Criteria For Judging Whether A Community College Is Successful

The current thinking of those creating the community college system is to have two main sections: learning outcomes and job training. Janice Yoshiwara, education services director for the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges, is on the working group focused on learning outcomes, and she described the approach that will be taken. She said that the standards must be “a set of measures that apply to all colleges,” large and small, urban and rural. And she said that the metrics to be used must “make sense to people outside” the community college world — to business leaders and politicians and parents, among others. She also said it was important to come up with measures that could apply to everyone enrolled at a community college and that they be “reasonable in scope and size.” Specifically, the measures under consideration would include:
•    College readiness, focused on how students arrive at a community college and how they become able to reach the college level.
•    Success in completing college-level courses.
•    Various “credit accumulation milestones,” such as earning 15 or 30 credits of college-level work.
•    Completion of degree or certificate programs.
•    “Overall success indicators” focused on whether individuals achieve whatever their purpose was in enrolling.