Ruby Ryles

Community colleges can improve graduation rates by offering a course that teaches students how to navigate college with lessons on study skills, time management and how to find the bursar’s office. Yet while “student success” courses are increasingly common, resistance remains strong at many community colleges.

That’s because all courses come with costs, through hiring or shifting faculty, finding classrooms and creating curriculums. And some academics don’t like the idea of spending limited resources or awarding credit on classes that teach note-taking or other basic skills.

Another challenge is turf wars over deciding which department should manage a student success course. If the class is housed in the communications department, for example, that probably means communications can include one less traditional course among its offerings.

It can also be controversial to ask students to pay for a success class, which are sometimes seen as a patronizing extension of high school, but are typically 1-3 credits, and count toward degrees or credentials as would an English or math class.

Yet research strongly suggests that taking the plunge on a student success course is a good move for two-year colleges.

Take Tulsa Community College, which for four years has required that about 1,000 incoming students take its “Academic Strategies” course. Those students are 20 percent more likely to remain enrolled at the college than students who don’t take the course, according to data collected by the college, and they also perform better in academic coursework.

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By Allen McDuffee

A new task force by the progressive think tank, The Century Foundation, will focus on strengthening community colleges with the intention of saving them from becoming “separate and unequal” institutions.

The Task Force on Preventing Community Colleges from Becoming Separate and Unequal will address questions of access, affordability and post-graduation opportunities, as well as intersecting race and class issues.

The 20-member group from academia, philanthropic institutions and the private sector will be co-chaired by Anthony Marx, president of the New York Public Library and former president of Amherst College, and Eduardo Padron, the president of Miami Dade College.

In his 2012 State of the Union address, President Obama said community colleges are central to economic recovery and job creation, calling on businesses to partner with community colleges to make the American workforce more competitive in the global economy.

“Model partnerships between businesses like Siemens and community colleges in places like Charlotte and Orlando and Louisville are up and running,” Obama said. “Now you need to give more community colleges the resources they need to become community career centers — places that teach people skills that businesses are looking for right now, from data management to high-tech manufacturing.”.

However, to sustain the current political and economic interest in community colleges, a new and innovative way of diversifying the student profile needs to be addressed, says Padron.

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The litany of bad news about the status of black men in higher education is by now familiar. They make up barely 4 percent of all undergraduate students, the same proportion as in 1976. They come into college less prepared than their peers for the rigors of college-level academic work. Their completion rates are the lowest of all major racial and ethnic groups in the U.S.

Shaun R. Harper is tired of hearing the list. It’s not that he believes it’s inaccurate — the facts are the facts — or irrelevant. But what troubles Harper, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania, is that it’s pretty much all that we hear, in higher education research, in news reports, and as reflected in campus policies. That single-minded theme struck Harper personally as incomplete, since it didn’t reflect his own experience or that of many black men he knew

And it troubled him professionally, as well, because he believes the relentless emphasis by researchers and others on the failures of black men has helped “shape America’s low expectations for black men.” For teachers and counselors and others in a position to influence black men, he says, “if all you read about them is bad news, it’s really hard to craft high expectations for them.”

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Mamadou and Amara Toure on road to success after rescue from foster care

Published: Friday, January 13 2012, 6:00 AM

Updated: Friday, January 13 2012, 6:00 AM

This is the story of two brothers, a tale with a somewhat happy ending in progress.

Let’s get the somewhat happy out of the way first.

Mamadou Toure, 19, will start his first year tomorrow at Lincoln College of New England, in Southington, Conn. He wants to be a film maker and perhaps play professional soccer.

Amara Toure, 20, is in his second year at Kingsborough Community College but is hoping to transfer soon to Brooklyn College and continue his studies. His goal is to become a physician.

These are happy, hopeful times for the siblings from Conakry in Guinea, West Africa, especially given the arduous path they’ve taken to get there.

Since 2009 they have called home an SCO Family of Services group home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, after being placed there by the city Administration for Children’s Services.

ACS entered their lives after Mamadou spent some time living on the street and Amara had to work seven days a week in a clothing store — while still in high school — to make the rent a relative demanded to allow him sleep on his living room floor.

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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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WASHINGTON — A meeting Monday between President Obama, university chancellors and presidents, and experts on higher education cost and productivity appears to mark a shift in policy for the administration, which will focus more on college affordability in the coming months.

Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and several domestic policy advisers met Monday afternoon with chancellors and presidents from 10 institutions, including public universities, two private nonprofit colleges, and one statewide community college. The discussion lasted about two hours, with the president in the meeting for more than an hour, and the conversation was wide-ranging, participants said. (Officials from various sectors, including public comprehensive colleges and for-profit colleges, complained that they had no, or insufficient, representation at the meeting.)

In general, Obama and the college leaders focused on a few key questions: how colleges can become more affordable while producing more graduates, and how new efforts in affordability or productivity can be “scaled up” from one college to large state systems or the nation as a whole.

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