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Updates from The SOURCE on Community College
Issues, Trends & Strategies
Published by
The Roueche Graduate Center, National American University
in partnership with Lorenzo A ssociates, Inc. 
"Nothing is impossible, the word itself says
'I'm possible'!" - Audrey Hepburn
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Volume 6, Issue 5 - March 6, 2016
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Miscellaneous
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03/03/2016: Identifying and Overcoming the Three Central Challenges for Liberal Arts Colleges, by Brian Williams, The EvoLLLution - Liberal arts colleges (perhaps even to a greater extent than larger privates and publics) need to identify the appropriate role for technology in the context of the close faculty-student relationships that define the liberal arts college experience and then create mechanisms that both invite and enable their faculty to readily adopt technology-enabled pedagogies in their classrooms. 02/29/2016: Transcript of Tomorrow, by Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed - It's an idea that's growing in popularity at colleges experimenting with competency-based education, serving working adults or examining how to give students easier access to their records. 02/25/2016: U.S. Health, Wealth, and Education Gaps Grow, by Alan Singer, HuffPost Education - In a recently released study, economics at the Brookings Institute reported that the longevity gap between richer and poorer is growing at a more rapid rate. In the early 1970s, an affluent a 60-year-old man lived, on the average, a little more than a year longer than someone the same age at the bottom of the income pyramid. In 2001, an affluent a 60-year-old man lived 5.8 years longer than his economically disadvantaged peer. But by 2014, the gap in life expectancy had climbed to fourteen years for men. It was thirteen years for women. In other words, low income robbed poorer men and women of more than a decade of life. It meant that after contributing to Social Security for their entire working careers, they did not live long enough to collect or they only collected a fraction of what wealthier Americans received. 02/25/2016: Engaged Students Succeed at Community Colleges, by Bruce Baron, The Sun, Education - The four characteristics to an "Engaged Student" are intellectual participation in their course work; interaction in their classrooms; participation with the campus community; and commitment to enhancing their personal growth. 02/24/2016: Students Still Need More and Better College Data, by Jennifer Engle, Money - The problem is that we don't yet have good enough information about which colleges and programs offer the best bang for students' often-borrowed buck. Gauging your odds of transferring or completing college or measuring the return on investment for your credential is challenging because critical data are not readily available for all types of students or institutions. 02/24/2016: The American Dream is Failing Some College Grads, by Aimee Picchi, MoneyWatch - College graduates who come from poorer families largely miss out on the same type of earnings boost that their cohorts from wealthier backgrounds earn across their lifetimes. That's according to new research from the Brookings Institution's Brad Hershbein, who analyzed career earnings profiles for people tracked by the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. 02/23/2016: Americans Are Moving to Europe for Free College Degrees, by Katie Lobosco, CNN, Money - There are at least 44 schools across Europe where Americans can earn their bachelor's degree for free, according to Jennifer Viemont, the founder of an advising service called Beyond The States. 02/21/2016: Hispanic Serving Institutions: A Home for the In-betweeners, by Paola Esmieu, Diverse Education - Chicana author Gloria Anzald�a coined the term "nepantleras" or "in-betweeners" to describe people who experience "nepantla." Nepantla is a Nahuatl word meaning in-between space. Anzald�a adopted it to represent the points of transformation in a person's life and to theorize the experiences of people living in-between different cultures, social and geographic locations and intersectional identities. 02/17/2016: The Revolution in Higher Ed Is Coming ... But When?, by Michael Hart, Campus Technology - In many circumstances, Richard DeMillo's answer to those questions, when asked by consultant and futurist Bryan Alexander in this week's Future Trends Forum video chat, was, "I don't know." 02/16/2016: Double Trouble, by Paul Bradley, Community College Week - High school students throughout the Midwest are at risk of losing access to dual enrollment courses because of new requirements that teachers have a master's degree, or at least graduate-level credits, in the dual enrollment subjects they are teaching. 02/2016: Collective Impact: Theory Versus Reality, by Melinda Mechur Karp and Valerie Lundy-Wagner, Community College Research Center (CCRC) - This brief draws on the experiences of five committed collective impact communities participating in the Ford Foundation's Corridors to College Success initiative to expose some of the practical challenges of translating the theory of collective impact into action.
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Online Education
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02/23/2016: What Employers Think About Your Online Nursing Degree, by Jordan Friedman, U.S. News & World Report - As with any application process, employers evaluate nursing job candidates based on more than just where - and in what format - they earned their degree. But an applicant's education still plays a large role in the process, and most employers have favorable views of degrees earned online. However, online nursing degrees are generally geared toward those who already have their licenses, as the initial training needed to become a registered nurse should be completed in person in order to build a foundation of clinical experience, experts say. 02/19/2016: Coursera Adds Mentors, Project-Based Courses to Online Offerings, EdSurge - SOUPED-UP MOOCs: Online courses often get knocked for lacking the interaction and guidance critical to successful learning. Coursera is beefing up its online offerings by introducing project-based and mentor-guided courses. Last week the company launched 12 project-based courses in areas spanning computer science and business ("Writing Professional Emails and Memos") to art and music ("How to Make a Comic Book").
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College Readiness
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03/03/2016: Never Judge a Book By Its Cover - Use Student Achievement Instead, by Thomas J. Kane, Brookings Institute - In February and March of last year, as teachers were preparing for the first administration of the end-of-year assessments from the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortia (SBAC), the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard surveyed a representative sample of 1,500 teachers and 142 principals across five states. Our report focused on the instructional changes teachers were making and the effectiveness of the training and support they were receiving. However, we also asked about the textbooks they were using. 02/24/2016: Report Explores College, Career Readiness Strategies, by Laura Devaney, eCampus News - Over the years, the authors assert, educators, employers, and policy makers have changed their expectations. Instead of wanting to assess students' current knowledge, these stakeholders want to know more about students' potential to achieve impactful and successful outcomes in the real world.
02/2016: Building Student Momentum From High School Into College, by Elisabeth Barnett, Community College Research Center Ready or Not: It's Time to Rethink the 12th Grade, Jobs for the Future - This report proposes a new dimension to our understanding of how best to prepare high school students for higher education. We suggest considering the accumulation of momentum points - specific college preparatory experiences and markers of educational attainment in high school - that together provide graduates with a greater likelihood of college success.
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Remedial Education
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02/25/2016: Report: Community College Students Not Prepared, by Laura Devaney, eCampus News - Many community college students are not prepared to complete college-level work, do not succeed in remedial courses, and fail to attain their educational goals, according to a new report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement at The University of Texas at Austin. "'Expectations Meet Reality' describes what is, and the innovative work featured in the report describes where we can be," says Evelyn Waiwaiole, director of the Center for Community College Student Engagement.
02/23/2016: 'Corequisite Remediation' Offers Promise for Community Colleges, Studies Report, by Catherine Gewertz, Education Week - Community colleges are not moving swiftly enough to revolutionize the way they assess incoming students' skills and support them in their classwork, a new report argues.
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College Completion
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02/25/2016: Fixing A Broken Freshman Year: What An Overhaul Might Look Like, by Byrd Pinkerton, NPR Ed - The three-year project is called "Re-Imagining the First Year of College," and it's organized by AASCU - the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. The schools plan to combine student advising with bigger, institution-wide changes to the curriculum, the administration and the faculty, all in the hopes of keeping students in school through graduation.
02/25/2016: Free to Finish, by Matt Reed, Inside Higher Ed - I tip my cap to Washington State for one of the smartest low-cost ideas for college completion I've seen in a long time. It's in the process of passing a "Free to Finish" bill, by which former students who left college within 15 or fewer credits of the finish line a chance to finish for free. Students have to have been out of college for at least three years.
02/25/2016: Faculty First on Completion, by Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed - Faculty-led reforms may be the best way to improve graduation rates, according to Achieving the Dream, which is working to give adjunct faculty members a seat at the table.
02/2016: Completing College: A State-Level View of Student Attainment Rates (Signature Report No. 10a), by D. Shapiro, A. Dundar, P. Wakhungu, X. Yuan, A. Nathan and Y. Hwang, National Student Clearinghouse Research Center - The college completion rate for students who started at two-year public institutions also declined in the same period by one percentage point. In 12 states (Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming, and Texas), the college completion rate for students who started in two-year public institutions stayed nearly unchanged or went up.
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Workforce Development
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02/14/2016: Quality Dimensions for Connected Credentials, by Deborah Everhart, Evelyn Ganzglass, Carla Casilli, Daniel Hickey and Brandon Muramatsu, American Council on Education (ACE) - The diversity of credentials is not always meeting the needs of students, educational institutions, and employers, and unfortunately the proliferation of credentials is causing confusion. There is a lack of shared understanding about what makes credentials valuable, how that value varies across different types of credentials for different stakeholders, what constitutes quality, and how credentials are connected to each other and to opportunities for the people who have earned them.
02/14/2016: Communicating the Value of Competencies, by Deborah Everhart, Deb Bushway and David Schejbal, American Council on Education (ACE) - The transitions that students make from education to employment can be fraught with uncertainty, poor communication, and inefficiencies. Students have difficulty articulating their knowledge, skills, and abilities in their resumes and online profiles, and their evidence of learning from academic activities often does not "translate" into employment processes.
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Technology Adoption
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02/25/2016: Security Tops List of Trends That Will Impact the Internet of Things, by David Nagel, Campus Technology - The new report spotlights technologies, trends and "principles" that should be on every IT professional's radar "through the next two years" (2017 and 2018).
02/22/2016: Faculty in No Rush to Adopt Digital or OER Curriculum, by Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology - A subset of digital content, open educational resources (OER), doesn't even show up on the radar of most educators. A full three quarters said they'd either never heard of OER or knew a little but had never used it or reviewed it for use in their classes. Another 10 percent said they'd reviewed it but decided against its use. Only 15 percent had used OER in courses.
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Data Analysis & Assessment
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02/24/2016: U.S. Department of Justice Eyes Accommodations on SAT, ACT, by Catherine Gewertz, Education Week - As more states choose to require all students to take the SAT or ACT, or use those college-entrance exams as their tests for federal accountability, new issues arise. One is a growing gulf between students with disabilities and those without. It's something that has caught the interest of the U.S. Department of Justice.
02/23/2016: Personalization at Scale: Using Analytics for Institutional Improvement, by Elizabeth Mulherrin, The EvoLLLution - In higher education, academic analytics refer to the collection, analysis or use of institutional-level effectiveness data and metrics by administrators, policy-makers, and regulators. Learning analytics aims to "improve student performance in individual courses, by measuring, collecting, analyzing and reporting data related to student learning, participatory, and performance-related behaviours."
Back to 'In This Issue'
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Funding & Economics
|  03/03/2016: States Should Not Choose College Students' Majors, by Jeffrey Dorfman, Forbes - While STEM graduates are certainly in demand by many employers, surveys of employers consistently find that companies want employees who can think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems. These are hallmarks of classical educations, in other words, humanities degrees. 03/01/2016: We're Holding Millennials Back, by Jen Mishory and Conan Knoll, U.S. News & World Report - Massive student debt and lack of access to retirement savings are stifling young innovators. 02/23/2016: Bernie Sanders Is Proposing Free College, But Would He Have The Power To Make It Happen?, by Kirk Carapezza, WGBH News, On Campus - "I think the odds that a President Sanders could actually get legislation through that would make college free for everybody are very close to zero," said Ron Haskins, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former advisor to President George W. Bush. 02/21/2016: California's Four-year Universities Reach Out to Immigrant Students With Low-interest DREAM Loans, by Tatiana Sanchez, LA Times - Officials at California's four-year public universities are reaching out to an estimated 10,000 undergraduate students who might qualify for a special loan aimed at reducing their tuition - a program that further distinguishes the state as a national trendsetter in providing services to immigrants who are in the country illegally. |
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Transfer & Articulation
|  02/29/2016: Building the Higher Education Transfer Pipeline, by Brian C. Mitchell, HuffPost College - Nationally, about 80 percent of community college students claim that they want to earn a bachelor's degree, but only about 38 percent of students who first enrolled at a two-year college actually earn a degree of any kind - whether two-year or four-year - within six years. 02/23/2016: Transfer IS Workforce, by Matt Reed, Inside Higher Ed - A week or so ago I mentioned in passing that the dichotomy of transfer degrees and workforce training is a false one: transfer IS workforce. From the comments, it became clear that the point merited more than a parenthetical. It's a basic truth in its own right, and it's too often overlooked. |
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The SOURCE on Community College Issues, Trends & Strategies
The Roueche Graduate Center, National American University & Lorenzo Associates, Inc.,
950-C Hopkins Road - Williamsville, New York - 14221 - (716) 688-5484
Please send comments and/or suggestions to
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