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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 Associates, Inc.

"You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream." - C. S. Lewis
 
Volume 6, Issue 14 - August 7, 2016    
  
In This Issue
Miscellaneous
07/27/2016: Helping Students Make a Good Living and Live a Good Life, by Terry O'Banion, Community College Week - One of the challenges of reaching agreement on the golden mean of an essential and integrated education is the historical architecture in which educators have created silos as barriers to such integration. For example, in the community college we have created two distinct cultures of workforce education and of liberal/general education. They operate in different silos separated by facilities, curricula, staff qualifications, titles, degrees, values, and funding.
 
07/27/2016: Open Educational Resources Paying Off for Some Colleges, by Jamaal Abdul-Alim, Diverse - Concerned about the rising cost of course materials for students, Brookdale Community College biology professor Carey A. Fox decided to try something different this past spring in her Life Sciences class.Instead of using a traditional textbook, which costs $124 in its loose-leaf format, Fox decided to search for suitable open educational resources, or OER, so that students could access the course materials for free.
 
07/27/2016: Community Colleges Win Grant to Change How They Advise Students, by Katherine Long, The Seattle Times - Heather Bennett calls it the "death by choice overload" problem: Community college students are often so overwhelmed by all the different possible directions their studies could take that they don't choose courses wisely. But Bennett, the executive director of institutional effectiveness and resource development for Everett Community College, says the state's community colleges are working on a fix.

07/22/2016: Why Tech Industries are Demanding More Liberal Arts Graduates, by Jarret Carter, Education Dive - The report, "Reclaiming the value of liberal arts for the 21st century," makes the case for institutions establishing stronger connections between traditional majors in the arts and professional disciplines, and encourages more effective marketing of liberal arts opportunities and successes.

07/22/2016: Report Emphasizes Institutional Change Before Initiatives, Inside Higher Ed - The findings "underscore the fact that the type of change lauded and encouraged by today's policy makers, grant makers and reformers is not simple. They also remind stakeholders that change can occur in absence of deep transformation, but to achieve the desired results, it is necessary to look beyond structural redesign to a broader, more culturally and behaviorally oriented notion of reform." 
 
07/21/2016: Failing Forward With Adaptive Learning in Higher Education, by George Lorenzo, EdSurge - When Michael S. Conner, digital liberal arts specialist at Grinnell College, saw the possible benefits to students that could be accrued through the adoption of an adaptive learning digital courseware tool, he sent off an inquiry to two dozen faculty members at this small, private liberal arts college in Iowa to see who might be interested in piloting such an online-oriented addition to their face-to-face courses.

07/18/2016: Survey: College Business Officers Say Higher Ed in Crisis, by Jarrett Carter, Education Dive - A majority of college business officers understand higher education is an industry under siege, in part, because of changes to industry, political spending ideology and new trends in workforce development. It's one thing to acknowledge the changes, and a totally different proposition to identify how to fix it.
 
07/14/2016: Should Colleges Really Eliminate the College Lecture, by Christine Gross Loh, The Atlantic - For some years now, students in MIT's introductory physics classes, for example ,have had no lectures, and physics departments at institutions around the country have been following suit. But while the movement to eliminate the college lecture first gained traction among physics professors, including the Stanford Nobel laureate Carl Wieman and Harvard's Eric Mazur (a proponent of "peer instruction" who has compared watching a lecturer to learn physics to watching a marathon on TV to learn how to run), it has expanded beyond the sciences. Getting rid of the college lecture entirely is the mission of a broad group of educators.
 
07/2016: Deconstructing CBE, by Ellucian - Rather than a single, dominant version of CBE, new 2016 survey data reveals a diversity of practice across a spectrum of schools, each formulating a version of CBE to meet their own unique challenges. A portrait of CBE has emerged as a menu of tools and practices, vs. a monolithic approach or linear path.

07/2016: Geospatial Impediments to Community College Access, by Elizabeth Thome Wallington, American Enterprise Institute -  This paper focuses on how geospatial contexts surrounding community colleges in a given region affect the potential of traditionally underserved communities to access community colleges.
 
Online Education
07/23/2016: The Best Free (or Cheap) Classes to Continue Your Education Online, by ValuePenguin, Nasdaq - Massive open online courses (MOOCs) - or online instruction for lifelong learners and those without access to higher education domestically or abroad - are still relatively new to the continuing education landscape. And they're not going away anytime soon. Often free and always relatively cheap (when compared with the cost of typical higher education classes), MOOCs can be a valuable tool for pretty much anyone with Internet access to further their education, specialize within their career (whether you're a dietitian, say, or a data analyst) or simply pick up a new language or instrument.

07/20/2016: New Research from Learning House and Aslanian Market Research Debunks Online College Student Myths - The Learning House, Inc., and Aslanian Market Research, unveiled findings from the fifth annual Online College Students 2016: Comprehensive Data on Demands and Preferences report. In addition to evaluating the demographics of the students pursuing fully online college degrees, the report explores what students are looking for in their programs and why they choose to enroll in them.

College Readiness
07/27/2016: Education for Recent Immigrants in NYC, by John Moreno-Escobar, Huffington Post - Despite the fact that New York City is known for the diversity of its people, growing up as immigrant youth in this colorful city is not so easy. Limited opportunities due to language barriers, immigration status, family separation, work responsibilities, trauma or lack of support are some of the various factors that constantly affect the lives of many young immigrants. Two Colombian residents from Queens came together at the end of 2008 and decided to start an organization in that community with the goal of supporting recent immigrant families gain access to higher education

07/20/2016: How Important are High School Courses to College Performance? Less Than You Might Think, by Gregory Ferenstein and Brad Hershbein, Brookings - There is a troubling hidden pattern behind success stories of high school graduation: though the percent of students earning a diploma is at an all-time high (82 percent), college completion rates continue to stagnate at best, exacerbated by a throng of college-bound students ill-prepared for advanced courses.

07/14/2016: What is College Ready Anyway?, by Carrie Kaufman, Nevada Public Radio - Many colleges and universities don't even look at test scores. They look at the person. And that opens the door for kids who are the first in their families to go to college - who are often the first in their families to grow up speaking English.
 
Remedial Education
07/27/2016: Illinois Community Colleges are Reforming Developmental Education, by Laura Devaney, eCampus News - Illinois community colleges across the state have implemented a variety of reforms to developmental education. Promising strategies including co-requisite developmental education, summer bridge programs, and fourth year high school courses are providing a pathway to success for underprepared students.

04/08/2016: What Happens When Colleges Start Treating Remedial Students Like Everyone Else, by Dereck Johnson, GoodCall - A growing amount of research has shown that most incoming college students placed in remediation courses do not gain any real benefits or skills that prepare them for college-level courses. In fact, students placed in remediation are more likely to take on additional student loan debt, more likely to drop out, and less likely to finish their degree. Given the alarming failure of most college remediation programs and the pernicious unintended consequences they cause, experts are increasingly questioning the value of these programs and pushing for alternatives like co-requisite remediation programs.
 
College Completion
college completion
07/26/2016: Is it Push or Pull?, by Alexandra W. Logue, Inside Higher Ed - Perhaps we in higher ed should consider motivating students to graduate by focusing more on what they have left to do than what they have already done.

07/25/2016: Colleges Nudge Students to Graduate Within Four Years, by Melissa Korn, Wall Street Journal - College administrators are sending a message to their students: Hurry up. Low graduation rates hurt a school's reputation, and staying enrolled for extra years adds to the tab for students. So dozens of schools and statewide systems are trying to cut back on the number of "super seniors" milling about campus.

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Workforce Development
07/15/2016: Employment Trends of Young Adults Over the Last Three Years, by Tom Allison, Young Invincibles - Generally, young adults, just like the workforce as a whole, have seen some significant improvements in the job market. In fact, there are 2.9 million more young adults working in 2016 than in 2013. Their unemployment rate has dropped 3.5 points to 6.8 percent from 10.4 percent.

06/2016: Encouraging Evidence on a Sector-Focused Advancement Strategy, by Richard Hendra, David H. Greenberg, Gayle Hamilton, Ari Oppenheim, Alexandra Pennington, Kelsey Schaberg, and Betsy L. Tessler, MDRC - This report summarizes the two-year findings of a rigorous random assignment evaluation of the WorkAdvance model, a sectoral training and advancement initiative. Launched in 2011, WorkAdvance goes beyond the previous generation of employment programs by introducing demand-driven skills training and a focus on jobs that have career pathways. The model is heavily influenced by the positive findings from the Sectoral Employment Impact Study (SEIS) completed in 2010.

Technology Adoption
08/03/2016: Digital Game-Based Learning in Higher Ed Moves Beyond the Hype, by George Lorenzo, EdSurge - Students in Art Goldberg's English composition classes at Miami-Dade College and Broward College have a different experience than their peers in most introductory college writing courses. They're role-playing as junior staff writers in a fictional newsroom, creating content for an upcoming broadcast-all within a digital game that aims to make learning grammar more engaging than memorizing Strunk and White.

07/26/2016: Willing or Not, Higher Education Faces a Digital Transformation, by Candace Talmadge, GoodCall -  Higher education worldwide stands on the precipice of a long-overdue digital transformation, according to a multinational survey of college students. Commissioned by software maker Unit4, the study polled more than 2,000 full and part-time undergraduate and graduate students in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Australia, Singapore, and New Zealand. Seventy percent of respondents want their college or university to update what is known as a student information system to make it possible for them to access administrative tools as well as academic coursework through websites or applications on their mobile phones, tablets, laptops, or desktop computers.

07/26/2016: It Takes a Village to Bring Adaptive Technology to Scale, by Connie Johnson, EdSurge - Colorado Technical University (CTU) began the adoption of adaptive-learning courses in late 2012. We have just over 100 courses using our proprietary adaptive technology (called intellipath), 400 faculty trained to use the technology, and approximately 55,000 students who have used it in CTU courses. Why did we embark upon this venture? How did we do it?

Data Analysis & Assessment
08/2016: How High Schools and Colleges Can Team Up to Use Data and Increase Student Success, by Michael Grady, Jobs for the Future - This report is part of a series that encourages high schools and higher education to share responsibility for improving college completion rates by co-designing, co-delivering, and co-validating supportive experiences for all 12th-grade students through the first year of college, especially those who so often struggle in this period.

07/14/2016: New Data for Teacher Prep, by Benjamin Riley, Inside Higher Ed - An analysis of the 23 teacher-preparation programs led by members of Deans for Impact revealed that only 26 percent have access to student-achievement data. More than half lack information about whether their graduates have remained in the teaching profession. Where data are being gathered, it's being done using tools that each institution has built in-house, making it all but impossible to compare data across different colleges of education.

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Funding & Economics
07/28/2016: Is the Student Loan Crisis Fact of Fiction?, by Claudio Sanchez, NPR - There's a new book out about the student loan crisis, or what author Sandy Baum suggests is a "bogus crisis." Baum, a financial aid expert and senior fellow at the Urban Institute, claims it has been manufactured by the media in search of a spicy story and fueled by politicians pushing "debt free college" proposals. We had a few questions for Baum about the book, Student Debt: Rhetoric and Realities of Higher Education.

07/28/2016: Do State Subsidies for Public Universities Favor the Affluent?, by Jason Delisle and Kim Dancy, Brookings - Combining data from multiple sources allows us to explore the relationship between university spending on education and what their students pay in tuition, more accurately estimating the average subsidies that students at public four-year universities receive. We use these estimates to examine how subsidies differ by family income and find that subsidies for education expenditures actually decline on average as student and family incomes increase.

07/25/2016: Long-neglected Maintenance Threatens to Further Escalate the Cost of College by Jon Marcus, Hechinger Report -  After years of budget cuts and continuing austerity, universities and colleges collectively face a shortfall of a record $30 billion for what they variously call deferred maintenance or "deferred renewal" to deteriorating buildings and other infrastructure, according to an estimate by the national association representing facilities officers. The problem is compounded by the fact that they nonetheless continue to build more, - spending a record $11.5 billion last year - in the hope of attracting students at a time when enrollment is leveling off or falling, or to produce more revenue from new residence halls and gyms.

Transfer & Articulation
07/12/2016: High Rate of Washington Community-College Grads Go on to Earn 4-year Degree, by Katherine Long, Seattle Times - The Clearinghouse, which compiles one of the most complete sets of college-completion data in the country, found that of the 14,183 students who received an associate degree in Washington in 2009-2010, 6,739 went on to earn a bachelor's degree - about 47.5 percent. Only Utah, Florida, New Jersey and Idaho did better. The national average is 41 percent. 

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