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Introduction

COMMUNITY COLLEGES

A Call to Progress

Our country has awakened to the importance of com-munity colleges. Th ey educate 4 percent of the entire U.S.

population—13 million students—each year. Most of the coun-try’s college freshmen and sophomores are in community colleges, whose relatively inexpensive tuition makes them a boon for Amer-icans seeking a brighter future on constricted budgets. More than any other set of institutions, the nation’s nearly twelve hundred community colleges are well positioned to meet the increasing de-mand for skilled workers in manufacturing, technology, health care, and other high-growth fi elds. Th ey are a necessity for a na-tion trying, in an age of austerity, to reverse a steady decline in higher education attainment relative to the rest of the world.

But they don’t always deliver on that promise. While access has expanded over the years, outcomes for students have not neces-sarily improved. So a new reform movement is taking hold, and community colleges are being pushed to achieve better results. Following repeated calls for improved graduation rates from na-tional foundations, the Obama administration, and state gov-ernments, in 2012 the sector’s own champion, the American

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Association of Community Colleges, called student success rates “unacceptably low” and career training “inadequately connected to job market needs.”1

Simultaneous recognition of community colleges’ importance and poor student outcomes translates into enormous pressure. State funding is increasingly being tied to graduation rates (rather than to the number of students enrolled, the traditional method).2 Federal and state agencies are requiring more public reporting on completion and employment outcomes. And for-profi t compet-itors—investing in technology-based instructional delivery and using private-sector marketing techniques—are enrolling more and more students, including the low-income and minority pop-ulations long served by community colleges.

To attract students and public dollars in an era of accountability, transparency, and competition, community colleges must deliver signifi cantly more degrees of higher quality at a lower per-pupil cost to an increasingly diverse student population—an equation that adds up to an immense challenge. In the balance is not just the colleges’ survival but also continued opportunity for Ameri-cans—particularly the less advantaged—to access the knowledge and skills they need to have a secure future and to fuel our nation’s economic growth.

But improvement is not coming easily, or quickly. Almost a decade into a new reform movement, there is not yet complete agreement about what community colleges should aim for, let alone good systems for measuring whether those goals are being attained. And there is not yet even universal acceptance of what, to most reformers, is a vital premise: it doesn’t matter how many students enter community colleges’ doors unless they exit with a meaningful credential in hand.

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We are moving in that direction, however. With few excep-tions, improving the rates at which students earn degrees and cer-tifi cates lies at the center of recent change strategies, from state policy reform to fi nancial aid redesign to eff orts by state systems and nonprofi t organizations to improve institutional practice. Completion matters to students; holding a degree or certifi cate is strongly correlated with having a good job with decent wages. Any signifi cant attention to completion, then, is a dramatic im-provement over the days when community colleges responded to ever-increasing enrollment numbers by developing more and more programs and courses, paying too little attention to whether students were succeeding in them.

As institutions and policy makers aim to improve community college completion rates, though, they must not do so at the ex-pense of access. It’s easy to increase the graduation rate if you just stop admitting the students least likely to succeed, if you invent policies and practices that eff ectively close doors to the rapidly growing numbers of minority and low-income young people who want to enroll—groups that historically have more trouble fi nish-ing college. And while nobody’s recommending that as a remedy, it must be guarded against as a possible unintended consequence of the drive to improve completion rates.

But even maintaining access and improving graduation are not suffi cient. After all, students don’t go to community college to graduate; most go to acquire skills relevant to the careers they will pursue either directly out of community college or by way of a four-year school. Just as institutions work to increase the num-bers of students who complete, they must put equal eff ort into ensuring the quality of their off erings and their instruction so that students leave well equipped to succeed in whatever comes next.

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Facing a steady drumbeat to improve student outcomes, com-munity colleges across the country are seeking more guidance on how to meet higher expectations. Already, a group of talented community college researchers, practitioners, and advocates has emerged. Some devote themselves to devising and testing the eff ec-tiveness of specifi c practices to increase success: learning commu-nities that connect small groups of students across several classes, early warning systems to give struggling students the help they need, additional fi nancial aid for students who achieve certain milestones, mandatory courses in study skills and career planning. Others are taking a more systemic approach, seeking to change state and federal policy or improve community college practice at multiple institutions at the same time.

Nearly all of these strategies aim primarily to increase the num-ber of students who complete, and evidence suggests that they work only some of the time.3 Indeed, community college gradu-ation rates have not signifi cantly increased over the past decade.4

Th is book seeks to contribute to the growing body of knowl-edge regarding how to increase community college student success, and thus help institutional leaders and policy makers un-derstand important strategies for improving degree completion, equity, learning, and post-graduation outcomes. It draws on ex-amples of what is happening at exceptional community colleges that were named fi nalists for the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence over its fi rst two years, as well as on under-standing gained through the extensive data-gathering and selec-tion process that begins with consideration of over one thousand community colleges each year. Profi les of the seven colleges that received the Aspen Prize’s highest recognition and are highlighted in this book can be found in appendix A.

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Th e Aspen Prize is built on a four-part defi nition of critical community college outcomes:

• Completion. Do students earn associate’s degrees and other meaningful credentials while in community college, and bachelor’s degrees if they transfer?

• Equity. Do colleges work to ensure equitable outcomes for minority and low-income students, and others often underserved?

• Learning. Do colleges set expectations for what students should learn, measure whether they are doing so, and use that information to improve?

• Labor market. Do graduates get well-paying jobs?

Pursuing and making signifi cant progress on all of these goals is how exceptional community colleges ensure that diverse pop-ulations of students get what they came for: the knowledge and skills that will aff ord them a better life than they would have had otherwise. Achieving any one of these goals is better than im-proving access alone. Achieving all of them means a high-quality education for students, and a much brighter future for our coun-try (see fi gure 1).

By starting with a holistic defi nition of excellence, measuring success against that defi nition, and then identifying practices and policies that align to high levels of student success, the Aspen Prize aims to help college leaders, educators, and policy makers better understand practices and policies that improve student outcomes across entire institutions as well as ones that may impede those eff orts.

Th is book sets forth what’s been learned about exceptional com-munity colleges, especially from the schools recognized during the

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WHY THIS MATTERS

CompletionDo students earn associate’s degrees and other meaningful credentials, and bachelor’s degrees after they transfer?

Community college completion/transfer rates are under 40%. • Completion of a credential leads to better employment and wage prospects. • Completion data enables colleges to set goals and others to compare colleges.

LearningDo community colleges set expectations for what students should learn, measure whether they are doing so, and use that information to improve?

There is strong evidence that college rigor has diminished.• Teaching students so they learn and develop skills is the core business of colleges, so this must be assessed.• Professors cannot improve instruction without good information about what’s working and what’s not in their classrooms.

Labor market outcomesDo students find long-term employment after graduation and earn a living wage?

• To prepare a skilled work force, colleges need to understand whether their programs are aligned with labor market needs.• Students’ post-graduation outcomes tell colleges whether their programs are succeeding and improving. • Students should be able to choose a college and program knowing whether they’ll be rewarded for their investment.

EquityDo colleges work to ensure equitable outcomes for minority and low-income students, and others often underserved?

Minority college students have historically succeeded at lower rates than others, yet can be successful with added supports.• Increasing success for minority and low- income students is necessary to meet the country’s growing need for better- trained workers.• Expanding access and success helps fulfill the ideal of equal opportunity.

FIGURE 1 Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence, indicators of community college excellence

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fi rst year of the Aspen Prize.5 Over the past two years, the As-pen Institute has engaged national experts in higher education re-search, practice, policy, and leadership to help fi gure out how to compare such varied institutions through the collection of qualita-tive and quantitative information. At the end of each analytic cycle is a $1 million prize, which, together with the promise of substan-tial publicity for the fi nalists and winners, has led to very high lev-els of participation.6

National data sets have limitations, so the Aspen Institute gathers information from multiple sources (see appendix B). In addition, the prize process takes into account the very diff erent contexts in which community colleges operate and the many re-lated variables, including student demographics, program off er-ings, regional economies, and state policies. Th e top-performing colleges in the prize competition vary signifi cantly in demo-graphics and program focus, showing that community college excellence comes in many packages (see fi gure 2).

Investigating and comparing quantitative and qualitative re-sults at such diverse institutions requires accepting some mea-sure of ambiguity. Among the greatest challenges are comparing completion rates at large urban and small rural colleges, or those at schools that award primarily career and technical credentials as opposed to those preparing most students for four-year transfer. In the face of such challenges, some resist the idea of transparently comparing community colleges based on imperfect measures.

But how else can we identify those exceptional colleges that are, systematically, doing the hard and smart work needed to achieve measurably high and improving levels of student success? Th e data available for analyzing institutional success—as opposed to

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programmatic success—are not perfect, and probably never will be, given the enormous number of variables associated with de-livering a community college education. But that cannot prevent us from rigorously evaluating community college success us-ing whatever data are available and fi nding new ways that entire

FIGURE 2

Aspen Prize winners and fi nalists with distinction (2011, 2013)

Community college Location

Number of students

Students 25 and older

Underrepresented minorities

Credentials in career/ technical

fi elds

CUNY Kingsborough Community College

Brooklyn, NY(urban)

25,425 22% 48% 26%

Lake Area Technical Institute

Watertown, SD(small town)

1,503 20 3 82

Miami Dade College

Miami, FL(urban)

95,166 37 85 30

Santa Barbara City College

Santa Barbara, CA(urban)

28,763 36 25 24

Valencia College

Orlando, FL(urban)

55,545 30 43 17

Walla Walla Community College

Walla Walla, WA(rural)

8,635 54 19 64

West Kentucky Community and Technical College

Paducah, KY(small town)

10,878 45 7.9 67

Source: U.S. Department of Education Integrated Postsecondary Data System, 2011.

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colleges can address the urgent need to improve community col-lege student outcomes.

Th e core premises of this book are, fi rst, that even in dif-fering contexts, there are important practices and policies that are associated with high levels of student success in completion, learning, and post-graduation success, including for underrep-resented minority and low-income students; and second, that if professors, staff , and leaders at more institutions—no matter their context—examine and learn from those practices, students will benefi t greatly.

Th e book is organized into fi ve chapters. Th e fi rst four align with the four-part defi nition of success used by the Aspen Prize: completion, equity, learning, and labor market outcomes. Th ese chapters discuss the importance of community colleges making progress in each of these four areas, provide examples of how col-leges have succeeded, and lay out the complexities of measuring that success. Th e fi nal chapter discusses the critical role leaders play within those community colleges that have achieved excep-tional student outcomes.

No single practice or policy featured in this book can be shown with absolute certainty to have improved student out-comes. But the high and signifi cantly improving levels of suc-cess these community colleges have achieved for students in completion, equitable outcomes, learning, and labor market success after graduating are simply too diff erent from those at similar institutions to be accidental. Failing to act on them risks delaying progress that could help millions of students who en-ter community colleges hoping to get an education that will give them opportunities to work and support their families—some-thing too few of them actually receive today.

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We owe it to today’s and tomorrow’s community college stu-dents to acknowledge that some colleges do better than others. Most importantly, we owe it to every incoming generation of commu-nity college students to understand and replicate whatever it is that has allowed exceptional colleges to achieve great outcomes for students.