A Renewed Approach to Community CollegePersistence

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What if I told you that only 50 percent of first-timediners at a given restaurant found the experiencesatisfying enough to want to come back?

With results like that, chances are you would have tothink twice about giving it a go, am I right?

Now, what if I informed you the establishment we arereferring to isn’t serving burgers, fries, and shakes butis instead providing you with what is, ostensibly, aquality education—along with some other 40,000 low-income students each year?

Well that’s what’s been happening at the CommunityCollege of Philadelphia, where, according to theChronicle of Higher Education, “half of full-time freshman don’t return for a second year.”

That’s both a staggering and profoundly troubling drop-off rate.

And the persistence rates of community college students across the country isn’t much better. On average,the freshman-to-sophomore retention rate is about 53 percent nationally.

If students get to their second year, often the final hurdle on the traditionally two-year path to anassociate’s degree, they stand a good chance of transferring to a four-year college or university andgraduating.

But if systemic factors such as a lack of student support services like academic advising—which researchshows is integral to degree persistence—is making already challenged students more susceptible tofalling between the cracks, then it’s incumbent upon all colleges and universities—not only communitycolleges—to rethink the way they approach building scaffolds to degree completion for the approximately14 million students served by two-year institutions annually.

If the strapped budgets and entrenched staffing and resource shortages at our 1,600 community collegesare now de rigueur, and unlikely to change at any point in the near term, then the mindsets of ourcommunity college officials must.

Officials must increasingly research models like the City University of New York’s six-year-oldAccelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP), where the graduation rate for its original cohort of1,132 students in 2007 was 55 percent, outpacing the national average of 18 percent, according to figuresfrom the U.S. Department of Education.

Even when you factor in the findings of an August Hechinger Report study pointing out that this 18percent figure is somewhat misleading—given that the DOE inexplicably counts the 1 in 4 communitycollege students who transfer to four-year institutions as community college “drop outs”—that number risesto a still underwhelming 40 percent.

Also, community colleges must consider new ways of tapping into the vast resources of their more affluentfour-year peer institutions to fill student support deficiencies on their own campuses.

Stronger “pipeline” partnerships between two-year and four-year institutions must be established. Also,students who have already successfully navigated the community college gauntlet must routinely beenlisted in assisting their peers who are following in their footsteps.

As the African proverb goes, “Each one teach one.”

But whatever the solutions that community colleges ultimately choose to implement, they must be enactedswiftly and be equally proportional to the outsized needs and special challenges faced by the manyambitious, enterprising students who call them home.

At present, the status quo that has apparently become par for the course at many of our nation’scommunity colleges is underserving students who can ill afford to be underserved any longer.