Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Editors’ Notes
References
Foreword
Chapter 1: Leadership Matters: Addressing the Student Success and Completion Agenda
Beginning of a Movement
Coaching for Transformation
The Role of Boards
Effective Boards
Reasons for Progress
Inventory of Policies and Practices
Transformative Culture
Changes at the Front Door
Promising Interventions
A Movement
References
Chapter 2: Maximizing Data Use: A Focus on the Completion Agenda
Data, Indicators, and Metrics
A Model for Improving Data Use in Colleges
Analytics
Human Judgment and Behavior
Organizational Habits
Summary
References
Chapter 3: Get With the Program … and Finish It: Building Guided Pathways to Accelerate Student Completion
Many Choices, Little Guidance
Building Guided Pathways to Success
Supporting Evidence
Collaboration Is Key
References
Chapter 4: Acceleration Strategies in the New Developmental Education Landscape
Evidence on Remedial Assessment and Placement
An Example of Institutional- and Classroom-Based Reform: Accelerating Developmental Education
Accelerated Learning Program of the Community College of Baltimore County
State-Based Examples of Developmental Education Reform
Discussion
References
Chapter 5: Working Across the Segments: High Schools and the College Completion Agenda
Colleges and the Common Core
A Structure for the Process
Three Stages to Alignment
An Example of Successful Regional Alignment
Alignment and College Completion
References
Chapter 6: Tuning Toward Completion
Tuning USA
Value to Community Colleges
Early Tuning Efforts
A Statewide Tuning Effort
Building Success With Facilitation
A National Discipline-Based Effort: The American Historical Association
Tuning and College Completion
References
Chapter 7: Unmet Need and Unclaimed Aid: Increasing Access to Financial Aid for Community College Students
Student Characteristics
Does Financial Aid Make a Difference in Persistence and Completion?
Do Institutional Practices Make a Difference?
Concluding Thoughts
References
Advert
Index
THE COLLEGE COMPLETION AGENDA: PRACTICAL APPROACHES FOR REACHING THE BIG GOAL
Brad C. Phillips, Jordan E. Horowitz (eds.)
New Directions for Community Colleges, no. 164
Arthur M. Cohen, Editor-in-Chief
Caroline Q. Durdella, Nathan R. Durdella, Associate Editors
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EDITORS’ NOTES
Study after study has shown that postsecondary education is associated with higher earnings; unfortunately, the United States fares poorly among other industrialized nations in postsecondary attainment. In 2008, among other industrialized nations, the United States ranked 12th for citizens aged 25–34; and only 29.4% of our African American population and 19.2% of our Hispanic population aged 25–34 had an associate degree or higher (College Board, 2013). In response to these concerns, the Obama administration early on set forth a goal of America having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world as part of efforts to revive the national economy. This was followed by a $20 million grant program to address the issue under the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). Other federal funding initiatives followed.
With the lead of the federal government, a national College Completion Agenda developed. The Lumina Foundation weighed in and established its Big Goal to “increase the percentage of Americans with high-quality [two- or four-year college] degrees and credentials [from 39% of the population] to 60% by the year 2025” (Russell, 2011, p. 3), an increase of 23 million graduates above current rates. In response, postsecondary associations, funders, and institutions have joined forces in many ways to define the issue and identify solutions. These national completion initiatives include, among others, the following: The College Completion Agenda sponsored by the College Board; Access to Success sponsored by the National Association of System Heads and Education Trust; Complete College America sponsored by a consortium of funders including the Carnegie Corporation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Lumina Foundation, W. K. Kellogg Foundation, and Ford Foundation; and Achieving the Dream (Russell, 2011). These national initiatives have done a good job of defining the problem, raising awareness, proposing solutions, and supporting efforts to increase completion. However, the recommendations tend to be general.
In this volume of New Directions for Community Colleges, we present practical strategies and solutions drawn from the field to advance the College Completion Agenda. Each of these strategies and solutions addresses a key aspect of colleges that can be the focus of efforts to support the College Completion Agenda. Some address the internal world of America's colleges, such as the role of leadership or using data, while others address the context within which our colleges act—linking to high school college readiness efforts or partnering with other institutions to collaborate on defining student learning outcomes at the discipline and degree level. Some strategies are designed to improve student achievement for those at great risk for noncompletion—students in remedial or developmental courses—and other strategies are designed to improve academic completion rates for all students. Some focus on academic factors and others focus on nonacademic student supports.
What all of these have in common, though, is their intentional design to improve the likelihood that students will persist to a college degree. These are not initiatives designed primarily to raise awareness, mobilize support, or promote legislation. These are strategies and solutions implemented locally at the institutional level to improve student completion rates at colleges.
Furthermore, these strategies and solutions are designed to ensure a focus on quality. Many commentators, pundits, and critics have noted that a focus solely on the outcome of completion rates can sacrifice quality for achieving a target. The chapters in this volume demonstrate that quality is a necessary aspect of increasing completion rates. The focus is on understanding and improving the student experience so completion becomes the likely outcome of enrollment.
The foreword by Walter G. Bumphus, president and chief executive officer of the American Association of Community Colleges, describes the College Completion Agenda—its development, evolution, and progress to date. Bumphus also places the Completion Agenda in a historical context.
The first chapter, by renowned college chancellor/president Byron N. McClenney, addresses the issue of leadership. McClenney presents lessons learned about the central role college leaders fulfill in moving the completion agenda forward. One could argue that each subsequent chapter is dependent on McClenney's.
The next three chapters address internal systems and functions that chief executives of community colleges can examine at their own institutions. The first discusses the role and uses of data. Phillips and Horowitz discuss the importance of data to understanding the impact of policies and practices designed to move the completion agenda forward. The authors argue that although data collection, storage, and reporting systems must be useful and usable, creating a data-driven culture must also include understanding how individuals process information and promoting organizational habits. They draw upon their decade's worth of experience at the Institute for Evidence-Based Change working with colleges to use evidence to drive improvement.
In the next chapter, Jenkins and Cho discuss the critical importance of helping college students enter into a program of study as soon as they enter college. They argue for a continuous redesign process and extend the previous chapter's focus on collecting data in support of evidence-based improvement. Both authors are researchers at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, focusing on student persistence, retention, and completion.
In the third, Venezia and Hughes discuss reforming developmental education at our nation's colleges. Also referred to as remedial or precollege courses, the authors argue that current practices work against completion. They present alternative strategies being tested at colleges around the country demonstrating early success in moving students to college-level coursework and, ultimately, completion. Both authors have been researching the issue, including the student perspective on advancing through remedial education, for many years. Venezia is an associate professor of Public Policy and Administration at the California State University, Sacramento, and the associate director of the University's Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy. Hughes is the executive director of Community College and Higher Education Initiatives at the College Board.
The next two chapters encourage college leadership to work with partners external to their institutions. Valdez and Marshall discuss the need for colleges to partner with feeder high school districts to align high school exit expectations with college entrance expectations. They make the case that the Common Core State Standards can support these efforts, but unless discussions occur between the two segments, alignment is left too much to chance. They illustrate the impact of alignment with a partnership that resulted in the English Curriculum Alignment Project (ECAP), which led to reduced placement into remediation and greater academic success in college English courses. Valdez and Marshall work closely with intersegmental professional learning councils throughout the nation.
Kolb, Kalina, and Chapman present Tuning—an effort that brings colleges and four-year institutions together to define student learning outcomes (SLOs) within disciplines for associate, bachelor, and master degree levels. Funded primarily by the Lumina Foundation, the outputs of Tuning are designed to improve college completion by aligning assessments, curricula, and courses to agreed-upon SLOs and clarifying expectations for students. The effort also eases transfers among institutions (including from two- to four-year institutions) because there are agreed-upon degree expectations. Kolb is a project officer for Tuning USA at the Lumina Foundation, Kalina was the vice president for Tuning USA at the Institute for Evidence-Based Change, and Chapman was a Tuning associate.
The volume closes with a discussion of financial aid by Julia I. Lopez. Lopez is the president and CEO of the College Access Foundation of California, which is a large private foundation committed to increasing the number of low-income students who attend and complete college across the state. In the chapter, she discusses the importance of financial aid to supporting the completion agenda and includes the personal perspective from students.
Brad C. Phillips
Jordan E. Horowitz
Editors
References
College Board. (2013). The college completion agenda: Gaining leadership in postsecondary degree attainment. New York, NY: Author.
Russell, A. (2011). A guide to major U.S. college completion initiatives. Washington, DC: American Association of Colleges and Universities.
BRAD C. PHILLIPS is the president and CEO of the Institute for Evidence‐Based Change and a data coach for Achieving the Dream.
JORDAN E. HOROWITZ is the vice president for Foundation Relations and Project Development with the Institute for Evidence‐Based Change and formerly senior project director in Evaluation Research at WestEd.
Foreword
American higher education now faces greater challenges than at any time in its history. But those challenges are balanced by unprecedented opportunity to reinvent the way we collectively serve students. More research has been done … more philanthropic dollars have been invested … more innovative technologies have been applied. These factors, complemented by growing receptiveness among educators to provide greater transparency predicated on a culture of evidence, are transforming the academy.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the nation's community colleges. For most of their more than 112-year history, two-year institutions received little attention in terms of research or analysis relating to institutional effectiveness on their campuses. Instead the focus was mainly on affordability, open access, and service to community. While those things remain integral to their mission, community colleges have undergone a sea of change within the last decade, shifting their institutional focus from providing access alone to ensuring access with measurable and improved student success rates. Much of this progress has been driven by the work of leading foundations, such as Lumina Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Kresge Foundation, coupled with the impact of an overarching “completion agenda” that catalyzed what many consider the most significant reform movement in the history of community colleges.
The work of the New Directions authors and publishers reflects that spirit of reform. Through thoughtful and informed analysis of and potential solutions to such problems as the failure of developmental education as currently delivered, disappointing student completion rates, misalignment of curricula, and resultant competency gaps, the authors further advance understanding among community college practitioners and stakeholders. They also illuminate promising methodologies, such as “tuning,” used to positive effect among European Union countries to harmonize degrees across disparate organizations by creating clear pathways and agreed-upon learning outcomes at every degree level.
Many of the ideas examined by New Directions authors correspond to the thinking and recommendations of the 21st Century Commission on the Future of Community Colleges, a blue-ribbon panel of national thought leaders convened by the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) in 2011. Following release of the commission's report in April of 2012, AACC initiated an intensive implementation phase designed to provide scalable, actionable strategies to address the commission's seven key recommendations. Results from that effort will be included in a summary publication, provide dynamic content for a new virtual center, and be used to further engage community colleges and stakeholders nationwide. Still other insights from chapter authors reflect the collective experiences and forward thinking of Achieving the Dream leadership and data coaches who have spent close to a decade studying the elements needed for institutional transformation, now being implemented at close to 200 community colleges in 34 states.
What has been studied and is now shared by these authors has relevance across the campus leadership spectrum—administration, faculty, and support professionals. Some issues presented remain stubbornly persistent: the unmet need for financial aid and the unintended barriers to student completion. One author's observation relating to the issue of common core standards favored by state policymakers could well apply generally to what we all acknowledge is the very hard work ahead. There is no “silver bullet” to help meet urgent educational challenges. But while there is no silver bullet, there is, I am confident, a “silver lining” as we move forward. That optimism is inspired by the unquestioned commitment on the part of community college leaders imbued with a growing body of knowledge such as that found in New Directions.
WALTER G. BUMPHUS is the president and CEO of American Association of Community Colleges.