Do Community College Faculty Have Too Much Power? : A CA. Perspective

Guest Blogger: Robert Shireman, Complete College Calfornia

These  first two blogs detail how faculty and administrators are wasting precious time and energy arguing about decision-making processes rather than addressing student needs:

• The parking-space stalemate at El Camino College. http://bit.ly/rshire1
• The missing signature at Modesto Junior College http://bit.ly/rshire2

Our third blog exposes how an obsession with “faculty primacy” at the colleges is preventing collaboration between constituent groups and is harming students. Fixing this problem becomes more pressing every day as crises such as that at City College of San Francisco not only threaten the college’s ability to function but to exist.  And unfortunately, Chancellor Brice Harris missed an opportunity to help CCSF and all community colleges by choosing not to clarify the system’s tangled and broken decision-making structure

Comprehensive Advice for Parents When Kids Leave Home For College

Here is a quick link: (http://www.nannywebsites.com/blog/25-blogs-parents-of-kids-going-off-to-college-won%E2%80%99t-want-to-miss/)

From Sonny Giffin at sonny@gmail.com

Will San Francisco Community College Implode?

The closer City College of San Francisco gets to the March 15 deadline for determining its fate, the more an alliance of critics disagrees with how administrators are transforming the school to try to keep it open and accredited. The Save City College Coalition of faculty, staff and students is organizing teach-ins, planning marches and wooing elected officials, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, to oppose downsizing the school and denounce pay cuts. “We’re going crazy trying to get the truth out,” said Leslie Simon, a women’s studies instructor at City College since 1975. “We’re very concerned about what we think is union-busting.” An accrediting commission said in July that college finances and governance were a mess, and gave the school until March 15 to turn itself around or lose accreditation and close. Employees – including two successive interim chancellors and a state-appointed special trustee – have since worked frantically to repair 14 major deficiencies flagged by the commission. Support fell away Wary faculty and staff went along. But support began to crumble by fall as they saw that compliance meant tearing down the pillars they say make City College a better place to work than other colleges – but which the accrediting commission calls too expensive and unwieldy. (more)

Pathways For Success In Community Colleges

Rethinking The Student Credit Hour

CARE, CAUTION AND THE ‘CREDIT HOUR’ CONVERSATION
Council for Higher Education Accreditation President Judith Eaton writes in University World News: Federal regulations that place authority for student learning outcomes in the hands of government officials and not academics are undesirable and, frankly, likely to be less than effective. If the government now defines the credit hour, decides the data that are to be used for student learning outcomes, and leads experiments in alternative approaches for using an outcomes-based approach to the credit hour, what is left for the academy to do?

Source: Carnegie Foundation

Alternatives To 4 Year College That Pay Off

From The Kiplinger Report

• Certificates—Professional certification is an affordable way to increase your employment potential once you are on the job; especially in fields that don’t require a bachelor’s degree.
• Associate’s Degrees—Employers are planning on hiring one-third more associate’s degree earners this year than last; far exceeding the increase in demand for bachelor’s degree holders.
• Take two and transfer— take your prerequisites at a local community college, where tuition and fees are often two-thirds lower, and then transfer to a four-year institution.
• Earn a BA in three— Graduating in three years lets you avoid a fourth year of college costs and you can start earning a salary a year sooner.
• Online Courses—the American Council on Education is evaluating the creditworthiness of MOOCs, or “Massive Open Online Courses” from partners such as Coursera, edX and Udacity.

To view the full article, please visit: http://www.kiplinger.com/article/college/T042-C000-S002-4-alternatives-to-a-four-year-college-degree.html.

Reports Worth Reading

Bringing Developmental Education to Scale: Lessons from the Developmental Education Initiative (MDRC)

The Community College Research Center recently released the following reports related to remedial education:
Contextualized College Transition Strategies for Adult Basic Skills Students: Learning from Washington State’s I-BEST Program Model

New Evidence of Success for Community College Remedial English Students: Tracking the Outcomes of Students in the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP)

Progress in the First Five Years: An Evaluation of Achieving the Dream in Washington State

Source:ECS

Washington State Student Achievement Initiative Policy Study: Final Report

College Rankings Should Emulate National Football League

The report released today by USC scholars, entitled “Lessons from the NFL for Managing College Enrollment,” examines the conflicts and tradeoffs in college enrollment management and presents a case for how the goals and strategies pursued can be recalibrated to address the national priorities or educational access and completion. Specifically, the paper suggests that American higher education would be more inclusive and results driven if colleges and universities formed a league to establish rules of competition and progress in the public interest. The goals of this “Higher Education League” would be broader participation, increased rates of success, and reduced costs. League rules would ensure better and more relevant public information about college characteristics and college choice, clear and consistent recruitment and application guidelines, full disclosure and uniform methods in determination and delivery of student financial assistance, educational quality measured by student learning and student readiness to realize personal and societal goals, and the nurturance of the talent in the K-12 pipeline.

Simpler And Fairer Comprehensive Student Aid Plan

The New America Foundation’s Education Policy Program today released a comprehensive package of policy proposals that would provide an overhaul of federal financial aid. The report,Rebalancing Resources and Incentives in Federal Student Aid, calls for specific changes to grants, loans, tax benefits, college outreach programs and federal regulations to provide more direct aid to the lowest-income students while strengthening accountability for institutions of higher education to ensure that more students are able to earn affordable, high-quality credentials.

Rebalancing Resources and Incentives in Federal Student Aid argues the current federal financial aid system is no longer up to today’s demands. Built in a different era, its haphazard evolution over the decades has made it inefficient and overly complicated. The existing system wastes taxpayer dollars and fails to provide institutions and students with the resources and incentives they need to access high-quality credentials and succeed in higher education and the workforce.

With the need for higher education never greater and college growing increasingly unaffordable, the report argues the time has come to put everything on the table. Students and taxpayers need a streamlined aid system that is more understandable, effective and fair. With this new report, New America’s Education Policy Program offers more than 30 specific policy recommendations that are designed to create such a system. Taken together, these recommendations can all be financed with the existing resources that policymakers have already committed to federal student aid. The proposals include:

* Pell Grants: Permanently eliminating the Pell Grant funding cliff and putting the program on a firm financial footing by making it into an entitlement program.  Increasing the maximum Pell Grant and providing Pell bonuses to public and private non-profit colleges that serve a substantial share of low-income students. Requiring schools that enroll a small share of low-income students but charge them high net prices to match a portion of the Pell Grant funds they receive.

* Federal Loans: Significantly simplifying the federal student loan system and reducing the dangers of default by requiring all borrowers to repay their debt based on a percentage of their earnings. Encouraging colleges to hold down their costs by eliminating both the Parent PLUS and Grad PLUS programs that currently allow for unlimited borrowing.

* Tax Expenditures: Eliminating poorly targeted higher education tax benefits, such as the American Opportunity Tax Credit, in favor of direct aid for students.

* Accountability, Transparency, and Reform: Holding institutions accountable for providing high-quality, affordable educations by extending broad accountability metrics to all colleges. Creating a federal student unit record system to provide a clearer picture of how students fare as they proceed through the educational system and into the workforce.

“Our policies ask more of students and institutions, and provide more in return,” said Kevin Carey, director of the Education Policy Program. “We have designed a simpler, fairer system that will reorganize and leverage existing federal dollars toward the nation’s college completion goals imperative to our economic success.”

To read the full report, please click here.

Community College Procedures Can Improve College Success

RECONCEIVING COMMUNITY COLLEGE PROCEDURES TO IMPROVE STUDENTS SUCCESS
The US has made a serious commitment to “college for all,” and community colleges are a primary vehicle for expanding college access. Yet as community colleges have succeeded in opening access to broad populations, their degree completion rates are low. Community colleges have retained many traditional procedures that are counter-productive for disadvantaged students and inappropriate for new labor market demands. Some colleges, however, have devised alternative procedures that are better adapted to real student needs. This brief describes common organizational failures and examines alternative procedures that enable student success. This policy brief is from the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford.

Source: Carnegie Foundation