Completion Comes First

WASHINGTON — Community colleges are no longer the “best-kept secret” in higher education. The colleges are getting plenty of attention for their role in workforce training, and at the same time feeling growing pressure to improve low graduation rates — a trend that continued Monday with the naming of Valencia College as the first winner of the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence.

Valencia, a large two-year institution in Florida that is widely considered a top community college, edged out the competition in part for its strides on completion rates.

“Valencia reworked many traditional processes that other colleges view as immutable,” according to an Aspen-produced pamphlet describing the 10 finalists for the award. By giving students earlier advising and orientation, as well as offering a “Student Success” course, the college has tried “new things where they’ll matter most, for the neediest students.”

The three-year, full-time graduation and transfer rate for minority students at Valencia is 43 percent, which outpaces the national average of 33 percent. And the completion rate for Valencia’s career programs has grown 44 percent over four years.

With the selection of Valencia, the prize committee has reinforced a strong Beltway focus on student outcomes in a sector where access has traditionally come first. In addition to weighing graduation rates, the award process involved intensive data-gathering on colleges’ labor market success, learning outcomes and performance with underserved student populations. Funding the prize was the Lumina Foundation for Education, a major force for the completion agenda, as well as the Joyce Foundation, Bank of America and J.P. Morgan.

“It can’t be just about getting in the door” at community colleges, Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, said at the event. “We have to take community college outcomes to the next level.”

Joshua Wyner, executive director of the Aspen College Excellence Program, told Inside Higher Ed that the group plans to make the award an annual affair. And he confirmed that the $1 million-total prize pot would be replenished each year, at least for the foreseeable future.

One of the goals of the prize is to create better metrics to track community college performance. And all the better if colleges try to change how they do business to win, said Wyner, because unlike other rankings efforts, this process can only lead to changes that will help students.

“We would like them to game this system,” he said.

Valencia received $600,000 for winning. Four colleges were named runners-up “with distinction,” each earning $100,000. They were Lake Area Technical Institute (S.D.), Miami Dade College, Walla Walla Community College (Wash.), and West Kentucky Community and Technical College.

The prize was culled from an initial list of “120” best community colleges. (There are about 1,200 two-year colleges in the U.S.) Those colleges had to submit detailed applications to be considered for the final 10. That group included Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College, Mott Community College (Mich.), Northeast Iowa Community College at Calmar, Santa Barbara City College (Calif.) and Southwest Texas Junior College.

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