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American Education System (Week 3)

We are all familiar with the old adage that we must understand our past, lest we repeat its mistakes. It’s certainly an important lesson, but what are the prospects for taking charge of our future when we do not yet fully understand the present? We need to get a handle on the actual dimension of higher education today. We must locate ourselves firmly in the context of a world that is radically different from the one that created the current systems of American colleges and universities. Without a more honest depiction, and absent an ability to accurately define, appropriately measure, and innovatively respond to reality, American higher education is not sustainable. Like an ecologically threatened environment, we must come to grips with what is undermining our ability to grow a sound ecosystem.

But how can we grow a sound higher education ecosystem? What are the requirements and principles that should guide us? I propose that if we single out and concentrate our efforts in three areas—pedagogy, measurements, and funding mechanisms—we can take charge of the formidable challenges that are present and that will be with us for some time to come.

The Truth About Higher Education

Community colleges educate about 46 percent of all undergraduate college students, but their impact is even greater.1 Of the 1.5 million students who graduate annually with a baccalaureate degree, 300,000 transferred from a community college and an additional 700,000 used them intermittently while earning their degree.2 Even when we look solely at four-year college graduates, our higher education system would not function without community colleges.

Community colleges are as fundamental to the higher education ecosystem as clean air and water are to the environment. While all of higher education grapples with graduation and retention rates, these struggles are nowhere more paramount than at community colleges. Nationally, although only about 60 percent of students selected to attend four-year institutions actually complete a baccalaureate degree, less than 30 percent of the unselected community college students complete an associate degree.

Rising Standards—Who Should We Educate?

With the advent of the Knowledge Era, a college education is as important as ever before. Colleges and universities must learn to not only effectively educate every student who enters our institutions, but also must recruit and succeed with a significantly larger swath of the adult population in America. The global race for influence, power, talent, and money is intensifying. Colleges and universities must equip our country with the educated citizenry that plays a fundamental role in American democracy, economy, and culture. Yet America still struggles with getting students ready for college. In 2003, 28 percent of eighth grade students scored below the basic reading level and 33 percent scored below the basic math level

Nationwide, the overall high school graduation rate for the class of 2001 was 68 percent.5 More than 8 million adults speak English poorly or not at all.6 Yet as educational standards rise to meet new economic and social realities, the number who need a college education grows larger.

Comparing ourselves internationally is no rosier. America still has the best educated workforce in the world, but not for long. In a 2004 comparison of the differences in associate degree attainment of the world’s 30 wealthiest countries, we rank eighth. Of note, the United States is the only country where older adults are more educated than those of younger generations. Any edge we used to have because of education is rapidly slipping away

Community colleges are the only postsecondary system that will be the pinch hitter for the gaps in the K–12 system, and the clean-up batter for American business and industry. It is in this system where hope lies to address the gaps I have described.

Better Teaching, Better Learning

Kati Haycock, president of The Education Trust, told me a great story in a wild car ride we shared after being snowed in at a conference in New Hampshire. She had given almost 100 talks that year to teachers across the country, at which she showed The Education Trust’s data that demonstrate rather stark differences in student success by college, after equalizing for variables such as campus size, student race/ ethnicity, and student socioeconomic status. What amazed her—and then me—was that when she asked her audiences to identify the reasons for these differences, no one, not one of the several hundred educators said, “Maybe the teaching was better.” This is one of the critical unexamined issues in higher education. If we are to better serve the students we currently have, as well as educate the much larger group of postsecondary students who need to participate and succeed in college, we must develop better pedagogy.

Let me use an analogy. When manufacturers in America began to face stiff competition from around the world, their first line of defense was to go to the shop floor to learn how to change processes to lessen costs and improve quality. This happened when frontline staff used their hard-won experiential wisdom to create new systems and innovations. American manufacturing became much more viable, although still subject to the intense competition from a global market.

Like these manufacturers, we have to improve our traditional way of teaching college students. Faculty are on the shop floor. Faculty in the classroom are the only ones who can undertake this prerequisite to improving student success. As leaders, we have to push for greater investment in faculty’s ability to innovate in the classroom. If we do, community college faculty will emerge as leaders of pedagogical initiatives.

At LaGuardia Community College, we serve more than 50,000 credit and noncredit students of enormous diversity. Over two-thirds of our students were not born in the United States, and they hail from more than 160 different countries and speak 110 languages in addition to English. We graduate almost twice the national average of students, even though our immigrant and New York City–educated students come to college with severe academic deficits. Our successful students go everywhere—Vassar, Columbia, Swarthmore, Georgetown. The absolute magnitude of achievement—where our students started versus where they end up—is part of the uniquely American story of opportunity and success.

How do we do this? LaGuardia has made major investments of time and money in providing sustained, systemic, faculty-led professional development programs. Our faculty have created pedagogical innovations, which incorporate technology in order to serve our adult, minority, and immigrant students. Through investing their time and creativity, our faculty have developed new structures such as first-year academies, student technology mentors, e-portfolios, and digital stories. By using narrative, faculty are able to weave the lives of our students into the fabric of the curriculum. We have data to confirm that these newly created pedagogical strategies advance deep, reflective learning. A 2004 Hesburgh Award confirmed their excellence.

While I find the work of our faculty inspiring, I know that LaGuardia faculty have opportunities that most community college faculty don’t. Our professional development programs flourish in part because we have been able to attract a steady stream of grant funding. Not all community colleges can do this. Moreover, as part of the City University of New York, our faculty are held to the same requirements for credentials and scholarship as our sister four-year colleges, have a high rate of pay relative to other community college faculty, and are given time for their research. The result is an extraordinary faculty. But we still fall short. Pedagogical innovations are key to educational success. But is it not realistic to expect faculty to be able to develop new teaching techniques until we change how American higher education is measured and funded.

The Mismeasure of American Higher Education

To state it bluntly, we use outdated methods of evaluating college success. The single federal measure of American community colleges—IPEDS (the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System)—asks us to presume that all students are just like those attending Princeton—first time and full time. IPEDS assumes everyone is a credit student, requiring no remediation, who enrolls full time for his or her entire academic career. All of those assumptions are false. It harkens back to a historical conception of college-going students that is no longer true. Community colleges are not just the junior version of four-year colleges. To understand community college success—or lack thereof— we must find a new way of measuring outcomes. Everyone wants to look at graduation statistics—and I do, too. But without other measures, it subverts the real contribution of a community college.

For example, we now count as college students those with high school diplomas but without high school skills, and then criticize community colleges when those students do not graduate in three years. How about thanking them for only taking a year to teach students what they were unable to master in their 12 previous years of education? Since community colleges welcome everyone and therefore are coping with students with a very mixed bag of intellectual and social skills, accurate measures have to be used to assess progress toward the ultimate goal of graduation.

Unlike four-year colleges, community colleges are rooted in a specific location. They should be measured on how well the education they provide contributes to the local and regional economy and community. Community colleges might be measured by changes in a community’s salaries, new business start-ups, new jobs, or increases in employee health insurance and retirement benefits associated with education. Community colleges might also be measured by advances in literacy or critical thinking, or by increases in their adult students’ involvement in their children’s school or in civic engagement. This doesn’t imply a backing away from the standard of graduation with an associate degree, but it realistically incorporates the progressive reality of education that seeks to move adults ahead step by step. Let’s learn to measure what matters in this context, for these people. It does matter if a community college moves an adult from reading at the fifth- to the ninth-grade level, or learns how to compute percentages, or develops the capacity for the intellectual problem solving necessary to get and keep a job. It’s not enough, and we cannot stop without trying to move everyone to complete an associate degree, but each step is a real improvement for the individual and our society.

Declaring the associate degree as a minimal academic requirement implies significant changes in the current system. We need a radical reframing of federal IPEDS and Pell Grant eligibility. All forms of adult education, not just K–12, must expressly link their achievement to the number of adult students who enter and succeed in college. This has significant implications for the GED Tests, adult basic skills, literacy, English as a Second Language, and workplace learning education.

Community colleges are increasingly pivotal in America’s role in globalization, and the integration of immigrants into the American society and economy. We must be measured by who our students are as they come in to study, what happens to them, and their subsequent success in local communities. Until those measures are also included in common assessments, we will always mismeasure the true impact of the community college.

Funding Imbalance

More important than how we are measured, however, is how we are funded. In 2004, national expenditures for public two-year colleges were $24.4 billion.8 This is less than 20 percent of the $124.8 billion expended by public four-year colleges and universities. The disparity is shocking. American community colleges, despite enrolling almost half of all undergraduate students, spend 80 percent less than their public fouryear sisters.

We can look at this another way. Per capita spending (that is, the amount of money we expend on average annually to educate each student) is also strikingly different. Community college spending averages $9,183 per student, while spending for fouryear public college students averages $27,973 a year.9 Thus, we spend almost three times more to educate each four-year college student than we do for each community college student. We are therefore funding those students most prepared to go to college at rates well above those who need the highest level of support.

For me, the conclusion is clear. To create a sustainable system of higher education, to recruit a much larger group of adults who should be in college, and to create the pedagogical innovations necessary to be much more successful with current and future students, we have to lessen the funding disparities. The financial data I just mentioned undercount the way in which community colleges are financially hobbled, because their faculty teach many more classes each semester than faculty at four-year colleges, usually twice as many. Community colleges also have a much lower percentage of classes taught by full-time faculty, and they have so few support staff as to be ridiculous.

With a very small infusion of public dollars, a very positive return on investment could be achieved because of community colleges’ foundational relationship to all of American higher education.

Re-envisioning the American higher education system will not be cheap. I need to tell no one that we have been losing the battle for public funding of higher education. The new message I want to champion is that we have to reform the funding structures internally at the same time as we fight for all the money we truly need. Because we have to educate more adults to higher standards than ever before, the substantive rethinking of the funding mechanisms and distribution of dollars in higher education will be profound. It will not be achieved with minor dollar increases in Pell Grants.

Toward a Sustainable Higher Education System

We must stop giving community colleges straw and expecting spun gold. The fact is that what happens to community colleges affects all of higher education. As higher education leaders, we have allowed the baccalaureate and community college systems to develop separately and unequally, with tenuous points of integration and inadequate financial support. Higher education funding and quality assessment is still premised on what are now nostalgic memories of traditional-aged, upper-middle class college students. Unless we let go of this myth and realistically face the modern demographics of the U.S. college population—who goes and who should go to college—the relevance and status of American higher education in a competitive, global education market will erode. If we do not recognize the failing systems of education in the United States—at every level—and do nothing to buttress the pivotal role of community colleges, our system is not sustainable over the long term.

I close with a quote from Mieko Nishimizu of the World Bank who said: “Discriminating issues that shape the future are all fundamentally global. We belong to one inescapable network of mutuality. . . . We are tied, indeed, in a single fabric of destiny on planet Earth.

So it is in recognition of our single fabric of destiny that I ask you to join with me in creating a sustainable system of American higher education—to begin to walk a path that is informed by the facts of our future, not the dreams of our past. Our students, our communities, and our country are depending upon us.

DMU Timestamp: March 29, 2019 18:11





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