INSIDE HIGHER ED - April 19, 2010
The Completion Agenda
SEATTLE --A few years ago, gatherings of community college
leaders commonly featured discussions of the unfairness and inaccuracy
of using graduation rates to measure institutional success. There were
no shortages of arguments to make: Many community college students
don't want a degree, or they transfer before earning one, or they just
wanted to take one course anyway, or they can only afford to take one
course at a time.
Those sorts of criticisms still came up here in discussions this weekend at the
annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges. And those criticisms
remain easy to back up. But in public statements here, on the agenda, and in
a series of activities, the emphasis is much more solidly than in the past on
the importance of community college students finishing up -- ideally their degree
or certificate programs, but sometimes just a single course. In speeches, new
campaigns and informal discussion, the talk of the conference is completion.
At the meeting's opening session Saturday night, Mary Spilde, president of Lane
Community College and the AACC board chair, announced that six national associations
focused on community colleges will issue a joint statement Tuesday pledging a "unified
effort" to increase completion rates. In addition to AACC, the effort will
be joined by the Association of Community College Trustees, the Community College
Survey of Student Engagement, the League for Innovation in the Community College,
the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development and Phi Theta
Kappa.
While AACC is not releasing details on the effort until Tuesday, Spilde said
it would represent an "unprecedented coalition for commitment." Several
involved with the effort said that they viewed it as a first step in a process
in which community colleges might be encouraged to set very specific goals for
increasing completion rates -- similar to the way many college presidents have
made pledges to reduce their carbon footprints.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation -- which has become a major player in
financing and agenda setting in community college education -- was involved in
bringing the various groups together, and the signing of the statement will take
place just before Melinda Gates addresses the community college leaders.
Diane Troyer, a senior program officer at the foundation, was frank before a
packed session Sunday that the foundation wanted to help propel more of a national
movement for change at community colleges, which are historically local and state-oriented
institutions. “I think one of the things that holds us back is that we
don’t have a system” of community colleges, but instead rely on local
governance, where “it’s difficult to reach consensus around really
huge goals."
She said that the statement being signed Tuesday would drive the associations
and their members to "reach consensus on what works, instead of letting
a thousand flowers bloom."
And Troyer was not particularly sympathetic to those who have noted all the reasons
for low graduation rates at community colleges. Even if students don't all come
to graduate, she said, "they don't come to us for three weeks of math," but
that's what a lot of students leave with.
Troyer's Sunday appearance here featured her and Holly Zanville, senior program
director of the Lumina Foundation for Education, talking about their vision for
improving completion rates at community colleges. George Boggs, the AACC's president,
led the discussion, and audience members lined up to ask questions and praise
the foundations (even having been warned jokingly by Troyer that she didn't have
any grants to give out on Sunday).
The questions did not generally challenge the idea that completion rates need
to get much better and that fairly radical changes in the ways community colleges
operate are needed in order to do so.
Both Troyer and Zanville praised a combination of college polices (offering short,
intense modules of remedial education, for instance) and state policies (basing
more funding on completion rather than enrollment). Troyer noted that the top
predictive factor on whether similar community college students will graduate
is where they live. "States matter," she said.
Zanville also spoke about the importance of new approaches. Asked by an audience
member about what she thought about "university centers" -- created
on some community college campuses, with bachelor's degrees offered by a range
of providers or the colleges themselves -- Danville praised the idea. She noted
that many low-income students don't want to travel far to finish a degree. And
she said it was clear that a range of new institutions -- such as university
centers and for-profit "mega universities" with more than 100,000 students
-- were changing the landscape.
"I don't think any of this is going to go away," she said.
Both Troyer and Zanville talked repeatedly about the idea that reforms must "scale
up" and be ideas that won't help just a few students, but ultimately most
students.
While their discussion was big picture, other events here Sunday zeroed in on
specific parts of an agenda focused on completion.
The Association of Community College Trustees announced the creation -- with
the Community College Leadership Program of the University of Texas at Austin
-- of a Governance Institute for Student Success. <http://www.acct.org/2010/04/governance-institute-for-stude.php> The
idea for the effort (financially backed by a Gates grant) is to better train
trustees and presidents to focus on student success.
And many presentations here that focused on individual colleges avoided any mention
of reasons for low completion rates and focused on specific policies to increase
them -- and the importance of collecting data to monitor progress.
For example, Anita Gliniecki, president of Housatonic Community College, in Connecticut,
described her enrollment gains this way: total enrollment increased since 2005
from 4,400 to 5,900, but the full-time equivalent figure increased from 2,300
to 3,400. "We've been pushing more students to come full time because we
know they will stay," she said.
Her topic was about how the kind of remedial reform much touted by Gates and
Lumina has played out successfully. In this case, through work with Achieving
the Dream, a major reform project, Housatonic has created "open entry, open
exit" remedial math. In these programs, students study with tutors on a
self-paced system, frequently finishing in weeks, rather than a traditional semester.
Not only are these students finishing more of their remedial math, but their
fall-to-fall retention rates are much higher than those of students who receive
remedial education in traditional semesters.
"We used to focus on just bringing them in, but now it's about what happens
to them," said Gliniecki.
Bill Truehart, president of Achieving the Dream, said in an interview that at
the college level and among national leaders of community colleges, the conversation
has changed. "There is a different expectation now," he said, "and
it is about completion."
— Scott Jaschik <mailto:scott.jaschik@insidehighered.com>
Anson C. Smith, Public Relations Coordinator
Housatonic Community College
900 Lafayette Blvd.
Bridgeport, CT 06604
Tel: 203-332-5229, Fax: 203-332-5247
E-mail: asmith@hcc.commnet.edu