Higher Ed News

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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By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

Published: November 17, 2011

Business majors spend less time on course work than other college students, but they devote more hours to nonschool duties, like earning money and caring for family members. In contrast, engineering students spend the most time studying and the least on outside demands.

Those are among the findings released on Thursday from the annual National Survey of Student Engagement, a project that tries to measure how hard, and how effectively, students are working. This year’s results are based on forms filled out last school year by more than 400,000 undergraduates, all of them freshmen or seniors, at nearly 700 colleges and universities in the United States.

Grouping students into seven academic disciplines, the study shows wide differences in the number of hours they put into schoolwork outside the classroom. Among students concentrating in engineering, 42 percent say they spend at least 20 hours per week on such study, well ahead of any other group.

They are followed, in descending order, by students studying physical sciences, biological sciences, arts and humanities, education and social sciences. Business majors ranked last, with 19 percent saying they spend 20 hours or more each week on schoolwork.

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By TAMAR LEWIN

Published: October 25, 2011

President Obama will announce new programs Wednesday to lower monthly loan payments for some students graduating next year and thereafter and to let borrowers who have a mix of direct federal loans and loans under the old Federal Family Education Loan Program consolidate them at a slightly lower interest rate.

At a press briefing Tuesday afternoon, Melody Barnes, director of the Domestic Policy Council, said the president would use his executive authority to expand the existing income-based repayment program with a “Pay as You Earn” option that would allow graduates to pay 10 percent of their discretionary income for 20 years and have the rest of their federal student loan debt forgiven. That plan would start next year.

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By MICHAEL WINERIP

Published: October 23, 2011

In June, Desiree Smith was graduated from Murry Bergtraum High. Her grades were in the 90s, she said, and she had passed the four state Regents exams. Since enrolling last month at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, Ms. Smith, 19, has come to realize that graduating from a New York City public high school is not the same as learning.

She failed all three placement tests for LaGuardia and is now taking remediation in reading, writing and math. So are Nikita Thomas, of Bedford Stuyvesant Prep; Sade Washington, of the Young Women’s Leadership School in East Harlem; Stacey Sumulong, of Queens Vocational and Technical; Lucrecia Woolford of John Adams High; and Juan Rodriguez of Grover Cleveland High. “Passing the Regents don’t mean nothing,” Ms. Thomas said. “The main focus in high school is to get you to graduate; it makes the school look good. They get you in and get you out.

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The faculty at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York has passed a resolution condemning the New York Police Department for infiltrating Muslim student groups, the Associated Press reported. The AP earlier revealed the strategy, which professors said threatened the civil rights of their students. “The use of undercover police agents and the cultivation of police informers on campus has a chilling effect on the intellectual freedom necessary for a vibrant academic community,” the resolution said. A spokesman for the college said that Karen Gould, the president, shared the professors’ concerns.

By Karin Fischer

When American community colleges attend student-recruitment fairs abroad, they are often greeted with blank looks.

That’s because “community college” is frequently an unknown concept overseas. Many countries do not recognize associate degrees as valid academic credentials, while in others, community colleges are seen as strictly vocational institutions, places to learn a skill or trade. As a result, two-year institutions in the United States have a difficult time recruiting abroad, despite their growing interest in doing so.

One exception is Green River Community College, outside Seattle, which has built up its foreign enrollments from just 200 in 1993 to more than 1,200 two decades later, 10 percent of the student body. The students come from 40 different countries, including Indonesia, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

Green River has succeeded overseas by positioning itself as a gateway to highly competitive programs in top universities across the United States. Through careful advising, well-tailored course selection, and strong relationships built over time with destination institutions, Green River sends nearly every one of its international students on to a university, in greatly sought-after programs like business and engineering

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September 9, 2011

WASHINGTON — The $450 billion plan that President Obama unveiled Thursday night to try to stimulate job growth and the economy would provide $5 billion in funds to build and renovate facilities and other infrastructure at community colleges and tribal colleges.

Details about the proposal were sparse as of last night; the president’s combative speech to a joint session of Congress did not even mention the funds, but a White House fact sheet said that the money for the institutions would bolster “their infrastructure in this time of need while ensuring their ability to serve future generations of students and communities

Education Secretary Arne Duncan also mentioned the money in a blog post, saying that it and another $25 billion in facilities funds for public schools would “put hundreds of thousands of construction workers, engineers, boiler repairmen, and electrical workers back to work rebuilding and modernizing our aging public schools and community colleges.” An Education Department spokeswoman confirmed Thursday evening that the agency would administer the infrastructure program.

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