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Introduction

COMMUNITY COLLEGES

 A Call to Progress 

O

ur country has awakened to

the importance of com-munity colleges. Tey educate 4 percent of the entire U.S. population—13 million students—each year. Most of the coun-try’s college freshmen and sophomores are in community colleges,  whose relatively inexpensive tuition makes them a boon for Amer-icans seeking a brighter future on constricted budgets. More than any other set of institutions, the nation’s nearly twelve hundred community colleges are well positioned to meet the increasing de-mand for skilled workers in manufacturing, technology, health care, and other high-growth fields. Tey are a necessity for a na-tion trying, in an age of austerity, to reverse a steady decline in higher education attainment relative to the rest of the world. But they don’t always deliver on that promise. While access has expanded over the years, outcomes for students have not neces-sarily improved. So a new reform movement is taking hold, and community colleges are being pushed to achieve better results. Following repeated calls for improved graduation rates from na-tional foundations, the Obama administration, and state gov-ernments, in 2012 the sector’s own champion, the American

 

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INTRODUCTION

 Association of Community Colleges, called student success rates “unacceptably low” and career training “inadequately connected to job market needs.”

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 Simultaneous recognition of community colleges’ importance

and 

 poor student outcomes translates into enormous pressure. State funding is increasingly being tied to graduation rates (rather than to the number of students enrolled, the traditional method).

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 Federal and state agencies are requiring more public reporting on completion and employment outcomes. And for-profit compet-itors—investing in technology-based instructional delivery and using private-sector marketing techniques—are enrolling more and more students, including the low-income and minority pop-ulations long served by community colleges.o attract students and public dollars in an era of accountability, transparency, and competition, community colleges must deliver significantly more degrees of higher quality at a lower per-pupil cost to an increasingly diverse student population—an equation that adds up to an immense challenge. In the balance is not just the colleges’ survival but also continued opportunity for Ameri-cans—particularly the less advantaged—to access the knowledge and skills they need to have a secure future and to fuel our nation’s economic growth.But improvement is not coming easily, or quickly. Almost a decade into a new reform movement, there is not yet complete agreement about what community colleges should aim for, let alone good systems for measuring whether those goals are being attained. And there is not yet even universal acceptance of what, to most reformers, is a vital premise: it doesn’t matter how many students enter community colleges’ doors unless they exit with a meaningful credential in hand.

 

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INTRODUCTION

 We are moving in that direction, however. With few excep-tions, improving the rates at which students earn degrees and cer-tificates lies at the center of recent change strategies, from state policy reform to financial aid redesign to efforts by state systems and nonprofit organizations to improve institutional practice. Completion matters to students; holding a degree or certificate is strongly correlated with having a good job with decent wages.  Any significant attention to completion, then, is a dramatic im-provement over the days when community colleges responded to ever-increasing enrollment numbers by developing more and more programs and courses, paying too little attention to whether students were succeeding in them.  As institutions and policy makers aim to improve community college completion rates, though, they must not do so at the ex-pense of access. It’s easy to increase the graduation rate if you just stop admitting the students least likely to succeed, if you invent policies and practices that effectively close doors to the rapidly growing numbers of minority and low-income young people who  want to enroll—groups that historically have more trouble finish-ing college. And while nobody’s recommending that as a remedy, it must be guarded against as a possible unintended consequence of the drive to improve completion rates. But even maintaining access and improving graduation are not suffi cient. After all, students don’t go to community college to graduate; most go to acquire skills relevant to the careers they will pursue either directly out of community college or by way of a four-year school. Just as institutions work to increase the num-bers of students who complete, they must put equal effort into ensuring the quality of their offerings and their instruction so that students leave well equipped to succeed in whatever comes next.