Updates from The SOURCE on Community College

Issues, Trends & Strategies

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VOLUME 5, ISSUE 20 - November 15, 2015

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In This Issue

Workforce Development

Technology Adoption

Data Analysis & Assessment

Funding & Economics

Transfer & Articulation

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Miscellaneous

11/10/2015: Who's in First (Generation)?, by Ashley A. Smith, Inside Higher Ed - Research finds varying definitions of "first generation" result in big differences in how these students are counted - but however they are defined, they lag behind their peers.

11/10/2015: Major Study Finds OER Students Do Just as Well - or Better, by Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology - In the largest study of its kind, a group of researchers has examined the use of open educational resources (OER) and found that students who used OER in their undergraduate courses performed as well or better than those assigned commercial textbooks.

11/10/2015: How Upwardly Mobile are Hispanic Children? Depends How You Look At It., by Nathan Joo and Richard V. Reeves, Brookings Institute - People often immigrate to a new country to seek a better life for their children. In their new country, immigrant children very often show rapid upward mobility. But immigrants are very far from being a homogenous group, arriving with very different levels of education, skills, and economic resources.

11/06/2015: A Right, Not a Luxury, by Lauren Camera, U.S. News & World Report - Today there is a growing recognition that getting someone in the door of a post-secondary institution is not enough, especially for low-income students whose college graduation rates pale in comparison to their wealthier peers.

11/05/2015: Exclusive: Dr. Jill Biden Explains Why Community College is 'One of America's Best-kept Secrets', AOL - In an exclusive Q&A with AOL.com, Dr. Biden explains why people looking to pursue a college degree should look no farther than their local community college.

11/04/2015: Renewing the Promise of the Higher Education Act: Seven Principles for Reform, by Mary Alice McCarthy, EdCentral - Few pieces of federal legislation have done more to open the doors of opportunity to millions of Americans than HEA. The law has benefitted generations of students who might not otherwise have afforded college. It has also benefitted our democracy and economy, providing the basis for a highly educated citizenry and workforce. But as we approach HEA's 50th anniversary, it's time to take stock of how well the law is meeting the needs of students today.

11/04/2015: First Year, First Generation: Going Home, by Avi Wolfman-Arent, NewsWorks - This article points to the idea that first-generation students often have a different and, perhaps closer, relationship to home life than their independence-seeking, middle-class peers.

11/03/2015: The Un-College That's Training $100,000 App Developers, by Anya Kamenetz, NPR Ed - This is just one of a slew of big announcements this fall coming out of a peculiar, fast-growing corner of the higher education world: the coder bootcamp. This is really an entire new industry within higher ed that's grown up in about five years.

08/27/2015: Managing Campus Facilities in the Digital Age, Center for Digital Education - Are your classrooms empty? With the shift to digital education models and more students logging in from home, classroom spaces are not being optimally used and universities face new challenges of managing their physical infrastructure. Education leaders need to consider this transformation now to better help shape the campus of the future.

08/27/2015: How Are You Influencing the Future of Education?, Center for Digital Education - Five key trends for the future of education - technology immersion, data analytics, personalized learning paths, knowledge skills and economic alignment - are rapidly converging to produce a new paradigm called the "educational continuum."

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Statistics

10/09/2015: The College Graduation Rate Flaw That No One's Talking About, by Ben Miller, EdCentral - It sure looks like community colleges are nearly three times worse than for-profit colleges. In fact, this is a common talking point used by both the for-profit industry and its defenders. There's just one problem, the two bars in the graph above aren't comprised of the same things. At for-profit colleges, 86 percent of students counted as graduates had finished programs of less-than two years, almost certainly certificates. By contrast, three-quarters of community college graduates were in programs that were two years or longer, likely associate degrees.

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Online Education

11/10/2015: Faculty: Are More Online Courses Really Feasible?, by Nick McCrea, eCampusNews - Faculty are divided over a plan that would expand online courses, questioning financial feasibility.

10/29/2015: Survey: Online Courses, Use of Tech Better Route than Public Funding To Cut College Costs, by Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology - The delivery of online classes is viewed by most people as a way that colleges and universities are keeping expenses down for their students. In a recent survey, 65 percent of respondents identified those more than anything else a school can do to reduce student costs. The idea of backing public funding for education to lower tuition and loan costs was specified by only half as many (34 percent).

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College Readiness

11/10/2015: Nearly All Phoenix's Central High Seniors Apply to College, Bucking State Trend, by Mitch Quesada, Cronkite News - Ramirez said that three years ago, only 20 percent of the seniors at Central High applied for college. Last year, that number rose to 98 percent, and they hope it continues to grow. The positive attitude of students helps a lot.

11/2015: Military-Connected Undergraduates, by Dani Molina and Andrew Morse, American Counsil on Education (ACE) - This groundbreaking report documents important differences between veterans and other students with a connection to the military and how those differences may affect their access and success in postsecondary education. One of the most compelling points of the report shows just how many risk factors military-connected students have-factors that might impede their college enrollment, persistence, and completion, no matter what their personal strengths and motivations are.

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Remedial Education

11/2015: Core Principles for Transforming Remediation within a Comprehensive Student Success Strategy, Core Principles.org -
Colleges and postsecondary systems across the nation have demonstrated remarkable progress since Core Principles for Transforming Remediation was published in 2012. States and institutions are phasing out standalone or multi-course remediation sequences, resulting in tens of thousands of students more quickly enrolling in and completing college level courses.

07/2015: Improving the Accuracy of Remedial Placement, by Judith Scott-Clayton & Clive Belfield, Community College Research Center (CCRC) - This practitioner packet summarizes CCRC's research on remedial placement at community colleges, and considers how using students' high school transcript information in the assignment process could improve placement accuracy.

05/2015: Statewide Developmental Education Reform: Early Implementation in Virginia and North Carolina, by Hoori Santikian Kalamkarian, Julia Raufman & Nikki Edgecombe, Community College Research Center (CCRC) - The community college systems of Virginia and North Carolina are national leaders in statewide efforts to improve developmental education. Both states have recently redesigned their developmental English and math courses, as well as their assessment instruments and placement policies, in efforts to decrease developmental education referrals, reduce the amount of time students spend in developmental education, and align developmental education across colleges and with college-level courses.

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College Completion

11/2015: Guided Pathways Demystified, by Rob Johnstone, National Center for Inquiry & Improvement (NCII) - While implementing guided pathways is a relatively new movement, initial evidence from related initiatives demonstrates a positive impact on student progress and completion.

05/2015: Educational Attainment in the United States and Six Major Metropolitan Areas 1990-2010: A Quantitative Study by Race, Ethnicity, and Sex, by Lawrence Cappello, Center for Latin American, Caribbean & Latino Studies - This study examines educational attainment in the United States between 1990 and 2010 for the population aged 25 years and older using data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau.1 It focuses on nationwide trends as well as those found in the New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Houston and Riverside metropolitan areas.

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Workforce Development

11/06/2015: Community College Career Technical Education Programs Significantly Increase Earnings, by Ann Stevens, Michal Kurlaender and Michel Grosz; UC Davis, Policy Brief, Center for Poverty Research - National efforts to increase college attainment and to address the nation's skills gap have focused heavily on community colleges. Understanding returns to community college programs is particularly important for low-income students, since nearly half of low-income students begin their college careers at community colleges, compared to just 15 percent of high-income students.Using administrative data from California, we find that students who earn vocational certificates and degrees see large earnings gains that vary substantially by course of study.

11/05/2015: Apprenticeships in the U.S.-A Way to Put "Career" in "College and Career Readiness", by Nancy Hoffman, Jobs for the Future - While we don't have a good system of career education, there are a number of good options, though not enough to go around. Among the most impressive networks incorporating learning for specific careers are up-to-date vocational high schools, career academies, High Tech High Schools, Cristo Rey schools, Big Picture Schools, P-TECH models, and early college schools.

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Technology Adoption

11/05/2015: Innovations in Technology-Assisted College Advising: Evidence of the Impact on Students and Institutions, Community College Research Center (CCRC) - Using interview and survey data collected at six colleges pre- and post- adoption of integrated planning and advising services (IPAS) technologies, CCRC research presented in this session investigates if and how colleges leverage implementation of these products to reform their advising systems. Results suggest that launching IPAS technologies can spur broad institutional change in advising, but requires an actionable vision for reform and an aligned leadership model.

11/03/2015: 20 Should-know Technology Tidbits from EDUCAUSE, by Meris Stansbury, eCampusNews - A quick-hitting guide to technologies, solutions and business talk from the 2015 EDUCAUSE exhibitor hall.

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Data Analysis & Assessment

11/05/2015: SUNY Diversity Policy Expected to Increase Student Retention and Completion, by Brittany Tesoriero, The Stateman - The policy introduces customized cultural competency training for faculty members, research that will evaluate the policy for effectiveness, and annual reporting on the policy's progress. The most progressive of these parameters is perhaps the approval of a new data collection tool that will allow each student to voluntarily self-identify their sexual orientation and gender identity during the registration process.

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Funding & Economics

11/04/2015: Explaining the Cost of College Tuition, by Mike Maciag, Governing - Tuition prices are influenced by far more than just state funding. View and compare differences for each state.

11/02/2015: Saving on College by Doing Some of It in High School, by Mikhail Zinshteyn, Education Writers Association (EWA) - The White House announced a new higher education experiment that will direct federal grants to some high school students who want to enroll in college classes.

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Transfer & Articulation

11/04/2015: Degree-Seeking, But Not Here, by Matt Reed, Inside Higher Ed - The harder case is the student who starts at a community college with every intention of transferring after a year to a four-year school. That student is using the community college as a springboard -- nothing wrong with that -- and saving thousands of dollars while getting the same eventual degree. But in the meantime, she shows up in our numbers as a dropout, as if the community college did something wrong. And she doesn't show up in the four-year school's graduation rate at all.

10/2015: Should Community College Students Earn an Associate Degree Before Transferring to a Four-Year Institution?, by Peter M. Crosta & Elizabeth Kopko, Community College Research Center (CCRC) - This paper investigates whether community college students who earn an associate degree before transferring to a four-year college are more likely to earn a bachelor's degree than students who transfer without earning an associate degree.

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