Can Community Colleges Work for Everyone?
Yesterday I went to a panel at the NYU’s Kimmel Center about the planning efforts for CUNY’s new community college, the first new, two-year college created by the system in almost 40 years. The as-yet-to-be-named campus would also become a lab of experimentation of sorts for CUNY, as the school hopes to formulate some new approaches to the community college experience. From a January 2009 New York Times article on the effort:
Students would be required to enroll full time, taking at least 12 credits a semester. Majors would be limited to about a dozen fields with robust job opportunities, including health care and environmental technology. Admission would still be open to anyone with a high school diploma or G.E.D., but face-to-face interviews would be required.
I think those are all good steps in theory, but I wonder how they’ll work in practice, especially after reading this op-ed in the Times from earlier this week that deals with New York’s poor record of helping students obtain GEDs:
The least fortunate live in New York State, which has the lowest pass rate in the nation, just behind Mississippi. Worse off still are the G.E.D.-seekers of New York City, which has a shameful pass rate — lower than that of the educationally challenged District of Columbia. This bodes ill for the city, where at least one in five adult workers lacks a diploma, and the low-skill jobs that once allowed them to support their families are dwindling.
The scope of this problem is laid out in an alarming new study by the Community Service Society, a 160-year-old advocacy group that focuses on policies affecting the city’s poor. Unless the state and city strengthen and better finance the G.E.D. programs, the authors say, a growing number of undereducated New Yorkers will be shut out of the labor force and will become a permanent burden to their fellow taxpayers.
One major issue when it comes to reforming community colleges is that they’ve often been placed in the impossible role of being all things to all people. They’re places for students who fell through the cracks in the secondary schools to do remedial work and they’re places to get new job skills and they’re places for serious academic preparation for those who want to get four year degrees. It’s hard enough for any institution to excel at even one of those things, much less do passable work in each area.
I can see this coming to a head with the open enrollment policy and the full time student policy. Quite often, community colleges are serving students who come from either poor socio-economic or educational backgrounds (or both) and are often not in situations where they can afford to go to school full time or get ahead in classes without considerable remediation. Again, from the Times op-ed:
In general, the report notes, the G.E.D. here “has become a second-class education system serving low-income people of color who were failed by our K-12 school system.”
The students and the schools are being placed in an untenable position here. The community colleges are stuck trying to do more than they’re able to do and students are often in a situation where they’re unprepared to do what they need to do to get ahead.
Members of the panel expressed hope that funds would be available for scholarships that might allow some who work to devote themselves to full time study (which had been proven as the best outcome for community college students), but little was said about the relationship between open enrollment and full time study. It is useful to get as many students into the system via open enrollment and there might be better outcomes if the students are full time, but what if your preparation is so bad that none of those other things matter? This is an important question and it will be interesting to see how the city’s educational establishment attempts to answer it.
Tags: Community Colleges, CUNY, G.E.D.