I’m studying the course catalog from the local community college at the moment. I’m doing a little research for an article. It’s actually fascinating. Totally different from anything that I’ve encountered before. You can take an entire 3 credit class on learning how to use Microsoft Office. And there are tons of one year certificates in everything from floral design to landscaping to exercise science. Does anybody really need a one year certificate to get a job in a floral shop?
UPDATE: I’m just loving the “Certificates of Achievement,” aka “Theft of Student Loan Money.” You can get a CA in Professional Cooking. It’s 18 credits, with one 3-credit class in “International Quisine [sic].”
Apt. 11d 
Well, people certainly aren’t born knowing how to use Microsoft Office, or, for that matter, the names and characteristics of various flower species. So it’s either learn it yourself, through some combination of reading and experimenting, or take a class. Many people prefer the latter.
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Just had this argument with my dad. He was arguing that the reason policemen now need BA’s and often MA’s in criminal justice is because of the general litigiousness of our society. “Previously, policemen could just beat up a criminal but now they have to know all these issues about rights, in order to keep from getting sued. They actually need to know about profiling and liability,” according to my dad.
He was also arguing that it makes sense for the regular fireman to have an AA or a BA in fire science and for their higher ups to have MA’s, because now you actually are expected to be able to write up a report about the chemicals involved in the fire, and to make quick decisions about the types of complex flame retardants you are expected to us.
I do know that a lot of landscapers take courses — because there are pesticides and so forth that you actually can’t get a license to administer without undertaking training (and you actually need to know about things like water tables and run-off, the chemical formula for how the pesticides would be diluted, which ones you can’t use in a place like a daycare, etc.)
Maybe life simply has gotten a lot more complex. It certainly helps to explain why there are so few options available to people who cannot graduate from high school. Jobs you might traditionally have held have actually become a lot more difficult.
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In view of recent mass fatalities of fire fighters (the California wildfire one and the West fertilizer factory one), I would have to agree. Firefighting doesn’t just mean holding a hose and running into burning buildings. People have to make split second decisions that may cost a dozen lives if they make the wrong call.
Also I think that police should know a lot about the law. There have been a lot of cases recently involving police who are unfamiliar with the law surrounding photography in public places.
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If English isn’t your first language; if you’ve just been released from prison; if you graduated high school but are not continuing on to college; if you’ve been out of the workforce for 15 years to care for your children; if you are 55 and are “too old” to continue to be employable in your professional career; and on and on. There are a lot of people for whom these kinds of classes take them from “not employable at all” to “slightly more employable and with a specific skill.”
Don’t knock Microsoft classes. I often wish my coworkers with PhDs were forced to take one.
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A class on Microsoft Office would drive me insane, probably literally. I think you have to talk to the people who take and teach those classes to understand anything at all about what they mean. I know a fair number of people who would feel the same way about Algebra 1 (i.e. why not just sit down and do all the problems, rather than take a tedious class that takes too long). And, Algebra 2, for most mathy people is tedious beyond compare a mere rehashing of old work with a few new concepts thrown in.
What I do wonder about is the government financing — and the incentives it provides. Can you take student loans for an AA degree? How about for certificates in floral arranging? If you can, I’d be prone to suspecting that the student loan system has created the incentive for those programs and be wary of their real value.
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“I know a fair number of people who would feel the same way about Algebra 1 (i.e. why not just sit down and do all the problems, rather than take a tedious class that takes too long). And, Algebra 2, for most mathy people is tedious beyond compare a mere rehashing of old work with a few new concepts thrown in.”
As I’ve mentioned before, my dad teaches small town remedial community college math. At that level, getting students to be proficient at 6th grade math is a major achievement.
Laura, if you want to interview my dad (or my other relative who teaches community college), I could probably talk them into it.
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How much does a certificate cost? Does the CC also have not-for-credit classes?
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If you’ve ever taught at a community college (I have) or worked with people who are uncomfortable with computers (I have), the Microsoft Word class is not ridiculous at all. Like one of the other commenters, I think there are plenty of well-educated people who could benefit from that class, like the same people who are constantly “replying all” and including the entire string of emails in their two-word response.
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Our school district quit offerring computer classes, because the kids knew so much more than the teacher, and the superintendent thought a writing class would be a better use of their time. That said, I’m sure that there are some people out there who don’t know how to use a computer and need a structured class to teach them how to do it. But that doesn’t mean that anybody should be getting college credit for it. My dad hasn’t figured out how to use his iPhone. He could use a class on using the text function on an iPhone, but I don’t think he should get college credit for learning how to make an emoticon.
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A lot of people will say they know a program like Excel when they really don’t know how to do much beyond using the basic features. Being trained on how to fully use the program is a really specific skill that might provide the entrance into office work as opposed to service or manufacturing work. Getting credit for it has an added bonus of showing that the student was at least minimally competent enough to show up for class and pass.
There really is no comparison between your kids (and your kids peers) to the millions of people out there with no marketable labor skills. Most people aren’t primed from birth to be upper-middle class professionals and these are the kinds of small steps they can take to increase their likelihood of landing an ok job.
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“Can you take student loans for an AA degree?” Yes.
“How about for certificates in floral arranging?” Yes.
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I looked over your PDF and my first thought was thinking about how divided our society is. Community colleges are different in different states, so I don’t know what category the NJ CC’s fall into. I’ve heard that there are areas in which CC classes are considered good classes, content stripped from all the baggage of either high school or conventional university (like football or HS cafeterias or cutting edge research).
But, I do think the student loans really skew the economic arithmetic, particularly since student loans can be taken out to pay for living expenses. I’m not sure how an individual can realistically assess the value of the certificate in floral arranging when their alternative is to not eat and not move forward.
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BTW, in my case, divided society, because I know so many people with PhDs and so few with associate’s degrees (maybe none). The other day my kiddo pondered what another adult might have done for their PhD thesis then realized “Oops, he doesn’t have a a PhD.
The CC systems, people without college degrees, policeman and firefighters they’re living in a parallel universe from mine. I do know nurses and teachers, though, but only ones with BA’s.
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“Most people aren’t primed from birth to be upper-middle class professionals and these are the kinds of small steps they can take to increase their likelihood of landing an ok job.”
The first part of that sentence is undoubtedly true, and you are right that in complaining about these courses, we’re not addressing the problem. But, my question is whether these “small steps” really does increase the likelihood of landing an OK job, and, I think Laura’s, too. The school selling these services needs to be showing the case for the certificate improving the lives of those they are taking money from, not pay vague lip service to the idea that they are educating people. That’s the student, first, since they are forever saddled with the debt, but also the taxpayers.
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But what is so magic, or so taboo, about calling it “college credit”? It’s just a word. No one confuses a course in Microsoft Office at a community college with a course in economics at Princeton. If people use the same word for both, what’s the harm?
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The school selling these services needs to be showing the case for the certificate improving the lives of those they are taking money from, not pay vague lip service to the idea that they are educating people.
This is true of universities and colleges as well. As Laura has mentioned repeatedly, a lot of second and third-tier colleges are seemingly doing very little to improve the lives of the people they are supposedly educating and often times those people leave with no degree and quite a bit of debt. Mostly I see courses in MS Word and landscaping and think that while that training may not translate into a stable and decent-paying job it’s probably not leaving the student with tens of thousands of dollars of debt.
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Well my main problem with using the word “college credit” is the access it gives to loans.
Yes, college need to be showing their economic value, if that’s what they’re selling, and I know that some colleges are selling job skills, rather than an experience. I am not as familiar with what their courses look like. I think Laura’s complained about those colleges, too.
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I was at a BBQ a few months ago and started chatting with a guy who was a chef at a high end restaurant in New York. I don’t know how we got on the subject, but he started ranting about kids coming out community colleges with culinary arts certificates and associate degrees. He said the kids knew the right temperature to boil an egg, but they had never actually boiled one before. He said that he learned how to cook in the kitchen of a restaurant from the ground up. He said he would never hire anyone with one of those AA culinary degrees.
While the kids who are getting these certificates are not accumulating tens of thousands of dollars of debt, those degrees aren’t free. Each one costs $2,500 to $5,000. The degrees use up a year of time, which would be better spent in a kitchen (where there would be getting paid).
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So why do you think those kids pursue AA culinary degrees? I’d bet a lot of them would prefer to bypass school and start as a dishwasher in a high-end restaurant but they can’t even get in at that level. I imagine a lot of them think that the degree will be the thing that gets them the dishwasher job.
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That’s cheap compared to the actual culinary schools.
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/15/134568267/regulators-try-to-light-a-fire-under-culinary-schools
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There seem to be three issues here:
First, whether courses in using Microsoft Word should be offered for “college credit.” That’s just semantics. Obviously such courses are more like courses in driving a truck (which generally do not produce “college credit”) than they are like courses in economics, but so what.
Second, whether these courses have any benefit. Given that no one would learn Microsoft Office for fun, the benefit would have to be in improved job prospects or earnings. It’s an empirical question whether these courses improve their students’ economic well-being, but I suspect they do. If you were hiring a secretary, would you prefer a high school graduate simpliciter, or a high school graduate with a certificate in Microsoft Office from the local community college?
Third, whether these courses are priced fairly relative to the benefit they provide. Another empirical question. If they are priced fairly (i.e., the economic benefit to the student represents a fair return on the cost of the course), then obviously it’s a social good to make loans available for those who can’t pay the cost out of pocket. If the price is too high, then the loans may lead unsophisticated people into expensive mistakes. Having a bunch of Ph.D.’s (and one J.D.) make fun of the course content doesn’t lead to a useful analysis of this question.
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Finally a topic where I’m in complete agreement with y81!
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I think it is legitimate for students to get loans for these kinds of certificates. A floral design course isn’t that out there, some states require florists to be licensed (so blame the state for those). I think it is ok, after all, that they can get loans to become auto mechanics, plumbers or bookkeepers. Microsoft office courses sound like the equivalent of what you would learn at secretarial school years ago.
Scantee is right that many people who claim to know Excel, really don’t. When I interview for assistants and someone lists Excel on their resume, I ask specific questions. Such as: what is a pivot table, or have they ever done a nested if statement? Many can’t answer the questions and these are SLAC/ivy league students claiming to be expert in Excel.
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When I started college, I was lucky enough to be advised to not skip the composition class (I had good enough SAT scores that I didn’t have to take it) but rather to take a class called “computer assisted honors composition” or something like that. It was taught by the co-chair of the honors program, which helped, but as much as anything, being forced to learn to write things on the computer made a huge difference in my life. The class was primitive in many ways- we used a dos based program. (I think word wasn’t really going yet.) But, it got me comfortable in writing on the computer, improved my typing, and taught me a tiny bit about computers, as well as improving my writing. It was hugely useful. We shouldn’t assume that, because kids all use i-phones and play video games that they can use a computer in the way that a job requires. So, this class seems completely reasonable to me. Community colleges are full of vocationally based classes, as they probably should be. This is just one more. I can’t at all see what the problem is.
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” Does anybody really need a one year certificate to get a job in a floral shop?”
What do the floral shop employers want ? is the real question..
As scantee notes above, no-one looking for a job, spends a year at a CC for fun as such.
The CA students are often older folks taking classes for fun, probably not using student loans. My wife used to run into them in the CC gym, full of strong old women lifting large weights before going to their cooking or MS Word classes..
@y81, “the loans may lead unsophisticated people into expensive mistakes.”
The University of Phoenix and its ilk have built an entire business model on this.. lots of free federally-guaranteed money for private profits, bs (this does not stand for Bachelor of Science) degrees for the rubes. The problem is not just in CCs, nor is it at its worst there.. nor are unsophisticated people the only victims.
The switch from free federally-governed public education, to federally-sponsored student loans and privatized education, has produced some astonishingly perverse incentives.
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Oooh, fun discussion here….
Got a splitting headache, so let me just tackle one of the issues. Should a class in Microsoft Office count as a college class? Y81 says that everyone knows that a CC class in Word isn’t the same animal as a philosophy class at Princeton.
I think that the people taking the CC class in Microsoft Office don’t know that they aren’t taking a real college class. Many of them think that they are taking a class that everyone will respect, including smartie-pants like us. They come out of these CC, where they spend three or four years, and think that the rest of the world will respect their degrees. They are totally shocked when these degrees don’t lead to real-world respect and jobs. That’s a problem.
Steve taught at a community college in the Bronx for many years. He taught a wide range of kids. Many had alarming gaps in their education. A few of them did well enough to transfer to a four year college. For those, the CC experience was really important. I’m actually a big fan of the general concept of CC’s for that reason. But I just came back from Cleveland, where I saw a few examples of where CC’s go wrong.
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What do you consider viable career paths for kids who are not college bound if this kind of vocational training is useless?
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I think that landscape design or floral design are viable careers. The guy who is fixing my back patio is doing so well that he is buying up investment properties on the Jersey shore. Did he start off his career with certificate in landscape design? I don’t know. I’m going to ask him tomorrow.
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” Such as: what is a pivot table, or have they ever done a nested if statement? Many can’t answer the questions and these are SLAC/ivy league students claiming to be expert in Excel.”
Of course I can’t tell whether this kind of questioning, and making hiring decisions based on the answers makes sense for your hiring needs. But, I haven’t ever implemented a pivot table, but it would be foolish to dismiss my excel knowledge on that basis. It would take me less than a day to figure it out, and, frankly, the fact that I don’t need to take a class to learn how to use any function in XL should be a bigger selling point for my skill set than whether i know at that moment how to implement a particular function. I think there’s something wrong with the hiring process in which decisions are made on momentarily important skill sets (and that it’s fairly foolish to train yourself for those skills for the purpose of being hired, since it’s just as likely that the specific thing you’ve learned will stop being useful with the next update).
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We need people who can actually do pivot tables, but it is more about them claiming to truly be expert when they really really are not. We’re happy to train people to do pivot tables etc. but I am just tired of kids claiming they know excel or statistics and yet can’t do the basics. Don’t tell me you know STATA, but have no idea how to write a do file. Don’t tell me you’re good at statistics if you can’t explain a t test.
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If I’m interviewing an Ivy/SLAC grads I’m probably am not expecting them to be masters of Excel because the career path their on doesn’t require that kind of knowledge*. But if I’m interviewing two people with high school diplomas for an admin asst. position and one has a certificate in Excel and the other does not then, yeah, that certificate might make the difference about who I offer the job to.
*If new grads from first-tier universities feel the need to pad their resumes with skills that they don’t have, like Excel, then maybe these skills actually are valued by employers.
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The viable career path for people who need vocational training is on the job training, apprenticeships with the expectation that you will get a job when you’ve learned those skills. I think, in food service, that that’s still a viable model. You are not, as Laura reports in anecdote, more likely to get hired if you have the certificate — people want to see practical experience. So, you have to keep looking for that first job, and earning the certificate might actually be detrimental, not just in time, but what it signals to your employer.
There’s an organization here that thinks food service is a viable career option for the marginal workers — they operate a not-for-profit catering/lunch company that trains homeless people to work in food service. They are very pragmatic and say they understand that many of their employees are struggling with mental illness and addiction, but that food service is a job where one might be able to work when one can (i.e. when the illness is treated or the addiction under control).
http://www.farestart.org/
Such a program might be implemented at an educational institution, rather than at a not-for-profit, but CC’s are trying to serve many different populations — and in many of them, there’s tension between preparing the unprepared but academic students for 4 year degrees and preparing for vocations.
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That’s really sweet of them, but have they reflected on the fact that the general public does not want mentally ill drug addicts handling their food? I sure don’t.
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AmyP, read any of Anthony Bourdain’s books to realize how many mentally ill drug addicts are already handling your food any time you eat in restaurants!
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I’ve read Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (which has some eye-opening descriptions of the hygienic practices of fancy Paris restaurants) and I periodically review the Health Department’s scores for local restaurants. It was so very sad to discover recently that the legendary local BBQ place had 47 or 48 health violations (a normal rating is more like under a dozen). We don’t go there anymore.
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Yes, I think that’s part of the theory, that marginal populations are already heavily employed in food services, so the individuals won’t be as much of an outlier. The organization does, however, offer significant wrap around services (including individualized counseling on access to housing and other resources).
I think the non-profit apprentice approach described is relevant to this conversation, because it’s an example of the kind of services some students (in this case a particular outlier population, with significant needs) might need in order to join the workforce.
Cranberry’s cited article about the Hudson institute report says “what do we do with a C student?” as it’s premise, and, presumably, those students are a population with fewer needs. But what they need might be more than just classes.
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I agree with scantee and y81 that it’s a bit rich for us to sit around and declare that no one should spend money for a vocational education, but rather be trained on the job while getting paid. I’m sure if that were an option, most people would choose that over spending time and money getting trained. There are also lots of jobs that probably none of us would consider where coming in knowing how to use Excel is a big advantage, and “I don’t know but I’m smart enough to teach myself” doesn’t really get you past the interview. Saying no one should take a class in MS Office is veering dangerously close to saying no one should go to secretarial school, because the content is theoretically something a smart person with free time and access to technology could train themselves on. Also, depending on when the classes are offered, it may be that people getting the certificates are already employed and getting a certificate for job advancement. I think it’s hard to say a priori that these certificates are definitely beneficial or definitely a waste of money.
Also, to the extent CCs compete with for-profit colleges for the same demographic, I am all in favor of CCs expanding their offerings. I’ve read horror stories about people going $100,000 in debt for a culinary degree, before realizing a starting cook’s salary is about $9/hour. $2,000 isn’t all that unreasonable for probably a similar sort of training.
More anecdotes. My friend’s aunt is a former pastry chef who has now become a fairly successful landscape designer, and I’m pretty sure she has a certificate or something similar in landscape design. My neighbor has an AA in landscape design and works as a landscape designer. Her sister is a Jaguar mechanic who trained at a CC. My friend’s mother was a chef at a top restaurant who trained on the job, but she acknowledges that in this economic climate that’s getting really hard, although she doesn’t recommend culinary school. Also, she was friends with the restaurant owner beforehand, which helped her get the job. Connections play a role in job getting at all levels, and it may be that people see certificates as a way around this.
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They have no problem selling out their dinners, so enough people disagree with you that the models work.
I presume that the model works because there is enough supervision.
My main complaint is that a number of those certificates are perceived as totally useless by employers. If people see many of those certificates as a way around connections they are being lied to or deluding themselves. I’m hearing the same issue with programming certification, which operates at a higher economic level. The certificates could be useful in thory, but in practice they are too slow to be effective in the interaction between highly specific job requirements and training.
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Yeah, whether they are useful in practice is an empirical question that we don’t really know the answer to. It would be interesting for someone to do a study to compare the employment outcomes of people with the certificate vs. people who took classes but didn’t get a certificate vs. people who did neither. It may be that they are a total waste of money, or they may be marginally helpful, or they may be incredibly helpful, and the employers who claim they aren’t are either in a minority or lying. My hunch would be, if the certificates are more expensive than just taking the relevant classes, your best bet would to take the classes and put your skills on your resume rather than paying for certification. I would also bet that a certificate gives you an advantage over someone with neither, but not much more so than someone who had taken the classes without the certificate.
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http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/22/pathways
Certificates offer a higher return on investment than A.A. degrees, according to an in-depth study by experts.
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Nice! Thanks, Cranberry. Yeah, I want to follow up on that study with conversations with professionals in health and landscaping and construction. This isn’t going to happen until September (other projects on deck for the summer), but I’m doing a little homework right now.
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I have a not well thought out sense of why certificates have taken the place of apprenticeships and why we’re not likely to go back to apprenticeships any time soon. Apprenticeships thrived in communities dominated by specific trades. So, even if your family wasn’t a plumbing family, there were lots of plumbing families in your neighborhood and if you wanted to get into that line of work you could rely on your connections to get your foot in the door. Whoever was hiring you could rely on community connections to generally enforce a certain standard of work (i.e. you wouldn’t want to be embarrassed by showing up to work drunk, being chronically late, doing a crappy job).
Over the past several decades, people became less tied to the geographic location of their family of birth and were willing to pursue jobs in a much larger area than they once were. This happened in professional circles first because the financial pay-off of pursuing work all over was greater than the in-kind benefits of staying local. People still got jobs through connections of course but these connections were and are different and broader than ones based on community or neighborhood.
Over time, this dispersion has impacted working-class families even though they receive far fewer benefits from a broad job hunt as compared to professionals. Community ties have weakened and working-class people can’t rely on those connections to lead to stable work. So what do they do? Mostly the get something like a certificate which now is the accepted way to enforce a standard of work. Like I said earlier: it’s just as much the skill they learned in the certificate program as the chance to show that they are responsible enough to complete such a program. It also gives them an opportunity to meet teachers and other classmates that are in their field which is their first opportunity to establish a network.
Apprenticeships only seem to be becoming less common rather than more common and I don’t expect that trend to change. I don’t think these certificates programs or wonderful or ideal but it does make a lot of sense to me why people pursue them given the lack of other options available to them.
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re: apprenticeships, note that Germany has a sensible and flourishing apprenticeship system,
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/04/149927290/the-secret-to-germanys-low-youth-unemployment
Of course Germany still has functioning trade unions. We have a long way to go to remediate our dysfunctional systems, education just one among them..
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Minimum wage law probably enters into the question of apprenticeships (note that unpaid internships are on very shaky legal ground nowadays in the US).
I was talking to my sister recently about a related issue. My sister has a number of businesses in Washington state, where the minimum wage is now over $9 an hour (plus taxes, of course). Problem is, when she gets a new employee, they are not worth $9 an hour (plus taxes) their first season. New employees need heavy supervision to ensure that they learn the job correctly, which makes them very expensive. My sister doesn’t break even on them until their second season, which may or may not happen.
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The German apprenticeship system is also under stress. The last I checked, small companies were complaining that large companies were scooping up the “Lehrlinge” (apprentices) they had trained. Also, the government has shortened the length of university and secondary education
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To work, an apprenticeship system needs either (i) strong legal rules or social norms preventing easy job changing, so that companies which train apprentices have some assurance of reaping the benefits or (ii) strong unions, for whom apprenticeships are a good way to control entry into the relevant workforce. Neither condition appears likely to obtain in the United States in the foreseeable future. Therefore, individually-financed, publicly-supplied job training (aka most of what community colleges do) will continue to predominate.
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I don’t actually believe most community colleges do concentrate on individually financed job training (though this may depend on the state). First, for many jobs, training actually means getting to do the job, rather than learning about it in a classroom. CC’s offer that only to varying degrees. Shifting the training to the job, even if one paid for, but with a guarantee of a job at the end would be a plausible fix, and not impossible. Second CCs are also providing stopgap education on the way to 4 year degrees. I think a big issue for students is when they don’t understand the difference between the two.
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CCs also provide a warm place to spend the day for very marginal people.
The CCs cover an awful lot of ground: vocational training, pre-BA coursework, ESL, remediation of faulty K-6 education, cheap entertainment for the elderly, help with hobbies, a bus ride to the big city to go see a show along with a congenial group (our local Texas CC does that), community theater, a place to go when you’ve got no other place to go, etc. The community colleges are COMMUNITY colleges, not just community COLLEGES.
Narrow that role down and I think you’ll find that community support for community colleges will be whittled down, too.
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Laura
As someone who actually works at a community college, let me weigh in. I should point out that all my experience is at rural schools in flyover country, so it may not translate to larger, more urban settings in your neck of woods.
No one is going to confuse my employer with Harvard any more than anyone would see the purse I bought on sale at Kohl’s as being just like the Coach bag I saw when I visited my daughter in Manhattan last month. Yet both wear the label of “purse” and either can hold the junk I carry around on a daily basis. Yet the fancy expensive purse would not fit my life and needs. Sure, I’d enjoy the luxury but my money is better spent elsewhere. Why is it OK to call both bags a purse but it’s not OK to say that Intro to MS Office is a college course?
Our tuition is low by most standards but many of my students struggle to pay it. They do get financial aid and without it, most wouldn’t be there—they’d be desperately trying to get someone to hire them for minimum wage, but most of those jobs left the area. There’s not many choices in the boondocks. To give one example of what happens for my students, when I returned to my office after a meeting today I was given a message that one of my advisees had called. She told our department administrative assistant to tell me that she passed her state boards and that she was just hired as an RN at the local hospital. She starts next week. This woman is in her 40s with 3 kids. She couldn’t pick up and move to North Dakota or some other place with low unemployment. Instead, she worked her tail off for 3 years (1 year of pre-requisites, 2 years of nursing course work) and now she’s got a marketable skill and proved to herself she can conquer a difficult challenge. In fact, the administrative assistant who passed on that message is another good example. She finished our office technology program a year ago and started working for my late boss the next Monday. She worked her way through school working just under full time at a tanning salon. But it took that plus her financial aid to get her through because she drives 50 minutes one way to get to school—distances are long here and there isn’t a real public transit system. Getting her degree in what we used to call secretarial training sparked an interest in lifelong learning. She’s now trying to work on a Bachelor’s online while working for our department and caring for her infant daughter. That just scrapes the surface–I’ve advised future elementary teachers, licensed cosmetology students, auto mechanics and welders. The welder probably makes more than I do. Each of them did internships they were unlikely to have gotten without being students at our college.
I’m not saying all my colleagues are saints—we have the same percentage of incompetents found in any workplace, but no more. Some of the courses we offer are weak, sure. In addition, some of our students really belong in adult basic education rather than college classes and some are only here for the Pell check. However, I suspect but can’t prove the percentage of students at my school who are what we call “Pell chasers” is lower than the percentage of entitled special snowflakes at the expensive 4 year schools who are there to drink beer on their parents’ money.
One of my kids attended a school in the Seven Sisters, another went to an expensive private near Laura and one got her BA at one state flagship and her PhD at the flagship in another state. I’m glad that my paycheck, financial aid and some loans (sigh) made that happen and I’m proud of them. But I don’t think my school is less valuable or important. It’s just different.
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Thanks, Anon, for that input. As I said earlier in this comment section, my husband was a long time CC adjunct. In the past, I was a huge fan of CC’s, but recently, I came across some major failures, so I’m in a questioning phase. If the certificate programs are really helping kids and are a necessary step to entry level jobs, then GREAT. I will write a glowing article later in the fall. If I poke around a little further and my anecdotes become data, then I’ll write a different article. I have no idea what I’ll find. I just want to more attention paid to the kids in those programs.
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I forgot another CC specialty: second chances for people who never got first chances.
My two CC instructor relatives are so proud that two of their students, who were former special needs kids who hadn’t been in school for a long time, have launched very successfully.
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I wonder when you write “kids” if you might want to check that data, too. Our CC average age is closer to 30 than to 20.
There certainly are problems — we’re trying to figure out how to get students from developmental English into college level course before their funding and/or motivation runs out. Most can’t just take an intensive year of classes (remember, they are working full-time).
Completion and certificates are increasingly mandated by outsiders (think legislators) when very often completion is not the goal. Sure, some do want a certifcate but lots of our students are enrolled for a few classes and transfer out. No completion. No certificate. And it looks like we’re not doing our job.
Oh,yes, my job now inlcudes a lot of attendance verification for the financial fraud folks. OK, back to work. Not sure what to say to the student who disappeared last week. His brother was shot. Our students have challenges. Ok, I’m getting too frustrated to write more. Back to grading.
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“Our CC average age is closer to 30 than to 20.” “they are working full-time”
Very good points. And the older students are very likely to have kids at home, etc.
“Completion and certificates are increasingly mandated by outsiders (think legislators) when very often completion is not the goal. Sure, some do want a certifcate but lots of our students are enrolled for a few classes and transfer out. No completion. No certificate. And it looks like we’re not doing our job.”
That is so wrong. If students take a course and learn something (their English improves, they learn the math they didn’t in 6th grade, they get comfortable around a computer), I think that is good enough and also a very good value for the tax payer.
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About attendance–from what I hear, the level of attendance can be very low for the less successful students. In highly cumulative classes like math, you can’t recover from even a short absence without huge effort (going to the tutoring sessions the CC math professors are continually holding during their looong office hours, etc.). The less successful students don’t know that or don’t care or can’t. The lower-performing ones often have a sort of high school mentality where any reason for absence is to be embraced and celebrated. They don’t quite get that it doesn’t matter whether an absence is excused or unexcused if you don’t have a prayer of catching up and your math skills are at the level of a slow 4th grader. (A couple years back (after 3rd grade?), I was showing my dad my oldest daughter’s Geometry and Measurement Kumon workbook and he was saying that many of his CC students would struggle with it.)
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I wonder if Khan Academy, or an equivalent online tutoring program, couldn’t be used to good effect with students of all ages with spotty attendance. Some students don’t have control over their schedules–they depend on others for transportation, or their work schedule heats up. Spotty attendance could have started much earlier, too.
If a student sincerely desires to progress, I would think an online program which would allow them to work through units at their own pace would be beneficial. In my dreams, a student could self-study with Khan Academy (or the equivalent) for free, then test out of any math requirements, or into the appropriate course.
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I get the challenges that CC professors face. Steve taught a class on geography for several years. The poor kids (or adults) could not identify simple points on a world map. Things that my autistic 11-year old can do easily. They didn’t know where Europe was. They didn’t know where the Hudson river was, even though they could see it out the windows of their classroom. Some couldn’t distinguish between water and land and put the pacific ocean in the middle of Asia.
My tentative critiques were not with the professors. I was questioning whether or not AA degrees and certificates helped people find jobs. Last week, I talked to a girl (well, anyone under 30 is a girl to me now) and she spent 6 years in a CC and then a local state college getting a degree in Early Childhood education, but is unemployed (and depressed), because schools are producing too many elementary school teachers.
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“…but is unemployed (and depressed), because schools are producing too many elementary school teachers.”
Aren’t schools producing too much of pretty much everything?
Are the schools at fault, or is the economy just bad?
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Are the schools at fault, or is the economy just bad?
Yep. Not a good time for most fields. It’s bad enough that relatively Pittsburgh is good and people moved back.
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I think questioning the value of the certificates is legitimate. You might find good information looking at Perkins grants (they depend on certificate completion, so suddenly we had certificates in odd things like Communications and WGST which used to just be part of the AA) and financial aid (why is the WGST certificate 16 credits now instead of 15? a capstone? not for pedagogical reasons, but that 16 credits is financial-aid eligible). Our students don’t stick around for an extra semester to do a capstone, so our completion went way down. Unweave it, there’s lots to think about.
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Glad those of you who actually work at CC’s are posting. As I read what I wrote I fear that I am falling into the trap of “breaking the tribe and replacing it with nothing.” (ala Cry the beloved country).
I do talk to people who teach at community college (the most recent conversation was about the dual demands of those who see the CC’s in our city. The first is a filler on the way to 4 year degrees (usually kids, who are using CC’s either as part of Running Start — for HS students looking for college credit classes, recent HS grads whose grades weren’t quite up to snuff, recent HS grades who don’t have funds for our ever increasing tuition at 4 year schools, and returning students, mostly women, who are looking for completing a degree that they stopped for children/moves/jobs). The second is people looking for vocational education and training so that they can find jobs (the c students who didn’t like school, the workers displaced from dying industries, the secretary who needs new skills, . . . .).
But, fussing about what isn’t working in this political climate often results in having nothing at all. And, I’m sure that wouldn’t be better.
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