March-April 2007

by Margaret A. Miller

Several articles in this issue deal with the inequitable distribution of educational opportunity in this country. One is our “Playing the Numbers” feature (this issue, by Patrick Kelly and Brian Prescott).  Kelly and Prescott describe the rationalization that we often invoke when someone points to the United States’ mediocre educational performance compared to the rest of the developed world on virtually all internationally comparable measures of learning and educational attainment: It’s because we have so many minority students in our schools and colleges. If we confined the comparisons to educationally privileged whites, we wouldn’t look so bad.

Indeed. And if hospitals confined their morbidity statistics to those patients who come to them brimming with the health conferred by decades, even generations, of access to first-rate health care and nutrition, they would look better too. But that’s irrelevant: From the individual patient’s perspective, dead is dead; from society’s prospective, dead is not productive. 

As Howard Fuller says, “Parents don’t send us their worst children; they send us the only children they have.” The students we have are the ones whose success we need to ensure.

The disparities in educational performance of the various subpopulations in this country—in the areas of college matriculation, learning, and degree completion in particular—didn’t just happen, they were created. And we continue to create them every day by the policies, both institutional and public, we develop or fail to develop. William Kirwan shows that it is possible for colleges and universities to adopt policies that enable them to lower costs and hence make themselves more accessible to students who are struggling to afford a college education. Sandy Baum’s piece on financial aid shows the degree to which good public policy is necessary to correct for the sometimes inequitable and inefficient operation of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” 


Good public policy is the key to solving problems whose complexity defies solution by any one institution or group of institutions. Take California as an example. That state’s working-age population is projected to rise to 40 percent Latino by 2020. Since Latinos have the lowest college-going rate in the state, it is crucial that California  keep its system of higher education accessible and relatively affordable if that population is going to have the skills, knowledge, and income levels that will ensure the state’s future prosperity.

California has done so in the past by relying heavily on a low-cost community-college system that educates over two-thirds of the state’s college students. But according to Measuring Up 2006, while the percentage of first-year community-college students returning for their second year has increased substantially over the past 15 years, it’s still only slightly over half of first-year students (57 percent, a bit better than the national average). And California ranks low in both national and international comparisons in the number of certificates and degrees produced relative to the number of students it enrolls.

But the most important faultline in the system in California, as it is elsewhere, is between the community colleges and the universities. The baccalaureate is the real ticket to a middle-class life in this country: In 2003, says Tom Mortenson, associate-degree holders earned a median $37,605 as compared to $49,889 for baccalaureate graduates. In an article that is forthcoming in Change, however, Stephen Handel points out that across the country, only about half of community-college students who say they want to go on for a baccalaureate eventually do so. If a state counts on the community colleges as the first part of a low-cost path to the four-year degree, it has a responsibility to make that path as smooth and unbroken as possible. 


To its credit, California has stepped up to that plate. As Handel will show, the agreement by the University of California and the California Community College system to increase transfer rates has already generated a remarkable 29-percent-increase in transfers, and those students have been as successful as the ones whose college careers began at the university. This success suggests the power of focused cross-sector policy in solving what seem to be intractable problems.

These problems of persistence, completion, and transfer in community colleges, the sector of higher education in which minority students disproportionately enroll, are not unique to the Golden State. They suggest that while we struggle to make four-year colleges accessible and affordable to underrepresented minority students and to be sure that the colleges serve those students well, our public policymakers also need to pay particularly close attention to the community-college sector.

Community colleges need to be kept affordable and accessible through adequate state funding. Their students need to be given the support they need to enroll full time, if possible, since that gives them the best chance of successfully transferring to a four-year college on their way to a baccalaureate. And once they arrive on a four-year campus, their community-college credits need to transfer, since that increases the chances of their eventual graduation. 

Meanwhile, community colleges can serve those transfer students well by attending closely to the conclusions of the Association of American Colleges and Universities report, “College Learning for the New Global Economy.” As the report points out, an insidious form of tracking is to give one class of people only technical training while more privileged students get the kind of liberal education that will prepare them to function effectively in the modern workforce. Skills that employers identified as crucial in the AAC&U survey that informed the report—such as the capacity to work in teams, to think critically, to solve problems, and to write and speak cogently—should  not only be developed in the liberal-arts core but also should be an essential part of all college education, including that offered by the community colleges. As the stuff of what Anthony Carnevale calls the “bankable skills in the 21st century,” they are necessary ingredients of any student’s learning and are key to eventual success in graduates’ professional, as well as their civic and personal, lives.

Finally, it is important to keep in mind Ana Lucia Hurtado’s contention, in the “Listening to Students” feature in the January/February 2007 issue of Change, that making “connections between their academic interests and real-world concerns [is] especially important to first-generation and underrepresented minority students who want to contribute to their communities.” By helping them see how their learning can be brought to bear on real-world problems, more students from at-risk populations might be motivated to stay in college and develop their powers. It will greatly benefit all of us if they do.