Matt Reed has an excellent post at Inside Higher Ed about the difficulty of assessing the quality of community colleges. If you look at future earnings as a metric of success, then that opens up a whole host of problems.
Sarah graduates from her local community college, and transfers to a nearby four-year college. She subsequently graduates from the four-year college and goes on to medical school. She spends a few years in residency, then gets a high-paying job as a physician.
At what point do we count her earnings? And who gets credit for them?
The standard measure is looking at starting salaries right out of college. But Sarah’s salary right out of community college, and even right out of her four-year school, was zero. We could include the zero, but it would be deeply misleading. Or we could exclude Sarah, but that would be misleading, too; if not for the start she got at the community college, she would not have been able to land her physician job. By excluding Sarah and others like her, we wind up with an artificially low figure for community college grads.  And in this political climate, that’s the kind of figure for which a college is punished.
We had an interesting discussion about this issue a few weeks ago, but I don’t think we came to any conclusions.
If the public is going to support higher education with student loans or with state money, then there has to be some sort of accountability and assessment. But it is very tricky at schools with high transfer rates or at community colleges, which can be stepping stones to other schools.
How should we assess community colleges?
Apt. 11d 
Which community colleges are thought to be doing a bad job? I think that’s the question I want to answer first, because I think this is a welfare queen or voting fraud problem (i.e. allegations of waste in order to undermine the system). I have no reason to believe that fraud or waste is huge in community colleges as they are currently constructed and that expensive, time consuming and extensive performance measures are going to improve the quality of our community colleges.
I think regulatory oversight and monitoring by the funding agencies is the way to judge the quality of the community colleges (say the same way we judge the quality of the police force in our cities and states). There may be specific pockets of corruption but I want to seek those out, rather than institute performance measures for everyone on some kind of mathematical, national level.
I am concerned about the for-profits, though, mostly because I think consumer-driven regulation is insufficient (often in general), but especially with young poor people making expensive decisions.
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Sarah! Dassme! And, yes, Merritt Jr College does not show up in the list getting credit for my brilliant career.
If you are looking to assess, I think you want to look at what goes in and what goes out: high school scores and grades, and how well the student does at some kind of knowledge metric after leaving the school – not something crude like average salary. Average salary is how Harvey Mudd beat Princeton – not that Harvey Mudd isn’t good, but Princeton it ain’t.
I think you can wipe out a lot of the problem by making student debt dischargeable in bankruptcy. Lenders will get a lot more choosy about putting loans out to students in underwater basketweaving or chef schools if they know they will get bit if the student can’t make a living, later. dave.s.
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I wish there was a fabulous study of community colleges to refer to, but I haven’t seen one yet. I’m mostly working with anecdotal stories from neighbors, friends, and family. I’m predisposed to love community colleges, because I strongly believe in giving people a second chance.
I haven’t heard stories about fraud, except from the for-profit schools, which need serious oversight. Still, every public enterprise has to justify its existence in some way in a democracy. If we are going to giving billions to community colleges in the form of direct support and student loans, then we have to have some idea about the benefits that they offer students.
I have heard widely divergent stories about the quality of community colleges. Some use cc as a way to take a chunk out of the college expenses. 2 years at the cc and then the final 2 years at a state college. That seems very practical to me. A couple of friends used their 2 year AA degrees to great jobs in hospitals later. There weren’t great students, but they needed the credentialing to run EKG machines or whatever.
I have also heard some very sad stories. One girl in doing her 6th year at a comm college for a very practical career. She can’t get through the program partially because the classes aren’t offered every semester. Others get degrees for jobs that don’t exist. I’ve heard stories about great professors, as well professors that are off their meds and are doing kooky things.
From professors, I heard other stories. I hear about students that aren’t even able to function at a community college, because their skills are so low. From BA programs, I hear professor gripe about the former community college students who were poorly trained and are annoyed that the low level college classes count as credit at the BA college.
I have NO IDEA what to think about community colleges and want someone to show me some data that says that those schools are great for X, Y, and Z reasons.
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Not only community colleges, but this article I read yesterday (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/business/economy/nice-college-but-whatll-i-make-when-i-graduate.html?ref=education)
also only looks at undergraduate, so it skews high for engineers and anyone going to graduate school is not considered employed.
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BTW there is a huge argument going on about the rankings of community colleges by the Washington Monthly: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/september_october_2013/features/a_note_on_methodology_communit046449.php
See esp the comments.
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I think one of the issues that need to be addressed in studies is what the community colleges are being used for. I think they serve a wide wide array of needs. There are the 2 year folks who use them as a jumping point to a shorter four year degree, and some of those use the step purely for financial reasons, some because they didn’t get a choice they were looking for, others because they could use the extra preparation. There are the remedial students. There are the returning students (who were in the workforce and are not out of it and looking for skills to renter). There are the folks training for associates degrees as their terminal degree (to enter the workforce). There are the casual class takers (I’ve signed up for a painting studio class through our community college — it wasn’t even really a class but just a studio opportunity near by).
(and, the story varies in different states, where the community colleges can be used differently (not to mention the community colleges that are trying to move up into four year schools for a variety of different incentives).
I’ve heard all the variety of anecdotes you have as well and am also unaware of any systematic analysis (not mention even the mystery of how the schools are structured in different places). We understand how universities work in our family, but have been confused about how to explain the educational plans of a relative who is currently attending a community college (because we really don’t understand how it works).
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“I think one of the issues that need to be addressed in studies is what the community colleges are being used for. I think they serve a wide wide array of needs.”
Exactly.
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I don’t know exactly what would be best to deal with this, but the problems I hear about are:
1. No-show students
2. Students who don’t do the work
3. Low-functioning students who are there to kill time
I don’t begrudge these students the chance to take Comp 101 or remedial math a third time, but I don’t think it’s mean to have differential tuition rates depending on how many times a student has tried to take a particular class (I’d suggest a small penalty for the second time, but doubling the tuition for third-timers). Also, I think repeaters should have relatively low priority at getting into courses with enrollment caps.
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There’s a fantasy novel — the “Name of the Wind” in which a major portion of the action occurs at a school for magic in which tuition is set after examination. Lots of politics interfere in the book, but also higher tuition for students who receive lower assessments.
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But it would be foolish to imagine that raising tuition for the student who is taking Com 101 for the 3rd time is anything other than forbidding them from taking the class (the hero in the fantasy novel has to go to loan sharks who take oaths of repayment in blood to pay his tuition when he looses out on the politics).
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A student might genuinely have gotten their act together finally, the third time. In that case, twice the normal tuition rate would be a bargain. (Remember, it’s just for the one class that they are taking the third time, not an across the board tuition hike.)
It shouldn’t be possible to indefinitely clog up the community college system at the taxpayer’s expense while barely bothering to make an appearance and making no visible progress.
If people are actually making progress, I don’t care how long it takes them, but I’d like to see some forward motion.
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Are there actually any Sarahs who have started at community college and gone on to become doctors? My experience with pre-med students is that they hit the college track hard and fast. In addition, CC bio and chem, while covering the basics, are unlikely to prepare a student for the rigors of upper level coursework in those majors.
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Tasha, it’s going to depend a lot on the state. California, not likely, California undertrains docs and counts on Kansas and Harvard to train them their docs. Kansas and the Dakotas and Texas and Oregon, reasonably likely: they have small populations from which they draw their med school classes, admission is a LOT easier.
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Yes. I had a second cousin who had always wanted to be a doctor, but had a baby at 16 and got her GED. She worked until her kid was older, went to CC, and then went to a local university, and last I talked to her (about 8 years ago) she was finishing up med school. Multiple people (I can think of 3 off the top of my head, and there are definitely more) in my PhD program got their start at CCs, some because it was cheap, and some because they weren’t ready for college after high school, or needed a second or third chance to get back on track.
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Cool. I love those stories. A research tech I knew (who actually had gotten a 4 year degree straight out of high school, but was taking some time off before she went on her next step once spent a lunch lecturing a faculty member who was whining about his 16yo son, who had not yet found his life path — this faculty member was an MD/PhD who had entered a 7 yo med program straight out of high school. It was an eye opening discussion (my kids were babies).
There are some paths you probably can’t get back on after having a baby at 16, and med school is a tough one, but it’s cool to hear that even that’s not impossible.
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Are there actually any Sarahs who have started at community college and gone on to become doctors?
I don’t know about doctors (surely there are _some_- it’s a big world) but I do know at least two now-tenured philosophy professors who started out at a community college, and another philosopher who is a successful bio-ethicist at a hospital who started out at one.
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See, that’s what I would LOVE to know. How many people coming out community college end up getting a PhD or an MD? How many simply graduate with an AA degree? An AA is a fine degree to have. Earnings are much higher for people with an AA than a high school diploma. That much we do know. But what we don’t know is how many people who start off at a community college finish there or somewhere else. That’s really important information to have. How many eventually graduate somewhere? Is it 70%, 40%, or 10%. If it’s only 10%, then we have to rethink the system.
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“But what we don’t know is how many people who start off at a community college finish there or somewhere else. That’s really important information to have. How many eventually graduate somewhere? Is it 70%, 40%, or 10%. If it’s only 10%, then we have to rethink the system.”
Laura, I don’t think you really get what community colleges are for. You’re thinking in terms of a pipeline that runs from the CC to 4-year schools, with leakage occurring along the way. I don’t think that’s quite the right image. I think bj captured really well the diversity of the community college audience upthread. I’d add to bj’s list:
1. foreign students en route to 4-year US colleges (I have an auntie who boards such students)
2. Elderly ladies who want to go to a show in Dallas (the local CC runs a bus).
Here are some overlapping groups:
3. homeschool kids attempting to create a plausible application with recognizable credentials for a 4-year-college
4. bright high school kids
5. in states like WA, Running Start students who are attending community college courses instead of high school courses (my auntie gripes a lot about the underprepared ones)
http://www.k12.wa.us/SecondaryEducation/CareerCollegeReadiness/RunningStart.aspx
I’ve personally never taken a CC class, but because of my strong family connections to the CC world, it’s always been on my radar. I’m tentatively planning to sign my kids up for CC courses when the time comes.
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Alright. I take it back. There are some studies of particular schools. Community colleges in New York City have a 29% 6-year graduation rate. Of course, some transfer before they finish their degree. It’s really hard to track that information.
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I think ours is 12% two-year graduation rate. Is this number meaningful? Or maybe the number of students who enrolled in the first-year experience class (over 650) vs the number who finished (less than 400)? I imagine it depends on what indeed are we trying to measure?
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Some of the community colleges in our area are dumping the developmental ed. Send them to ABE (adult basic education) if they can’t read and write at the college level. Sure, the municipalities are going to be able to fix this with volunteers. But with the pressure to retain, to graduate, to prove that every certificate is going to guarantee an certain income, seems like we’re really being pushed to let go of part of what we see as our mission – that open gate.
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More links:
About 40 percent of all college students are older than 25, according to U.S. Education Department data. More than a third attend classes part-time. Nearly 20 percent work full-time. About 60 percent enroll at four-year public and private schools, while the rest mostly attend community colleges or enroll at for-profit colleges. Very few attend the well-known universities topping the U.S. News and World Report rankings.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/todays-typical-college-students-often-juggle-work-children-and-bills-with-coursework/2013/09/14/4158c8c0-1718-11e3-804b-d3a1a3a18f2c_story.html
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My husband was an international student from a poor background and he enrolled first at a CC, transferring later to a state flagship. He’s been very successful in his career. At CC he took ESL and a writing composition class, both of which he said helped him a lot, along with some engineering pre-reqs.
Most people, when they become successful, don’t talk about their CC background (only politicians who are trying to concoct a rags-to-riches scenario routinely brag about humble origins). So you might know successful people who went to CC, but most of them probably wouldn’t broadcast it.
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Thanks, Kris. I totally agree that we need to have a national conversation about community colleges, especially since they educate such a large percentage of students. I’m going to do some homework this week. If I can pull this together and get a thumbs up from the Atlantic, I may bother you for your perspective on this topic.
So, you think it’s a bad thing that cc are sending some kids to adult basic education? Yeah, I’m sure that volunteers won’t help them out much, but what about regular certified high school teachers? I would think that they have more training in working with people with low level skills, than a PhD or an adjunct, right?
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Good question. But they really aren’t kids. That’s a different kind of college. Our average age is over 25 (and we have a lot of high school students who are skewing that down).
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Don’t forget Joanne Jacobs’ community college blog:
http://communitycollegespotlight.org/
As people have mentioned, the additional difficulties of CC students is that they are older (and hence their academic knowledge is rustier), they’re working and they may have families,
In my home town, the closest actual 4-year college is about four hours away by car. There’s a CC branch office that teaches a limited array of courses and then the main CC campus is 90 minutes away by car. If you have a job and a family, and you’re a little older, the last thing on your mind is to leave your job, uproot your family, and pay through the nose for a four year college education that may or may not do you more good than your CC courses. That’s an entirely rational choice.
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Yes, I would talk to Joanne, too.
Forgive me, if I ask stupid questions. I’m thinking about this for the first time.
So, it seems that that community colleges have too many missions. They are trying to educate kids who didn’t receive proper training in high school. They provide technical education for people wanting to operate EKG machines and to become stenographers. They provide a liberal arts education for people wanting to transfer to a traditional 4-year college. They give locals a chance to take a class here and there in art or something. That’s a lot of different missions. Is that too much? Aren’t all those missions creating massive confusion about the purpose of a community college?
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Around here, the universities are running branch campuses to try to capture the people who might have used a cc and then transferred. I’d guess they will get the best students willing to transfer. Penn State has been very big into that and most of their undergrads now start somewhere besides Happy Valley.
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I’m not sure the multiple missions create confusion except when people try to apply measurements that aren’t relevant.
NOT that I think we don’t have problems. We certainly do. I’d like to see more than 70% of my students complete comp I successfully. And that number seems steady in almost every format. Just thinking aloud now — I’m in office hours (online).
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My local cc has a 17% 6-year graduation rate. 15% transfer. All on Obama’s handy college scorecard. How do I make sense of that number? Is 17% a good number? Apparently, even some college without graduation still does mean a boost in life-time earnings. So, should I not care about graduation rate?
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“So, should I not care about graduation rate?”
No, for CC, I don’t think you should.
Think of a CC as being like a grocery store. Some people are there for a week’s worth of groceries: milk, eggs, meat, veggies, fruit, cereal, toilet paper, bread, dog food etc. Others are there for just the milk or just the bread, and yet others are there to rent a carpet cleaner or send money via Western Union. If we evaluate the success of the store based on what percentage of customers spent $100 per visit just on food, that would be a mistake.
It is handy to have everything under the same roof, even if there isn’t much of a logical connection between all the items and services offered.
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I agree with this evaluation about graduation rates, though I think different states have different missions for their CCs (both what they’re designed for, and what they’re used for). And also agree that having the different missions under one roof can be useful. As someone who casually signs up for art classes, I appreciate having classmates who are more serious about the work than I am (who are, say, seeing it as a stepping stone to a teaching career, or in some cases, actually applying to art school). I wouldn’t prefer a set of classes that was specifically designed for moms with some spare time and creative energies (most of the time, though sometimes that might be what someone is looking for, too).
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We have to think more broadly about education than in terms of pieces of paper handed out or earnings. Some of the benefits from education are huge, but not obvious.
For instance, I listen to a lot of hard luck personal finance radio, and the twin curses of the lower middle class are
1) the fact that numbers make their eyes glaze over
and
2) they get all of their personal finance education from salespeople.
There is a huge industry devoted to getting lower middle class and middle middle class people to make bad financial decision: 90-days-same-as-cash deals that turn nasty on day 91 (all the previously deferred interest hits you like a load of bricks), pay day lenders, car loans with interest rates in the mid to high teens (or even higher), Tote-the-Note car lots, department store credit cards with 30% interest, furniture rental places, whole life insurance policies, etc. Poor people make surprisingly good eating.
Here, for example, is the story of a Kia that changed hands 8 times in 3 years at a Tote-the-Note lot at 2 and 3 times its actual book value and at 20%+ interest.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-buy-here-pay-here-timeline-interactive,0,4010877.htmlstory
Once you have a certain level of comfort with numbers and a little bit more information and street smarts, that stuff is less likely to happen to you, even if your income is the same as it was.
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Here’s another of the gripes that I’ve heard from my CC teaching relatives. Some students have a really K-12 attitude about absences, where you can tell that they think they’re getting away with something if they have a good reason not to be in class. For instance, my dad had a student schedule a non-emergency vet appointment during his math class. It’s really hard to catch up if you miss a math class when you’re not that good at math. It’s hard for some CC students to wrap their minds around the fact that if they miss class and don’t keep up with the work, they are hurting nobody but themselves. If you’re not smart enough to figure that sort of thing out, life is going to be a lot tougher for you, college or no college.
To balance the gripes, I should mention that my dad and his math colleague put in hours and hours of time hanging out at the college to help students with homework before class and there have been some really amazing success stories involving students who take full advantage of the local CC resources.
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We’re using a textbook called “On Course” for the first year experience class that is tied to both reading and writing developmental courses. You might look at some of their data just to get a sense of the focus: fall-to-fall retention, gpa, etc. One of the problems is whether our students can actually read this text even as it’s being used to help them understand navigating the college system. We couple it with what’s called “intrusive advising” which just means they meet with faculty rather than setting up all of their courses on their own.
http://www.oncourseworkshop.com/Data.htm
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An interesting flip side of getting all of one’s financial education from salespeople is not understanding how something works when it really is a benefit. The Atlantic had an article profiling a lower income student with stellar grades (and this time, with actually stellar grades and SAT scores, not just “high”) who certainly would have been a candidate at the higher end schools that are basically free for that level of income. But, her parents basically thought those deals were scams, couldn’t believe that Amherst, say, really wouldn’t make them pay, and would even give their daughter money. The sticker shock and the similarity to get rich quick/lottery/scams was just too high.
I’ve heard quite a few stories of people throwing away the Questbridge information thinking it’s a scam (say, like the “World travel nominations”.
Now the varied benefits of education are the standard argument for liberal arts colleges, too, and I believe it there as well. But, I think community colleges really should be the option to bolster for those who are marginally educated, the one where we have to judge success by lessons learned and not by degrees earned or salaries raised. And, we should keep the experience cheap enough to make it available to everyone.
(I think 4 year colleges should have to show greater success rates, say, for graduation rates)
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