As you know, during the last several months City College has been especially focused on issues of student equity, continuing a long tradition of working for the success of all our students and I’ve written several times about why I believe this work is important. City College is not working alone; indeed, student equity is a focus at both the state and national level. Many of the same strategies we are employing are also being used elsewhere.
Scott Lay, President and CEO of the Community College League of California, also believes in the importance of student equity and the League’s Commission on the Future is currently drafting recommendations—some of which may surprise you—to close the statewide achievement gap. On May 6, 2010, Lay appeared before the California Senate Budget Subcommittee and gave the following preliminary report. What he said has implications for us here at City College and I hope you’ll take the time to read it:
Good morning, and thank you for allowing me to brief you on the work of the Community College League of California’s Commission on the Future. Before I begin, I must offer an important caveat that we are a little more than half-way through the commission’s seven months of work and no policy or practice change I discuss has been yet endorsed by the commission or the League’s policy boards. I do think, however, that there is an emerging consensus on several items that is exciting.
The commission is a 33-member body of trustees, CEOs, faculty, staff and students convened to identify policy and practice changes that can contribute to a momentous goal—a 1.5 million cumulative increase in the number of students emerging from our community colleges with a meaningful certificate or degree. That outcome is drawn from the necessary California goal of increased graduates to meet the nation’s goal of restoring America’s global lead in higher education attainment.
While the commission is indeed focused on a numerical outcomes goal, there are concomitant values of both access and student equity. Transfer rates or graduation rates are meaningless if you do not pay attention to the denominator—the number and composition of people being served.
We are not engaged in this exercise to simply meet economic or political mandates. We are willing to stand up and declare that a system-wide persistent and pervasive achievement gap of 15 to 20% is morally abhorrent.
And we are committed to doing something about it.
Five subgroups are currently developing recommendations through an iterative process that began with the review of nearly 200 policy options derived from reports both internal to the system and from third-party observers. We are down to 28 recommendations, each of which are measured using SMART principles—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.
This is not another community college report that says that if you double our funding, we will deliver unicorns and rainbows. Indeed, we are among the lowest funded community college systems in the country, but we also operate within the construct of a challenged state budget and Proposition 98. All of our recommendations will be financed within those bounds or through an otherwise identified funding source.
Let me briefly talk about a few of the recommendations that I believe are rising to the top.
Intensive and Intrusive Student Services and Guidance
If there is one mantra that is echoed in the literature about student success in community colleges, it is that “students don’t do optional.”
This really isn’t a new concept and you find it throughout successful models of education.
I think about my first year of law school at Davis. We had a mandatory introduction week that reviewed how to study, the importance of financial aid and not trying to work while going to school, and other basics to ensure our success. During that week, we were handed a schedule of courses that ensured that we stayed on campus four-and-a-half days each week and put us in student cohorts of 30 students. Our business and medical schools use similar strategies, as do the high-cost for-profit institutions that are attracting an increasing number of our Latino and African-American students.
In contrast, at most of our community colleges this fall, a new high school graduate will be handed a course schedule, a low-ranking priority for online registration, and has a less than 50-50 chance of being assessed, and less than 25% chance of meeting with a counselor. There’s no wonder we lose 25% of students after one term and another 25% after the first year.
In other words, in public higher education in California, we are providing far more guidance and support to the most advantaged students who get into our professional schools than our most disadvantaged students entering our community colleges.
Now, we are not going to be able to provide the array of services and support that the law school does with $35,000 or so per-student on our $5,300 per student.
Nevertheless, the commission will recommend intensive and intrusive student services that better meet the needs of students. These likely include mandatory assessment and placement, orientation courses, and the broader use of prerequisites that are contextually relevant. The CCC Assess program is an example of how we are thinking differently to accomplish these goals.
The California Graduation Initiative
As you have heard, community colleges—like prisons, hospitals, and K-12 schools—are funded by activity and not outcome. This is important in a state as diverse as California but can lead to unintended consequences. I firmly reject that any leader in community colleges has malevolent motives and cares solely about “butts in seats,” but that indeed is how our colleges are funded. I would argue that, unless the state wants to sacrifice access, that model must continue to be the cornerstone of our funding. The cost of operating a classroom and paying a faculty member does not decline after the third week.
However, there is an emerging consensus that an additive, categorical, incentive-funding structure that recognizes momentum points and effective activities would be an exciting way to get community college faculty, staff and students focused on outcomes. Following the Washington-state model, a college could be rewarded when it got a student across the 15-unit threshold or successfully through college-level math. We would additionally integrate activity point—when a college increases the numbers of students completing federal aid forms or meeting with a counselor to complete or update a student education plan.
This is in the concept stage, and we think it can be funded using a portion of the maintenance factor stream of funds already dedicated to community colleges.
A Culture Shift
Finally, as community college leaders, we must embrace student success as the most important benchmark of our work. We have all attended too many parties celebrating new facilities or successful fundraising campaigns. I dream of the day where such events would celebrate closing the achievement gap or recapturing a leading role for California in college achievement.
Trustees and CEOs must embrace student success as a key measure of institutional success. And, while we do amazing things to turn lives around—including my own—we cannot celebrate our current outcomes as a percentage of our mass student base. And, before we ask faculty members to reinvent their teaching styles or return to the basic skills classroom, the institutional leaders must be the first ones to step up and take responsibility.
We are further a system that is doing quite little professional development at a time when the economy is shifting dramatically and our student demographics have inverted. Our campuses are being rebuilt with bond dollars but we have failed to invest in the people—trustees, CEOs, faculty and staff—who we need to create the environment and culture of success. We must ask all of our employees to do more to help meet this incredible student success challenge, but we also need to give them the tools to do so.
Thank you for this opportunity to share what I believe are some highlights of the emerging work of the commission. I look forward to delivering the commission’s recommendations to you and doing everything we can to meet the economic and moral imperatives of matching California’s historic national lead in student access with similar achievement in student success.
