Confessions of a Community College Dean

My state is considering tying individual colleges’ shares of the state higher ed allocation to “performance” on a series of measures. And it has no intention of increasing the size of the allocation. In other words, for Northern State to get more, Southern State would have to get less. We’ll be funded on a curve.

Late Spring is always difficult. It’s the end of the academic year, so that brings with it the Revenge of the Rubber Chicken Circuit -- a cascading series of evening events calculated specifically to defeat family time. Each event is worthwhile in its own right, of course, but the sheer number of them becomes wearing.

Half of new bachelor’s degree grads are either unemployed or underemployed, according to the Associated Press. The market isn’t ready to absorb them.

We have a grant-funded program designed to get students with severe educational deficits into basic skills programs, and then into “contextualized” remediation that leads into short-term employable certificates. The idea is to help folks who would normally be consigned to the economic margins to become employable at higher, if still fairly modest, levels.

This story in IHE generated quite the firestorm yesterday, and for good reason. Apparently, the Education School at the University of Southern California has decided to ban certain adjuncts from teaching at any other college or university as a condition of employment.

A few years ago, my college started a January intersession in which students take a single course for two weeks. It was a runaway hit; enrollments have grown every year, course completion rates have hovered around 90 -- off the charts by community college standards -- and faculty feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

A regular correspondent writes: "My state wants cc administrators to be able to change grades if faculty demonstrate 'error' or 'unfairness.'"

How do you know if a student needs remediation? It isn’t as straightforward as it sounds.