second chance," "sub-baccalaureate," and one of my personal favorites: places of "continued dependency, unrealistic aspirations, and wasted general education." That last one dates back to 1968, in the heat of their growth period (the author is W.B. Devall, writing in Education Record).

Despite all the disparaging remarks, I have a strong sense that many community college leaders are willing to be called just about anything, as long as they're "not called late for dinner." And this year, at least, they're at the table, and standing to enjoy a nice deal in the form of the American Graduation Initiative (part of legislation pending in the Senate).

But this period of sunshine provides only a modicum of comfort, given the longstanding backdrop of invisibility punctuated by insults. In 2005, Washington Post columnist Jay Matthews wrote a confessional column called "Why I Ignore Community Colleges." A Brookings Institution report released today reveals that Matthews was (and is) far from unique among his colleagues.

Brookings examined mainstream news coverage since 2007 and discovered that only about 1% of national coverage (appearing on TV, newspapers, news websites, and radio-and not including blogs) is devoted to education. That's education of any flavor.

Zoom in on coverage of community colleges and the picture gets even worse. Of all education reporting - of that 1%-- only 2.9% is devoted to community colleges. Public two-year colleges enroll 60% as many students as 4-year colleges and universities, but receive only one-tenth the news coverage. As the Brookings authors conclude, "From the standpoint of national media coverage, community colleges barely exist."

Invisibility is both a cause and a symptom of community colleges' low-status in higher education. The oft-unmentioned "snob factor" contributes to reporters' sense that their readers neither care, nor need to know, much about this sector. Children of journalists are unlikely to attend community colleges, and we all know that parents pay more attention to whatever their kids are doing. The same problem applies to politicians-it's a veritable miracle that President Obama is speaking with pride about institutions of postsecondary education where he's unlikely to send his own children.

Leaving community colleges out of the news means substantially skewing the American image of higher education. Stories about the critical links between the economy and education are missed-after all, it's community colleges who consistently watch enrollment rise along with unemployment. Kids and parents hear repeatedly about competitive admissions and rising tuition, expensive dorms and climbing gyms, even though these are the reality for less than half of all undergraduates. And we hear about, and from, presidents of 4-year colleges and universities, far more often than we hear about their hard-working peers running community colleges.

I think that sadly enough many at community colleges have gotten used to stereotypical representations of those schools-the lack of resistance to NBC's comedy Community may be one indication. But as William DeGenaro points out, it hasn't always been this way. In the 1920s and 1930s, community colleges were praised as essential to public education, getting ink in publications like the New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, and Reader's Digest. Enrollment was climbing rapidly, just as it is now, and the media took notice. In fact, DeGenaro's research reveals that "the print media served as a booster, implying that the colleges resulted from common sense." That "rhetoric of inevitability" stands in sharp contrast to today's stance of invisibility. By ignoring an entire sector of higher education, the media helps to de-legitimate it. Simply put, reporters need to catch up--the President, together with many federal and state leaders, philanthropists, and citizens, sees the American community college as essential to the nation's future. What are journalists waiting for?

House Passes Historic Community College Legislation!

Today the U.S. House of Representatives voted 253 to 171 to pass the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act. It knocks private lenders out of the student loan business, and uses the savings to make transformational investments in the nation's community colleges, as well as increase the Pell grant. Some, including La Guardia Community College president Gail Mellow, have called this the most important piece of higher education legislation since the G.I. Bill.

Let's hope the Senate soon follows on the House's class act!
(at least the House had at least 1 class act this week...)