The Talk of the Office

A very upsetting article from the Hechinger Report was the talk of the office on Tuesday. The article is an intermittently hopeful and damning portrayal of community colleges failing to do the sorts of things that would help students graduate. It suggests that a “reckoning” is nigh.

The piece includes some eyebrow-raising quotes from respected figures in the field, as well as some heartbreaking stories of students who fell through the cracks. We all know that those stories happen and that we need to work to make them less common.

In an office conversation, someone asked how things were different around 2010, when enrollments were at their peak. It got me thinking.

Back then, although enrollments were much higher, success rates were much lower. The article doesn’t include any historical context, so I’ll offer some. In 2010, remediation reform hadn’t made inroads in many places yet. OER had yet to break through, at least among community colleges. Standardized exams for placement were still ubiquitous. Online options were fewer, and mostly worse. The guided pathways movement had yet to make an impact. College food pantries were largely unknown. And many student schedules were bizarre because classes were so full that they had to take whatever they could get. (The college where I worked at the time converted its tennis courts to parking lots to put a dent in the overflow. Parking was a nightmare.) At the time, the single greatest constraint on scheduling was a lack of faculty.

Success rates have improved more or less steadily since then, with an asterisk for COVID. Some of that has to do with the reduced pressure on capacity (outside of some allied health programs), but I suspect most of it derives from the improvements noted above and other similar ones. For example, Amarillo College, which is rightly noted as a success story in the piece, moved to shorter semesters with students taking fewer classes at a time. Colleges that have moved in that direction have generally seen significant improvements in success rates, particularly for low-income students and students of color. Replacing Accuplacer and similar exams with directed self-placement has shown promise. Co-requisite remediation has had encouraging results. Food pantries have proliferated, and the phrase “student basic needs” has entered the vernacular. Online options have improved. And research on concrete reforms that can improve student success has flourished.

(Although people don’t often talk about this, many of those reforms were pioneered in the for-profit sector. DeVry did guided pathways and minimal remediation in the 1990s, though it didn’t use those terms. The concierge model of financial aid was pioneered there, too. In the for-profit model, a retained student is a repeat customer. When some of these reforms hit community colleges in the early 2010s, I had a distinct sense of déjà vu.)

The catch is that some reforms that have been shown to generate terrific results, such as CUNY’s ASAP program, are expensive. Hiring more academic advisers is expensive. Running more programs at night and on weekends requires having more faculty and running more small sections, both of which cost money. Daycare for students’ kids costs money. These are all great ideas, but without money, they don’t happen.

The article itself has some internal flaws. At one point, it claims that community colleges “have the worst completion rates of any kind of universities and colleges.” A few paragraphs later, it contrasts them to for-profit colleges, which “often have worse labor outcomes that can include lower job placement rates and postgraduate earnings and higher costs that lead to more debt.” Leaving aside that the for-profit sector as a direct competitor is a shell of what it used to be, it’s hard not to notice the goalposts move. One could well argue that if you look at average debt loads, community colleges are wildly successful. (The median debt load of a community college graduate is zero.) Alternately, one could argue that the services the for-profits provided that kept the graduation rates higher were expensive, which is why they charged so much. Without connecting the dots, one could easily come away thinking all is hopeless. It isn’t.

Students who choose community college often have particular needs. They may need flexible schedules, daycare and a level of academic guidance that you wouldn’t find in a more traditional setting. (Many also need successful credit transfer. Those decisions are made by the receiving school, not the sending school.) All those cost money.

If we see social mobility as a good thing—and the political scientist in me can tell you that you really don’t want a society without it—then we need to invest in it. That means investing in the schools most of those students attend.

Yes, of course, there’s work to do. Some of us have devoted our careers to that work. We’re making progress in meaningful ways. We could make more if we had the funding to do it. If we give up on social mobility altogether, which seems to be the default path, we’ll see a reckoning beyond anything in this piece. I’d rather invest in something constructive.