Three ways to re-imagine community college, raise grad rates, and better prepare âtwo-yearâ students
We tend to call them âtwo-year collegesâ â but thatâs a serious misnomer.
At community colleges in Michigan, for example, just 13 percent of students who enrolled in the fall of 2013 had completed a degree or transferred two years later, according to state records.
And thatâs not the worst of it. We could call these institutions âsix-year collegesâ and it wouldnât make much difference. Nationwide, just 39 percent of students who enroll in a community college have graduated with an associate degree in six years.
Why is this happening?
In part, the low grad rates are a result of the way many community colleges were designed in the first place. The goals at the time of the community college boom of the 1960s was to make post-secondary education accessible and affordable to anyone â and many experts say community colleges have done a good job in those regards.
But being able to easily â and inexpensively â enroll in college means nothing if students arenât prepared for college.
"Realistically, what keeps people from completion is not just on-campus issues," Mark Yancy Jr., a campus coach at Michiganâs Henry Ford College, recently told The Detroit News. "There's so much more going on in life that can cause problems."
Obstacles like a lack of transportation, job changes and unreliable child care can make college untenable. And thatâs just the start. Even students who can avoid or overcome off-campus obstacles can struggle to know what to do when they get on-campus.
âNo one in my family has ever gone to college of any kind,â Oakland Community College student Erica Mills told The News. âThe professors hand out a syllabus â Iâve got no idea what that is. I didnât know how to pick classes â I took some classes just because they sounded good.â
Add to all of those challenges the fact that community college students are more likely than their university counterparts to already have a history of having struggled in school, and a 1-in-8 graduation rate might not actually seem so bad.
Except, of course, that no one goes into higher education with the intent to drop out. The status quo represents a whole lot of broken dreams.
What can be done? Here are some ideas that Tom Bailey, the director of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University, shared with The Hechinger Report: Â
Offer a concrete graduation plan. College programs tend to have a lot of variability â with literally thousands of potential pathways to a single degree. That can be overwhelming to students with no college experience and little peer or family guidance. Default programs â a class-by-class and semester-by-semester plan of courses students must take to complete a degree, can provide a far less nebulous picture of the path to success.
Provide âmeta majors.â âWhat some places have done is to institute nine or 10 meta majors,â Bailey said. âYou might not know you want to be a nurse, but youâre interested in the medical field. Or business. There are some basic courses in those fields that everybody takes. They donât need to specialize that much.â
Change the preparation dynamic. Itâs no secret that many students enter community college (and universities as well, for that matter) lacking fundamental academic skills and knowledge. At most schools, these students are placed in remedial English and math courses ostensibly designed to bring the students up to snuff â even if theyâre pursuing degrees where such skills arenât necessarily vital to success. Instead of preps and prerequisites that delay a studentâs journey, Bailey recommends addressing academic needs as they arise in the context of program goals.Â

















