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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. 
"If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship,
he would keep it in port forever." - Thomas Aquinas
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Volume 6, Issue 18 - October 2, 2016
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Miscellaneous
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09/25/2016: Shaken By Economic Change, 'Non-Traditional' Students Are Becoming The New Normal, by Eric Westervelt, NPR Ed - While colleges and universities have seen enrollment growth follow every recession since 1980, the boost in enrollment following the Great Recession was far greater than previous. And a growing number of those students enrolling are older, working, have a family - or all three. Nearly half of those enrolled in higher ed today are so-called "non-traditional" students. One quarter of all students are over the age of 30. The increase is driven mostly by tough financial realities and a changing economy.
09/25/2016: Need for Latinos in Community College Leadership Emphasized, by Jamal Evan Mazyck, Diverse - "We wanted to bring together leaders and aspiring leaders to discuss the latest education research and best practices to serve Latino students since the demographic is growing in community colleges nationwide," said Maria Harper-Marinick, chancellor of the Maricopa Community College District and NCCHC president. "For the majority of Latinos in the United States, the academic journey begins at the community college so it is a new day for us, and it is our responsibility as leaders to make sure they feel welcome and provide a culturally competent environment."
09/23/2016: Redoing Application Reading, by Rick Seltzer, Inside Higher Ed - Colleges and universities are preparing for a future in which student bodies are less white, Northeastern and Midwestern. That means changes for admissions readers, those who evaluate applications from prospective students.
09/22/2016: A Primer on the College Student Journey, American Academy of Arts & Sciences - Over the next several years, the Commission, comprising national leaders in education, business, and government, will study how well students are being served by today's higher education models and will seek to identify the challenges and opportunities that higher education will encounter in the decades ahead.
09/22/2016: Days might be numbered for one of the nation's largest college accreditors, by Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, The Washington Post - The Department of Education is standing by an independent advisory board vote to bar one of the largest national accreditation agencies from serving as the gatekeeper between colleges and billions of dollars in federal financial aid, setting the stage for a protracted fight with the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools.
09/21/2016: Despite warnings, College Board redesigned SAT in way that may hurt neediest students, by Renee Dudley, Reuters Investigates - When it decided to redesign the SAT, the New York-based not-for-profit sought to build an exam with what it describes as more "real world" applications than past incarnations of the test. Students wouldn't simply need to be good at algebra, for instance. The new SAT would require them to "solve problems in rich and varied contexts."
09/20/2016: New President Will Bring New Challenges for Colleges, by David Baime, Community College Week - As the presidential campaign hurtles forward, a look at developments in federal higher education policy over recent years gives some concept of what the next president will confront in fashioning an agenda for community colleges.
09/16/2016: Indiana's Grand Textbook Compromise, by Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed - Better service, lower prices, higher profits. Indiana U may have found a textbook acquisition model that makes everyone happy.
09/13/2016: EDITORIAL: Local schools challenge college-only model for success, The Gazette - Modern American culture tells high school graduates to enroll in college regardless of costs, with or without well-defined career goals. We end up with surpluses of lawyers and various other subject experts who work outside the disciplines they studied. The economy has limited ability to employ art history experts, sociologists, theologians and journalists. Under-employed graduates struggle to pay off college loans, which so often represent a poor investment.
09/13/2016: Throw the cookie cutters away: Remaking high schools for the 21st Century, by LaVerne Evans Srinivasan and Saskia Levy Thompson, The Hechinger Report - For more than a year, The Hechinger Report has been spending time in high schools across the U.S. trying to learn what can be done to improve dismal graduation rates, along with looking at efforts to get more teenagers invested and interested in school. This op-ed comes to us via the Carnegie Corporation, among our many funders, based on Monday's White House meeting on the topic. Our special reports on high school reform continue to run, and we've solicited a host of viewpoints on innovative approaches that show promise. We welcome new views and voices!
09/07/2016: Open Educational Resources (OER) and the Evolving Higher Education Landscape, Cengage - Who's using OER, who's not, and why? Where is OER headed and do educational content providers fit into the picture? Out of primary and secondary research conducted by Cengage Learning in early 2016, a view emerged of the evolving OER landscape. As a former CEO of a non-profit technology company said, "The longer game with OER is really in the adaptive and customization capabilities to spur learning outcomes."
06/23/2016: Scaling Innovation in Community Colleges: A Guide to Action, by Lisa Soricone, Jobs For the Future - As community colleges across the country look for ways to promote student success, the need for scaling effective approaches is critical. This guide builds on a framework of four phases of scaling developed in JFF's previous publication, Thinking Big: A Framework for States on Scaling Up Community College Innovation: planning, initiating, expanding, and sustaining. With the aim of translating the framework to promote action on the ground, the guide outlines key concepts, questions, and action steps related to each of the four phases. The guide draws on lessons from multiple JFF initiatives designed to promote student success in postsecondary education, and offers examples of key concepts in action.
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Online Education
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09/01/2016: Digital Badges and Academic Transformation, by Veronica Diaz, EducauseReview - It seems that digital badges are everywhere these days: in fitness apps, on social networking websites, and in company loyalty programs. In higher education, they're taking the form of microcredentials, representing successful completion of a variety of learning experiences inside and outside of the traditional for-credit course.
08/09/2016: Why Today's MOOCs Are Not Innovative, by David Weldon, Campus Technology - While there were plenty of examples of innovation on hand in the awards portion of the session, much of what is passing for innovation in education today is not really that, Downes said. And in the industry overall, is it innovation we are achieving - or change?
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College Readiness
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09/14/2016: Can Millennial Latinos Fill Workforce Void as Baby Boomers Retire?, by Raul A. Reyes, NBC News - The report highlights two clear trends for the second half of the 21st century. Members of the baby-boom generation will be entering retirement in record numbers, creating a void in the American workforce. Simultaneously the 80 million young people known as millennials will be entering the workplace - and that's where Latinos factor in.
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Remedial Education
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09/22/2016: What's Working: 21st Century Advising for Today's College Students, by Allan Golston, The Huffington Post - Whatcom is one of an increasing number of colleges and universities that have started using a suite of online advising tools called iPASS, which stands for Integrated Planning and Advising for Student Success. Early alert, for example, automatically flags students who have repeated absences or missed assignments for in-person follow-up. This allows the student to get back on track. Since implementing iPASS, Whatcom has seen fall-to-winter retention rates increase by 5 percentage points compared to the previous year.
09/19/2016: Can Bite-Sized Courses Help More Students Complete Remedial Math?. by Marguerite McNeal, EdSurge - Students in North Carolina and Virginia community colleges who started their fall semester have already knocked out credits for math and English and are moving onto their next classes. Both state systems have implemented a new approach to remedial education, breaking credits into bite-sized modules instead of semester-long courses.
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College Completion
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09/23/2016: Say Good-bye to the Four-Year College Degree, by Joseph Williams, TakePart - A new report on college completion by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center indicates that less than half of all full-time college students at public universities earn their bachelor's degree "on time," with the majority finishing more than five years after they enroll. The rate of degree completion is even worse at community colleges, with just 5 percent of full-time students reaching graduation day within the expected two years. The study also concludes that the longer a student spends in college, the more likely he or she is to drop out before obtaining a degree.
09/01/2016: How other states are getting college dropouts to drop back in, by Ron French, Bridge Magazine - Virginia incentivizes community college students to complete a two-year associate degree before transferring to a four-year college, and helps pay the costs of a bachelor's degree. The state offers up to $3,000 in grant money per year at participating four-year universities for transferring community college students, but only if the students first stay in community college long enough to earn an associate degree.
Back to 'In This Issue' |
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Workforce Development
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09/12/2016: One college turns its football field into a farm and sees its students transform, by Gwen Ifill, PBS News Hour - Eighty-three percent of our students are Pell Grant-eligible, which means, by and large, that their families have a dysfunctional relationship with wealth and with work. So if you have never been in an environment where you have come to understand the expectations of a career, because all you have ever seen is people be underemployed or unemployed, then how are you going to learn that?
09/12/2016: On Bootcamps: Community Colleges Are In A Different Category, by David Baime, The EvoLLLution - While bootcamps provide the hard skills students need to get a job, community colleges teach those hard skills as well as the soft skills students need to get a career.
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Technology Adoption
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09/21/2016: How One Community College Teaches Shakespeare Across the Desert, by George Lorenzo, EdSurge - Any small college knows the challenge of filling an esoteric literature course with enough students to officially keep the course on record through an entire semester. But an Intro to Shakespeare course at a rural community college in Arizona wouldn't seem to stand a chance. 09/19/2016: Why It's Time for Education Technology to Become an Academic Discipline, by David Raths, Campus Technology - In a lively Future Trends Forum video chat last week hosted by consultant and futurist Bryan Alexander, Maloney made the case that now is the time to think more deeply about the role of technology in teaching and learning. Analyzing all the components of the work he and others in the field do around education technology, he said, "We can see it as a way of engaging around a set of problems that we think are important but that we don't think have a single solution. There may be multiple solutions that require research, that require an approach that I think mirrors or suggests the contours of a discipline." 09/15/2016: 4 innovative technology initiatives on campuses today, by Laura Devaney, eCampusNews - As the school year gets underway across the nation, many institutions are launching new technology initiatives and programs designed to improve teaching and learning. Educators love to share their successes, learn from the success of other institutions, and they also love to share lessons they learned along their journey.
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Data Analysis & Assessment
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09/23/2016: Adaptive Learning in Higher Education is Here - Maybe, by Lou Pugliese, LInkedIn - Also called personalized learning or machine learning, the idea that algorithms, data and processors can optimize knowledge acquisition for individual learning styles has been around for some time. It has intensified since the gradual adoption in the early 2000s of learning management systems (LMS), which were highly successful in enabling the administrationof learning, but less so in enabling learning itself. The initial design criteria point for LMS design had fundamentally been undergraduate education. 09/22/2016: Civitas Learning Offers New Insights into Student Success, by Rhea Kelly, CampusTechnology - Civitas Learning has upgraded its Illume predictive analytics product with new capabilities designed to help institutions improve student outcomes. Illume integrates students' academic, financial and behavioral data to develop personalized predictions, identify at-risk students and deploy targeted interventions. Two new features - Courses and Impact - aim to provide a "more precise, holistic understanding of student success," according to a press release. 09/21/2016: Indiana launches nation's first comprehensive measure of college value., Tribune Star - The Indiana College Value Index provides college value profiles for all Indiana public college campuses, focusing on three areas aligned to the state's strategic plan for higher education, called Reaching Higher, Delivering Value: Completion, Competency and Career. The index combines quantitative data from the Commission's College Completion Report and Return on Investment Report with qualitative information from the Gallup-Indiana Alumni Survey as well as examples provided by the colleges.
Back to 'In This Issue'
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Funding & Economics
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09/14/2016: There's Plenty of Risk to Go Around, by Ben Barrett, New America - Only half of all students who started college in 2009 have graduated. Many other students leave college loaded with debt and a useless degree. Meanwhile, the institutions that these students attend have assumed very little responsibility for the quality of education that they provide -- and the federal government has done little to change this situation.
09/14/2016: Smarter State Spending, by Paul Fain, Inside Higher Ed - One paper suggests reallocating state dollars to public colleges that enroll more low-income students, away from those with wealthier students. The other criticizes free-college proposals, saying they will hurt lower-income households most, and calls instead for prioritizing the use of tuition revenue on need-based financial aid.
09/13/2016: The anxiety is real: College costs rise more, relative to income, for the middle class, by Catharine Bond Hill, The Washington Post - Those in the middle haven't been imagining their pain. While all households are facing rising costs of higher education relative to incomes, those truly in the middle of the income distribution are facing larger increases relative to their incomes than those households above them in the income distribution.
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Transfer & Articulation
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09/12/2016: Realizing the Time-Saving Promise of Dual Enrollment, by Sarah Hooker and Joel Vargas, Jobs For the Future - College courses taken by high school students are not always accepted for credit by the colleges where they enroll after graduation, or they may not count toward requirements for all majors. As a result, students can end up spending more time and money pursuing their degrees than anticipated, in spite of their early start. But to be clear: the lack of efficient transfer systems in U.S. higher education unfortunately leads to broken promises for the broad universe of students who transition between postsecondary institutions, not just dual enrollees. Among a nationally representative sample of transfer students, over two-thirds lost some of their credits when they switched schools, according to a 2014 analysis by the U.S. Department of Education. Back to 'In This Issue' |
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The SOURCE on Community College Issues, Trends & Strategies
The Roueche Graduate Center, National American University & Lorenzo Associates, Inc.,
Ann Arbor, MI 48103 - glorenzo@edpath.com
Please send comments and/or suggestions to
Continuous, Timely & Relevant Information Resources Brought To You By The SOURCE.
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