Expert answer:added PP presentation
Solved by verified expert:I did the PP I attache the outline for presentation that you can follow it and add the PPthe most important thing to add 1- the purposes of the article and 2- the success of the community college.and please write the speach for all slide in secret word document.
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hep_article___goldrick_rab___challenges_and_opportunities_for_improving_community_college_student_success.pdf
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Challenges That Community College Students Face
Main points:
• Power, Governance, and Funding
• Goals and Incentives
• Financial Aid
• Institutional Differentiation
• Access to Credit-Bearing Coursework
• Faculty
• Social Inequalities and Student Characteristics
• Academic challenges
• Economic challenges
Power, Governance, and Funding
• Publicly funded, indebted to business communities, families,
and legislators
• middle-grounds between K-12 and higher education
• Do not conform to institutions below or above them
• Substantial resistance when community connections are not
apparent
• Tight linkage between funding structures, governance and
success
• Heavy reliance on state and local revenues.
• Very little federal funding including financial aid
• Additional state and local support fails to fill this gap
• Susceptible to fluctuating economy and budgets
• Resources get focused to some programs over others.
Goals and Incentives
• Emphasis placed on college-going rather than completion
• Governments and philanthropies pay little attention to
finishing college
• This is reflected funding formulas
• Funding formulas based on enrollment
• Rewards for getting students not ensuring students succeed
• Little incentive improving the quality of student outcomes.
Financial Aid
• Largest government investment
• Rules and guidelines reduce access and retention of aid
• E.g., although part-time enrollment reduces aid eligibility.
• Students enrolled less than half time are ineligible for any aid
• Work earnings for independent students quickly absorbed
quickly under the federal formula.
Institutional Differentiation
• students move institutions to complete a bachelor’s degree
• This introduces a structural barrier to student success because,
• Some students lose a portion of the credits earned previous
institution
• Fail to piece together a coherent curriculum of courses, and
• struggle to pay for college and travel to school
Access to Credit-Bearing Coursework
• Academic preparations does not preclude enrollment
• But, affects transitioning to credit-bearing coursework
• A common practice that affects many students because,
• Most students are adults
• From, disadvantaged backgrounds,
• Often enter higher education with low literacy levels
Faculty
• Heavy reliance on part-time adjunct lecturers
• Overall negative effect on student persistence
• Professional development commonly one-time ineffective
workshops
• Lack resources for faculty development
• A severe faculty shortage in nursing, Science, Engineering,
technology and Mathematics
Social Inequalities and Student Characteristics
• Students of a range of family backgrounds
• Some families, neither of the parents is educated beyond high
school
• Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds less likely to
complete college
Academic challenges
• Students need academic preparation
• Students with advanced preparatory high school courses perform better
• Economically disadvantaged and minority students receive secondary
schooling in vocational tracks
•
take fewer math and science courses; and
• Attend schools with fewer resources, less-qualified teachers, and lack
college preparation coursework
Economic challenges
• Significant challenges figuring out how to pay college fees
• Low-income and minority students do not attend or do not
complete a college degree due to affordability
• Financial aid are less need-based and more merit-based
• Funding devoted to loans rather than grants,
• reduced chances that low-income students enter or complete
college degree
Review of Educational
Research
http://rer.aera.net
Challenges and Opportunities for Improving Community College Student
Success
Sara Goldrick-Rab
REVIEW OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 2010 80: 437
DOI: 10.3102/0034654310370163
The online version of this article can be found at:
http://rer.sagepub.com/content/80/3/437
Published on behalf of
American Educational Research Association
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0163RER
Review of Educational Research
September 2010, Vol. 80, No. 3, pp. 437–469
DOI: 10.3102/0034654310370163
© 2010 AERA. http://rer.aera.net
Challenges and Opportunities for Improving
Community College Student Success
Sara Goldrick-Rab
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Many of the democratizing opportunities provided by community colleges are
diminished in the eyes of policy makers by inadequate rates of success. In
particular, large proportions of students who enter community colleges do
not persist for longer than a semester, complete a program, or attain a credential. This review critically examines academic and policy research in
search of explanations, emphasizing what is known about challenges stemming from three levels of influence: the macro-level opportunity structure;
institutional practices; and the social, economic, and academic attributes
students bring to college. It provides examples of how factors operating at
each level affect rates of success at key times, including the initial transition
to college, the experience of remedial education, and persistence through
credit-bearing coursework. The article also discusses potential and ongoing
reforms that could increase rates of community college success by addressing
one or more areas of influence (the macro, the institutional, or the individual). It is concluded that increasing success in the open-access, public 2-year
sector requires reforms directed at multiple levels and cannot be achieved
with either student- or institution-focused incentives alone.
Keywords:
community colleges, social stratification, educational reform
The massive expansion of the community college over the last century substantially increased participation in American higher education, particularly among
individuals with limited opportunities for education beyond high school because
of academic difficulties, financial constraints, and other factors. But strides in
increasing access have not met with much success in terms of matching students
to credentials; in fact, efforts to broaden opportunities may have hindered efforts
to increase completion rates. A substantial proportion of students attending public
2-year colleges enroll with the intention to earn credentials yet make little progress
toward a certificate or degree (Bailey, Leinbach, & Jenkins, 2006). For example,
within 6 years of transitioning to college only slightly more than one third of community college entrants complete a credential of any kind (Calcagno, Bailey,
Jenkins, Kienzl, & Leinbach, 2006).
Furthermore, although the open-door policy that community colleges embrace
is intended to democratize opportunities, completion remains correlated with
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Goldrick-Rab
socioeconomic advantage (McIntosh & Rouse, 2009). In fact, individuals from
middle-class backgrounds may incur the greatest benefits from the community
college and in particular its transfer function (Dougherty, 1994; Leigh & Gill,
2003; Rouse, 1995, 1998).
This review examines studies from social science, education, and policy over
the last 25 years that identify contributors to community college success. The
conceptual approach taken emphasizes the intertwining roles of three levels of
influence: the macro-level opportunity structure; institutional practices; and the
social, economic, and academic attributes students bring to college. The purpose
is to clarify the multiple sources of difficulties that community colleges face before
deciding on solutions.
Although practitioners often attribute poor completion rates to the numerous
“deficiencies” that students bring to community college, this review shows that
policies affecting the capacity of community colleges to serve students are also
important. Crafting more effective responses requires reforms at multiple levels
and cannot be achieved with either student- or institution-focused incentives alone.
Several promising practices with empirical support are described, and the review
concludes by identifying several areas for future research with the potential to
increase the field’s scope and utility.
Measuring Community College Student Success
Community colleges are highly regarded for their open admissions policy, which
expands opportunities to everyone, regardless of prior advantages or disadvantages. Working learners are welcomed—more than half of 2-year college students
are employed, compared with only 37% of 4-year college students. Because prior
academic success is not a prerequisite for admission, 61% of students at community colleges take at least one remedial course while in college, and 25% take two
or more remedial courses. This means that community college faculty members
often take on the hard but necessary task of meeting students where they are and
helping to move them to the next academic level (McIntosh & Rouse, 2009; U.S.
Department of Education 2008).
This “second-chance” policy serves an essential function in a country where
substantial numbers of poor and minority students leave high school without a
diploma and even more often without developing strong writing, reading, and math
skills. Many of these students focus their college search process on community
colleges, constructing a decision between attending that institution or not attending
college at all (Roderick, Nagaoka, & Coca, 2009). Fully 58% of all AfricanAmerican undergraduates and 66% of all Hispanic undergraduates are enrolled in
community colleges (Katsinas & Tollefson, 2009). As a result, “there are, for
example, more low-income African American and Hispanic students at Bronx
Community College alone than there are in the entire Ivy League” (Bailey &
Jenkins, 2009). That diversity in both the student population and institutional missions creates challenges for creating and measuring success.
Establishing a Baseline
Open-access institutions are nonselective by definition. This means that students
enter with a wide range of goals and expectations, making assessment (and particularly benchmarking) of their outcomes complicated. For example, if success is
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Improving Community College Student Success
based on the outcomes of all entrants, performance will be depressed unless success is very broadly defined. By the same token, measuring success only for a
select group (e.g., those who indicate degree intentions or achieve credit thresholds) may produce a falsely positive appearance of success while also encouraging
access to diminish (e.g., through creaming). Results vary depending on how
broadly the pool of potential completers is defined and how success is measured
(Adelman, 2005; Bailey et al., 2006; Bradburn, Hearst, & Peng, 2003; Burke,
2004; Dougherty, Hare, & Natow, 2009).
Therefore, descriptions of success in the community college sector must carefully define its terms and conditions and recognize the implications of metrics
(American Association of Community Colleges, 2009; Dougherty et al., 2009).
However, those caveats do not ameliorate the need to assess success, particularly
given a climate of scarce fiscal resources and a push to increase the nation’s stock
of human capital (Aldeman & Carey, 2009; Hebel, 2009). Those desires for degree
completion are echoed in the individuals who enroll at community colleges. Trends
in college aspirations indicate a strong presence of a college-going culture in
American high schools, with nearly all high school seniors reporting intentions of
earning college degrees (Roderick, Nagaoka, & Allensworth, 2006). Ninety percent of high school students indicate that they expect to attend college, even if their
career choice does not require it (Schneider and Stevenson, 1999). Compared with
the 1970s, 12th graders in 2000 were twice as likely to anticipate earning a bachelor’s degree in addition to a 2-year degree (Reynolds, Stewart, MacDonald, &
Sischo, 2006). Rates of long-term expectations for earning bachelor’s degrees are
similarly high among entering community college students, with 70% expecting
to earn a bachelor’s degree or higher (Bailey et al., 2006).
When they first enroll, community college students report a mix of short-term
motivations primarily based on practical considerations and personal enrichment.
When not restricted to offer a single reason for attending, 46% report enrolling for
personal interest and 42% report seeking job skills. Roughly the same percentage
indicate that they are enrolled to earn an associate degree, and 17% want a certificate (Horn & Nevill, 2006). Notably, desires for job skills or personal enrichment
do not preclude degree intentions—nearly 80% of students across those two groups
expect to earn a credential (Bailey, Jenkins, & Leinbach, 2006). Over one-third of
community college students report that they enroll in order to transfer to a 4-year
college (Horn & Nevill, 2006).
At the same time, one function of education is to increase students’ ambitions
for further education, and therefore college attendance itself may enhance educational expectations. One simple measure of success is whether students increase
(or decrease) their educational expectations after entering community college. In
contrast to a longstanding hypothesis that community college students incur
diminished aspirations over time in a process of “cooling out” (Clark, 1960), there
is mounting evidence that students’ already-high aspirations swell during college
in a process some have termed “warming up” (Alexander, Bozick, & Entwisle,
2008). In contrast, there is little support for the idea that students level or reduce
their expectations in response to feedback about their academic abilities or planned
occupational requirements or as a result of attending community college
(Rosenbaum, Deil-Amen, & Person, 2006).
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Goldrick-Rab
Therefore, conditioning rates of success based on initial measures of expectations
or primary reasons for enrollment may be problematic (Bailey et al., 2006). Given
that intended outcomes vary over time, some observers suggest that community college success is more appropriately measured with intermediate indicators or “milestones” (Calcagno, Crosta, Bailey, & Jenkins, 2006; Moore, Shulock, & Offenstein,
2009). For example, progress can be assessed based on the completion of course
credits (either remedial or nonremedial credits), the percentage of a program completed, or whether a student passes the initial college-level or degree-credit “gateway” courses in writing and mathematics. This approach credits incremental progress
and takes into account wide variation in student pathways.
Average Rates of Success
Even with the caveats mentioned here, progress through community college is
generally slow, no matter how it is measured. The evidence is clear—among students with stated degree intentions, rates of dropout are high (Bailey et al., 2006).
After 3 years just 16% of first-time community college students who began college
in 2003 attained a credential of any kind (certificate, associate’s degree, and/or
bachelor’s degree), and another 40% were still enrolled. When students are given
6 years to complete instead of 3, completion rates improve somewhat—for example, 36% of students entering community colleges in 1995 attained a credential by
2001. Moreover, another 17.5% were still enrolled. Although this indicates that
completion rates need to account for the pace of progress toward completion, the
noncompletion rate (no degree, not enrolled) hovers very close to 50%—even
given longer time horizons. Of course, this number decreases when degree completion is measured over a longer period of time (Attewell & Lavin, 2007), but in
the aggregate it represents a substantial loss of human capital and resources.
Reviewing the Challenges and Opportunities
What stands in the way of increasing credential attainment among community college students? In pursuit of answers, this review examines 25 years of academic
and policy research on community college student persistence.
Methodological Approach
Articles were identified with a search of the Educational Resources Information
Center, Education Full Text, and Social Sciences Abstracts using combinations of
keywords (community college student, 2-year student, degree completion, persistence, momentum, and barriers), resulting in the location of 2,200 studies published
since 1985. Reference lists of relevant books, articles, and reports from this literature, as well as conference proceedings and dissertation abstracts, were consulted.
To include relevant nonacademic work, the Google search engine was used, and
publication listings of major nonprofit organizations funding or conducting
research on community colleges (e.g., MDRC, Jobs for the Future, RAND, the
Lumina Foundation) were examined. The author also corresponded with researchers at the Community College Research Center in New York to inquire as to unpublished research, and several reviewed the list of studies to be included and suggested
additions.
After the more than 3,000 studies produced by that search were culled to identify
those which dealt with independent data sets, the resulting list of approximately
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Improving Community College Student Success
750 studies were filtered according to two criteria: (1) They used quantitative or
qualitative methods that could rigorously address the research questions, and (2)
quantitative studies needed to produce findings that could reasonably be generalized beyond the sample to the larger population of community college students.
Rigorous research was defined as using sufficient and appropriate data to address
the research question and following a research design that made it possible to
answer the questions posed. For example, for studies addressing questions of
“what works” or program effectiveness, the research had to be designed appropriately to satisfactorily rule out competing explanations, providing grounds for
causal inference. For studies examining mechanisms or pathways promoting college success (e.g., interviewing studies), the approach to sampling and data collection had to be transparent and defensible. Studies meeting those criteria were
included in the final review (n = 300; some are not reflected in the reference list
because of space constraints).
Analytic Approach
For the purposes of analysis, studies were grouped into those focusing on (a) the
macro-level opportunity structure; (b) institutional practices; and (c) the social,
economic, and academic attributes students bring to college. Particular attention
was paid to studies that discuss the relationships and interactions between individuals and institutions, institutions and policy settings, or some combination of
the three.
A multilevel conceptual model was used for several reasons. First, this approach
draws attention to the structural constraints governing individual decision-making.
Absent sufficient consideration of structure, many studies (and policies) target
individuals’ choices as if they are unconstrained. As Hearn (2006) notes, it is not
uncommon for models of student success to neglect key relationships between
societal structure and stratification processes, state and fe …
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