Can Community Colleges Save the Day?

~ Laura

From the newsletter:

Our local community college is a perfectly nice place with solid buildings and green lawns. It’s not Princeton-level nice, but much better than the CUNY schools* where Steve and I worked many years ago. Yet, when you walk into the Student Center, you get smacked with a wave of misery. Maybe it’s the shuttered Dunkin Donuts by the front door. Maybe it’s the empty hallways and the rows of unused computers in the “one-stop center,” whatever that is. Maybe it’s the poorly lit bookstore that doesn’t seem to sell any books. All together, the place feels like one of those shopping malls where all the stores have left, and old people walk around to get exercise. 

Ian and I were there last Monday to sort out some bureaucratic nonsense. The previous week, I helped Ian write an email to community college’s Office of Specialized Services to ask for a note-taker for his Introduction to IT class. Another parent told me that a note-taker — an accommodation that is really geared towards blind students — helped her autistic son, so I thought Ian would benefit, too. When they didn’t respond, I called and left a message on a machine. When they didn’t return my call, we drove there to get help. 

By now, we all know that students did not learn much during remote education. And any teacher will tell you that schools are not back up to speed this year. This June, we’re going to graduate hundreds of thousands of students, who really didn’t get much schooling since March 2020. They’re going to be dumped into the world, not ready for a four-year college and needing remediation on basic math and reading skills. For many, a skilled trade may be the best option for them. Others are leaving four-year colleges with too many anxieties and mental health issues to continue. 

All those young people suffering from issues related to the pandemic should be heading straight to their local community colleges to regain lost skills and to heal. But will they?

On paper, the mission of community colleges is to provide training and support for students, who graduate from high school, but are not ready for a four-year college. They should shore up weaknesses from a weak high school education, provide an on-ramp to a four-year school, and train students for high-wage skilled jobs. That’s their mission, and it’s a good one. 

However, community colleges have always struggled to fulfill that promise, mostly because they are underfunded. As The Hechinger Report recently reported, New Jersey’s two-year schools get about $14,000 less per student annually than its four-year institutions do, according to the Center for American Progress. The gym teacher at our high school is paid more than the tenured faculty at the nearby community college. Adjuncts are paid less than $2,000 per class, for an entire semester. 

Since the pandemic, community colleges really suffered, as is evident by their enrollment numbers, which are down by 15 percent. Our local community college still has only a fraction of their courses in-person; that’s why the campus feels like a dead shopping mall. Unlike the local public schools, there is no pressure from organized parents or attention from the media to get students back in a physical classroom. 

Their funding issues haven’t improved since COVID. That Hechinger article pointed out that four-year colleges received far more federal help during COVID than these two-year schools. They had to use that pocket change to fix massive problems from COVID. 

But I don’t need articles and statistics to see an institution that’s faltering. I can see it. It was impossible to get Ian help from the disability office without me going down there and putting on a snooty Professor Karen voice. I had to do that last spring, too, to get him enrolled in a class and get a student ID. (I wrote about those challenges at length.) Staff are dispirited, and expectations are low. 

What needs to happen?

  1. Money is the first step. There needs to be a spending spree to create high quality support systems for students and hire better professors. We actually need to take money away from the four-year schools and give it to community colleges. Sorry. 
  2. They need to get away from the jargon that clogs up the system. There’s so much talk about “pathways” and other higher ed conference lingo, and students have no idea what those slogans mean. 
  3. There needs to be a better bridge between high schools and community colleges. 
  4. They need to get student back on campus. 
  5. We need national media attention to community colleges. There should be a rule. For every new article that mentions Harvard, that publication must write an article about a community college. 
  6. To deal with the damage from COVID, certain classes — remedial English and Math, for example — and mental health services should be free and available to any student. 
  7. There needs to be high-end career support with efforts to move students to local, available, good paying jobs. 

That’s a long and ambitious laundry list of reforms, I know. But community colleges may the only place where young people, and not-so-young people, can recover from the damage of Covid. 

*Higher Education Fun Fact: Bronx Community College – Steve was an adjunct professor there for several years — is the nicest looking of the CUNY campuses. It’s the former NYU campus, and its library was used as a set for the Thomas Crown Affair.

Published by Laura

26 thoughts on “Can Community Colleges Save the Day?”

  1. Money, of course, everyone wants more. Will it come from four-year pubic colleges, which are becoming affordably because of decreasing support from their states? I can’t say that I would support that. Bigger increases for CC’s over four-year colleges? maybe.

    But a goal of bringing students to campus is nuanced, I think for CCs. Here’s an article from a Community College Survey: https://www.newamerica.org/education-policy/edcentral/online-learning-nuances/

    The article says that the majority of Americans think that online instruction is inferior. But, only 1/3 of CC students want all their classes to be in person. Seems a lot like the issues facing workplaces on whether workers should return. Solid groups want different things.

    Community colleges serve HS students, straight out of HS students looking for less expensive education, education closer to home, those not ready for four year colleges, returning students with jobs and families, laid off workers seeking retraining. . . . The median age of students at our local CC is 33.

    Agree about the educational jargon which I hate and don’t understand and I don’t understand who is responsible for it, either.

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    1. “Money, of course, everyone wants more. Will it come from four-year pubic colleges, which are becoming affordably because of decreasing support from their states? I can’t say that I would support that.”

      It should come from a tax on the rich. Seriously, I am getting to be so over taking from the poor to give to the poorer and vice versa.

      Re “pathways”: they’re supposed to be different from disciplines or majors, I think. Students look at a major nowadays and say “I don’t need some of those courses. Why are they there? I just want to take the courses I need to get the job I want.” But you’re doing a student a disservice by letting them just take whatever courses they want and leading them to believe they can get a job that way. (I might have just sat through a 2.5 hour meeting, part of which involved talking about this.)

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    2. One of the articles Laura linked (in a tweet?) described course planning software that mapped out the “shortest path” to a degree, with blocked out times for CC students (a NJ CC?). Sounds like a good idea, though the 525K they paid (with stimulus funds) seemed like a lot. And, the tech solutions of making trying to make solutions by taking the labor away takes away the art of human contact many learners need.

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    3. I’m for taxing the rich, but I think we have to recognize that the amount of money we want for all the things is going to include a broader definition of rich than Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, and Musk. I do keep getting naively shocked at hearing the opinions of yet another billionaire so maybe there’s more money there than I think. But, they really can move away. I really think Thiel is planning his own nation on a barge somewhere, maybe in the South China Seas, and will barter with some autocratic dictator for it.

      But, in general, I think many will have to pay more taxes to fund these programs, and though I’ll vote for the people who will raise my taxes, I hear most of people won’t, I think, and, apparently, they are the swing votes in all the counties & states that matter.

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      1. “I’m for taxing the rich, but I think we have to recognize that the amount of money we want for all the things is going to include a broader definition of rich than Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, and Musk. ”

        Good point. Let’s see how much tax revenue we can raise just by taxing the ultra-rich. Then, let’s see what the shortfall is. We won’t know till we try.

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      2. They are worth about 5 trillion, the Fed government spends about 7 trillion in one year. If we confiscate their money less slowly maybe they’ll generate more.

        “More recently, the Institute for Policy Studies estimated that as of Oct. 15 there were 745 U.S. billionaires, together worth slightly more than $5 trillion. That’s a 70% collective increase in fortune since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak on March 18, 2020, according to the institute.

        As for the federal government, it spent $6.82 trillion in fiscal 2021, which ended Sept. 30, according to the Treasury Department.”

        https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/nov/02/viral-image/confiscating-us-billionaires-wealth-would-run-us-g/

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  2. We are technically the rich but a) we’re a household of 5 with 2 minor children and 3 kids 9-19 that need to be gotten through college or whatever and b) we own 1 car c) we have enormous medical and therapy costs right now and d) 90+% of our travel is just to see family.

    I realize there will come a time when we will have more disposable income, but this is not that year. If anybody wants to tap us hard, may I suggest starting in summer 2023 or ideally summer 2027, when our current high schooler will be graduating from college or close to it?

    Appreciated!

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    2. So the tax applied only to billionaires, it would generate 100 billion. Presumably, there’s more to be found in the 50 millionaires and up.

      I think our current tax system is insufficiently progressive (mostly because of social security taxes, which generate 1 trillion, though state and local taxes can also be a problem). But, though I want more progressive taxes, I think taxes sold on the premise that they will only apply to other people support bad decision making.

      I voted for levy measures for our school system this week. Comfortable with the $2400/year or so they’ll cost me for the billion or so they’ll raise (and, I hope no one finds the cost unbearable). I support steeply progressive taxes but not ones that promise they won’t affect me at all.

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  3. Re: recommendation 6 – there’s a growing body of evidence that remedial instruction doesn’t work/isn’t the best. That’s not to say some courses shouldn’t be free, but not remedial courses.

    https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/07/17/data-already-tell-us-how-effective-co-requisite-education-opinion

    https://www.brookings.edu/research/evidence-based-reforms-in-college-remediation-are-gaining-steam-and-so-far-living-up-to-the-hype/

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  4. Those are nice articles that should guide planning, but they don’t argue that there shouldn’t be “remediation”, only that it shouldn’t be used to gate keep access to courses that might provide a track to a degree or employment.

    “Evidence of the greater effectiveness of co-requisite remediation, as compared to traditional remediation, has been steadily accumulating.” from the first article and from the second that students might be able to do OK in courses without the remedial classes and that current assessments are bad at evaluating who needs remediation.

    I don’t know this student population at all, but I do wonder how we move away from standard academic curricula to teaching what some students need for employment (while still retaining on ramps for those who want to return to more traditional academics). Who needs to know algebra? calculus? what do we teach in traditional language arts classes? what kind of English language proficiency is required for different occupations (especially when the student also has proficiency in another language?). What skills need to be taught to students with specific learning disabilities or special needs? What do employers say they need?

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    1. When I was considering switching careers and taking a lot of science classes at City College of San Francisco I saw a lot of struggling pre nursing students. Their lack of math and science basics was killing them in chemistry and micro biology. It was blocking their chances at getting into LVN/LPN or RN/BSN programs and making a decent income.

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    2. Marianne said, “When I was considering switching careers and taking a lot of science classes at City College of San Francisco I saw a lot of struggling pre nursing students. Their lack of math and science basics was killing them in chemistry and micro biology. It was blocking their chances at getting into LVN/LPN or RN/BSN programs and making a decent income.”

      My fairly bright 11th grader is in AP Chemistry right now and his whole life revolves around the class. I’ve been looking at reddit (don’t judge!), and it seems like that’s pretty normal, both for AP Chemistry and college chemistry courses.

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      1. My Catholic high school had a great pseudo AP chemistry class – it wasn’t geared toward the AP but it really prepared you for college chemistry. My sister, a nursing major, made a tidy income as a chemistry tutor. It’s a challenging class. Even some students who got some AP credit struggled per my sister- especially if they took it in 11th grade and forgot a lot.

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      2. My Catholic high school had a great pseudo AP chemistry class – it wasn’t geared toward the AP but it really prepared you for college chemistry. My sister, a nursing major, made a tidy income as a chemistry tutor. It’s a challenging class. Even some students who got some AP credit struggled per my sister- especially if they took it in 11th grade and forgot a lot.

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      3. “Even some students who got some AP credit struggled per my sister- especially if they took it in 11th grade and forgot a lot.”

        I’ve taken an awful lot of science classes and forgotten an awful lot. Presumably, at some point in my life, I knew how to answer the AP chemistry questions (unlike molecular biology, where the PCR reaction post-dates my coursework, mostly, while my kiddos actually encountered it in 8th grade). I question the degree of acceleration some students are experiencing. It works for some, but for others, they are really learning it at a point where they won’t remember it later. And, if you don’t remember it, does it matter whether you learned it? That’s a real question, not a rhetorical one.

        For example, I’ve forgotten the details of Lewis diagrams (which also really annoyed me when I learned them because they were taught as though they were a rule, but as with HS grammar rules, there were exceptions, and the Lewis rules exceptions hurt my brain). Am I more likely to understand them now on review?

        There are things I learned and I will always remember (exponents, algebra as two examples, some trig, some calculus). There are others that I used consistently (brain areas, anatomy of neurons, . . . .). But so much of what gets taught gets forgotten.

        Which is the long way of wondering what nurses really need to know — about chemistry, microbiology, . . . . And, again, a real question. I don’t know what a nurse needs to know.

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      4. “Which is the long way of wondering what nurses really need to know — about chemistry, microbiology, . . . . And, again, a real question. I don’t know what a nurse needs to know.”

        So I asked sister-the-nurse, who is an RN, an OCN (Oncology Certified Nurse) and a CRNI (Certified Registered Nurse Infusion). She texted back:

        “We need to understand diffusion and osmosis. We need microbiology to understand general pathology. Parts of a cell. In Oncology there is a lot about cells and apoptosis. In Immunotherapy we talk about specific proteins on cells. We monitor electrolytes too.”

        LMK if you have other questions/want specifics.

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    3. Co-requisite remediation has a long (ish) history. It relies on the idea that we don’t learn well without context for what we’re learning. So simply drilling students on grammar* doesn’t help unless they can figure out how to apply that knowledge to their own writing about things they care about. When I was in academic administration in the 90s, we were implementing this kind of remediation. It’s expensive and wieldy to implement, which is why, I am sure, it’s no longer used as often.

      (*Also, have you ever taught a student in a writing class who tells you their HS teacher told them X or Y “rule”? Like, “never begin a sentence with the word ‘because’? Without context, students just rely on rules they were told, even if they aren’t technically grammar rules.)

      Teaching students how to write is DIFFICULT work and requires a lot of individual attention to students because the reasons why students don’t write well are very individual. But again, that is expensive.

      “I do wonder how we move away from standard academic curricula to teaching what some students need for employment”

      Employers want lots of “soft” skills: communication, creativity, collaboration, ability to adapt to changing needs. All stuff in the liberal arts curriculum, but HEY, we don’t need no stinking liberal arts.

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      1. I have spent a lot of my career supporting software for commercial lending. So many of the big deals are unique and thus require large written documentation as you can’t design an application with enough unique data elements to capture that in any affordable way. Often a deal is accompanied by a 10 page single spaced write up (interspersed with tables). I’ve heard that some interns are stunned to learn they will be producing the equivalent of a 20 page paper every week plus other work. And the writing has to be clear and unambiguous.

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      2. Marianne said, ” I’ve heard that some interns are stunned to learn they will be producing the equivalent of a 20 page paper every week plus other work. And the writing has to be clear and unambiguous.”

        WOW!

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      3. AmyP Yes it can be intense at first. And to be fair, the documents they produce are somewhat structured – overview of customer, key guarantors, risk ratings, overview of project to be funded, etc but the interns have to learn how to look at a lot of information, pick out what is important and summarize it clearly. On the plus side there are no citations required though you better be able to say where you got all those numbers in your tables. After a while you hear the keyboards tapping away as they crank out their work more and more confidently. It’s important work – the credit teams that decide whether or not to fund these enormous loans need to have a lot of information in an easily digestible format.

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  5. One thing that I am personally noting is how much of a barrier lack of proficient English language skills, including reading/writing can be in entering paid employment (maybe this is different in areas with a larger number of other language speakers, like parts of southern CA & Spanish). In my neck of the woods, English language learners (ELL) speak a wide variety of languages and so translating to the languages is a complicated task and so much interaction requires being able to navigate websites, which requires some proficiency in English.

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    1. I agree that written English is frequently a barrier in a whole range of areas (people with severe dyslexia are unlikely to pass a driver’s licence, for example – which limits your employability as a tradesperson

      Also, heavy accents can prove communication barriers.
      I once had to come to the rescue of a staff member who was in an increasingly heated interaction with a customer. Both had good English, but both had heavy accents – and rhythm shift – in their English. While I (standard NZ English speaker – with a bit of a British accent) could understand and be understood by both of them, neither of them could understand each other.

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  6. I once worked with a post doc who struggled with online training (especially the CYA form, which is not really for training, but just to say that you’ve “trained”). We could communicate speaking to each other, including fairly complicated issues, but the kind of scanning of boring, potentially non-informative information to answer “tricky” online questions became an experiment in an odd set of language skills, not in whether she actually understood how to do something (like a lab procedure).

    And everything going online increases the dependence on this kind of skill. And yet, the SAT is still testing whether students can interpret a Barbara Kingsolver passage for metaphor. I know the SAT isn’t the tool used in community colleges, but I think people are still prone to missing the point of testing comprehension (especially when they want to see variation in scores).

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    1. bj said, “And yet, the SAT is still testing whether students can interpret a Barbara Kingsolver passage for metaphor.”

      I feel like there are a lot of non-fiction passages nowadays, but yeah, even there I felt like the current SAT is pretty big on gotchas as opposed to real world comprehension.

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