Confessions of a Community College Dean

Why do those who need the most get the least? Elite universities and colleges get far more funding per student than their less elite counterparts. Community colleges, which are even less elite, get even less. And adult basic education, which serves the very most vulnerable students, gets the least of all.

Dear Selective Colleges, You know I’m a fan. I’m a proud grad of one of your number, and I’m glad to report that my community college has a strong track record of sending students your way, where they’ve done markedly well. So I’m writing this in the spirit of constructive criticism.

This piece in IHE was painful to read. It’s about being a sacrificial lamb candidate for jobs for which the internal candidate has the inside track. The author winds up asserting that there’s simply no point in applying for jobs when there’s an internal candidate, since the fix is presumably in.

The second day of the NCPR conference struck a funny note. Many of us had noticed that the persistent theme on Thursday was “here’s a study that shows that (pick your intervention) doesn’t work.” Honestly, it was a little dispiriting. To start Friday’s discussion, Tom Brock of the CCRC opened by acknowledging the relative bummer of the first day’s findings, but then suggesting that, tone aside, some consensus had emerged about measures that actually do work.

I spent Thursday at the “Strengthening Developmental Education” conference presented by the MDRC at Columbia University in a shockingly hot New York City. It was an odd cluster of presentations. On the one hand, the intellectual firepower present and the quality of evidence mustered was encouraging. There was an honesty about findings, and a humility in the face of facts, that’s all too rare at academic conferences. On the other, though, that meant that many of the findings suggested that much of the student success toolkit -- learning communities, summer bridge programs, and dual enrollment, to name a few -- just won’t live up to our hopes.

A quick description of the world that appears before local sixteen year olds now: Paths to jobs that pay enough to actually want are less legible than they’ve been in generations, but to the extent that they are legible and you aren’t a standout athlete, they tend to go through college.

My college needs a “what if?” committee, but I’m not sure how to make it happen. Most of the existing committees are task-based. Curriculum committee, for example, approves or disapproves suggested changes to courses or programs. That’s a necessary function, and it’s fine as far as it goes. But it’s necessarily reactive; it responds to proposals brought to it.

In the wake of the mess at UVA, in which a President was pushed out by a rogue faction of a Board that felt she lacked “strategic dynamism,” those of us who follow these things have been left to wonder just what that might mean.