Updates from The SOURCE on Community College  
Issues, Trends & Strategies     

 

Published by
The Roueche Graduate Center, National American University   
in partnership with Lorenzo Associates, Inc.
 
"Learn to be what you are, and learn to resign
with good grace all that you are not."  - Henri Frederic Amiel    
VOLUME 5, ISSUE 15 - September 6, 2015 
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Miscellaneous
08/31/2015: Trouble for an Accreditor, by Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed - The system and its 113 colleges "have lost confidence in the ACCJC [Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges]," the report said. It also found that the commission, which is the only one of seven regional accreditors to specialize in two-year colleges, may no longer be a good fit for a system that has begun issuing four-year degrees.
 
08/28/2015: Minimum-Wage Work Alone Won't Get You Through College, by Sandhya Kambhampati and Meredith Myers, The Chronicle of Higher Education - Politicians and pundits love to talk about the character-building experience of working your way through college. But how realistic is that ideal? As one way of answering that question, here's a thought experiment: Let's say you're planning to attend your state's best-known public university (at the in-state rate, naturally) and you're hoping a minimum-wage job will cover the cost. How long would you have to work at that job to recoup a year's worth of tuition and fees?

08/27/2015: The Unemployment-Enrollment Link, by Nate Johnson, Inside Higher Ed - For this fall, if the past is any indication, the 0.8 percentage point drop in unemployment from 2014 to 2015 should translate into between a 1 and 3 percent enrollment decline. Regions hitting a rough patch - say, the energy-producing areas of the country - may see the opposite trend.

08/26/2015: Support Community College Students, by Tom Snyder, HuffPost, College - One out of three community college students has family income of less than $20,000, and 69 percent work 35 hours or more a week.

08/26/2015: Admissions Officers Seeing More MOOC Credentials on Applications, by Tara Garc�a Mathewson, EducationDive - Prospective students are touting massive open online course enrollment and completion on college applications, often in hopes of differentiating themselves from their competitors.

08/25/2015: 5 Years of High School Can Net Students College Degree, by Lori Higgins, Detroit Free Press - Schools can create early/middle colleges in two ways: They can be separate high schools, often located on college campuses; or they can create programs that function within an existing high school. The latter option, there are 67 of them, allows students to continue to be part of their home high school and stay involved in extracurricular activities there.

08/25/2015: Concussion Crackdown in Higher Ed Athletics, by Chris Nicholson, University Business - The sensors measure impacts to the head and wirelessly transmit the data to a computer or smartphone on the sideline. Athletic trainers monitor the readings and follow up on the health of players involved in potential concussion-causing collisions.

08/01/2015: Serving Students' Hidden Needs, The League for Innovation, Member Spotlight - NCC realizes that having determination and a sterling work ethic aren't enough for some students to succeed. That's why, in addition to the requisite financial aid and career services, NCC offers two uncommon support services that provide students with free medical care and free groceries, right on campus.

08/2015: A Clearer Pathway to Student Success, by Tim Goral, University Business -"Community colleges were set up to have low-cost access, and they've done that," Bailey says. "But the next step is to go beyond enrollment and figure out what students' goals are, and help them reach those goals."

08/2015: Community Colleges: An Epic Social Change Movement, by Anthony E. Beebe, The League for Innovation - Philosophically, the social justice aspects of opening the door to higher education are clear to many of us, but there is another important aspect to community colleges and social justice that few have considered.

08/2015: League for Innovation 2015 Trends Report, by Gerardo E. de los Santos and Mark David Milliron, The League for Innovation - The trends surveys conducted by the League for Innovation in the Community College (League) are an attempt to both catalyze and inform those ready to take a breath and take a look down the road ahead. 
 
To view our entire Miscellaneous Resources section, click here.
Statistics
06/03/2015: Hispanic Students - The Condition of College & Career Readiness, ACT, Excelencia in Education -  This report provides a national snapshot of academic performance among Hispanic students in the high school graduating class of 2014 who took the ACT college readiness assessment. Through this snapshot, we can begin to address questions of critical importance to our nation. Are Hispanic high school students prepared for college and career?

To view our entire Statistics-Oriented Resources section, click here.
Online Education
08/26/2015: Competency-based Programs Reimagine College Credit, by Sherrie Negrea, University Business - Growth has been fueled by an endorsement from the federal government, which has approved waivers to allow financial aid for students in competency-based programs.

08/21/2015: ASU's MOOC Lets Students Around Globe Earn Freshman-year Credit Online, by Kaila White, The Arizona Republic - Arizona State University has launched the first class of its Global Freshman Academy, which gives anyone in the world the opportunity to earn freshman-level university credit online without having to go through the college admissions process. More than 12,500 people from 163 countries have enrolled in the new massive open online course, or MOOC, the first day of classes.

To view our entire Online Education section, click here.
College Readiness
08/26/2015: K-12 System Not Preparing Students for Life After High School, Diverse - The ACT's new report on College and Career Readiness for 2015 shows that a significant percentage of students is leaving the K-12 system underprepared for postsecondary education and work. This year, 40 percent of test-takers met the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks in at least three of the ACT's core subjects. Conversely, 31 percent did not meet the benchmarks in any of the four subject areas.

08/2015: Redesigning a Student Success Course for Sustained Impact: Early Outcomes Findings (Working Paper No. 81), by Melinda Mechur Karp, Julia Raufman, Chris Efthimiou & Nancy Ritze, Community College Research Center (CCRC) - Based on both qualitative and quantitative analysis, this study finds that FYS participation is associated with positive student outcomes that appear to be sustained for a longer period of time than what is typically found for students taking a traditional student success course.

To view our entire College Readiness section, click here.
Remedial Education
07/2015: Practitioner Packet - Improving the Accuracy of Remedial Placement (Parts 1 & 2), by Judith Scott-Clayton & Clive Belfield, Community College Research Center (CCRC) - Part one, Improving the Accuracy of Remedial Placement, provides an overview of the research, including evidence on the accuracy of typical practices, alternative methods of remedial screening, and the predicted impacts on student subgroups of using high school transcript information (instead of or alongside standardized tests) for placement. Part two, Improving Assessment and Placement at Your College: A Tool for Institutional Researchers, presents a framework for understanding and improving assignment to developmental education.

06/18/2015: Researchers Assess Remedial Education Policy Reform at Florida's Community Colleges, by Shouping Hu, Florida Sate 24/7 - Faculty expressed both optimism and pessimism about students opting out of developmental education and the potential consequences for college-level courses. 

To view our entire Remedial Education section, click here.
College Completion
college completion
09/01/2015: Missouri: Don't Shoot the Messenger, by Michael J. Petrilli and Robert Pondiscio, St. Louis Post-Dispatch - The result was a comforting illusion that most children were on track to succeed in college, carve out satisfying careers, and stand on their own two feet. To put it plainly, it was a lie.

08/29/2015: Time to Add Real Impetus to Texas College, University Completion Rates, by Bill Hammond, Waco Tribune - The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board has hit a home run with the 60x30TX plan. No other education plan will impact businesses in a more positive way than this one will. If you haven't heard of the goal, it is to have 60 percent of Texans between the age of 25 and 34 hold some kind of degree or post-secondary certification by the year 2030. That number right now is 38 percent, so we have a long way to go and only 15 years to get there.
    
To view our entire College Completion section, click here.
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Workforce Development
08/19/2015: Arizona Sun Corridor - Get Into Energy's Eight-Tier Stackable Credential Model, by Deborah Richie, Office of Community College Research and Leadership (OCCRL) - The Arizona Sun Corridor - Get Into Energy consortium worked with industry to develop a stackable credential model for programs of study in mining and energy at community colleges across the state.

08/2015: The Best Jobs for Millennials, by Konrad Mugglestone and Tom Allison, Young Invincibles - Millennials confront steep challenges as they start their careers. Through the economic recovery, young adults (aged 18 to 34) have consistently faced unemployment rates much higher than the population large. In July 2015, for instance, the young adult unemployment rate was over 40 percent higher than the national unemployment rate - 7.5 percent versus 5.3 percent, respectively.
 
To view our entire Workforce Development section, click here.
Technology Adoption
08/26/2015: How to Achieve IT Innovation Amid Budget Cuts, by Tara Garc�a Mathewson, EducationDive - While many CIOs in the corporate sector are seeing more funding for IT needs, colleges and universities are on the other end of the spectrum, forced to figure out how to do a lot with a little.

08/2015: Student Attitudes Toward Technology-Mediated Advising Systems (Working Paper No. 82), by Hoori Santikian Kalamkarian & Melinda Mechur Karp, Community College Research Center (CCRC) - Using focus group interview data from 69 students at six colleges, this study investigates students' attitudes toward technology-mediated advising. More specifically, the authors seek to understand how students' perceptions and experiences vary across different advising functions. They find that students are open to using technology for more formulaic tasks, such as course registration, but prefer in-person support for more complex tasks, such as planning courses for multiple semesters and refining their academic and career goals.

To view our entire Technology Adoption section, click here.
Data Analysis & Assessment
08/21/2015: Student Voices and the Path to Equitable Outcomes, by Heather McCambly, Office of Community College Research and Leadership (OCCRL) - PTR's (Pathways to Results) reliance on practitioners' engagement with quantitative student-level data is a common feature of many data-driven improvement initiatives in higher education, including Achieving the Dream, Inc. and the Center for Urban Education's Equity Scorecard; however, as OCCRL has sought to scale the PTR model, it has become obvious that engagement with quantitative data in itself may not always catalyze change. Without qualitative data to give a face and voice to the numbers, practitioners' perceptions may not change.

To view our entire Data Analysis & Assessment section, click here.
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Funding & Economics
8/26/2015: Responding to Free, by Ashley A. Smith, Inside Higher Ed - Community colleges across Tennessee are starting their academic year with many students who may have never thought they would attend an institution of higher learning, but who are taking advantage of the Tennessee Promise program, which offers them a free two-year college education.

08/25/2015: Who Would Use Income Share Agreements to Pay for College?, by Robert Kelchen, Brookings Institution - In response to concerns over the rising price of college and increasing amounts of student loan debt, the Obama Administration has worked to expand income-based repayment programs for those with federal student loans. In late 2015 or early 2016, the U.S. Department of Education will likely allow students with any federal loans to enroll in a more-generous version of income-based repayment that would cap monthly payments at 10 percent of discretionary income (i.e., earnings above 150 percent of the federal poverty line) for 20 years for undergraduate students and 25 years for graduate students, with any remaining balances forgiven by the federal government. 

To view our entire Funding & Economics section, click here.
Transfer & Articulation
09/26/2015: SUNY Achieves Seamless Transfer Guarantee as Chancellor Zimpher Aims to Boost Completion, SUNY - Students are guaranteed seamless transfer of credits to and from all SUNY campuses as the 2015-16 academic year begins. SUNY's landmark policy helps ensure students graduate on time and with less debt.

08/26/2015: Students Can Now Transfer Credits Between SUNY Colleges, by Joseph Spector, Poughkeepsie Journal - The system has aligned more than 32,000 academic courses, allowing students to more easily switch schools starting this school year which gets underway this week for most SUNY colleges.

To view our entire Transfer & Articulation section, click here.
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