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Please answer the following questions:
1) Joe Morgan grew up idolizing Jackie Robinson, and today both star second-basemen are members of Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame. But that’s not their only connection. Name another.
2) Actor Edward James Olmos and high-school math teacher Jaime Escalante are forever linked, because the actor was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of the teacher in “Stand and Deliver.” What else do they have in common?
3) Besides being Texans, what connects Jim Lehrer, H. Ross Perot, and pitcher Roger Clemens?
And for extra credit:
4) What connects California Democratic Congressman George Miller and California Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger?
The correct answer to all of these questions is “They’re community college alumni.” And the list of prominent alumni doesn’t stop there. Henry Louis Gates, Venus
Williams, Calvin Klein, Diane Keaton, Queen Latifah, Sylvester Stallone, Tom Hanks, Clint Eastwood, George Lucas, John Mellencamp, James Belushi, Rita Mae Brown, Amy Tan, and Nobel Prize winner R. Bruce Merrifield all graduated from community colleges. These institutions educate about half of all degree-seeking American undergraduates, plus another six million students who are taking a course or two.
In the nearly two years that my colleagues and I spent on community-college campuses in California, New York, Illinois, and Colorado, we met hundreds of dedicated but often frustrated teachers and administrators. We got to know students and their dreams, and we watched some of those dreams flourish while others withered and died.
When You’re Down and Out ...
The people who repair your furnace, tune up your car, and keep your office IT system running probably studied at a community college. “They prepare people for computer-repair jobs, for auto-mechanics positions, for construction, for culinary arts, for apparel design and manufacturing, plumbing and electrical work, and even cosmetology,” noted Jack Kyser, the chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation. “These people make the economy go.”
Community colleges, which admit virtually everyone who applies, may be the one place that doesn’t turn away those in desperate need of career help. Thirty-year-old José Sosa is a good case in point. A high-school dropout with a wife and three young children, Sosa had just lost his job as a clerk in the shipping department of a textile company when we met him. It was the latest in a string of a dozen or so dead-end jobs he’d held since dropping out of high school. He’d also worked as a food runner at the Olive Garden and the Macaroni Grill restaurants, a janitor at three different factories, and a kitchen assistant at a Marriott hotel.
When he lost his job as a shipping clerk, Sosa, his wife, and their three children were living in a small one-story house, which they rented for $1,200 a month. His first despairing reaction was to feel “like I let my family down. It was like, ‘this can’t be happening, not again.’”
But with his wife’s support, Sosa enrolled in Los Angeles Trade and Technical College’s 15-month culinary-arts program. He had long dreamed of making a living as a cook, but now he had free time. “Now I can say ‘fortunately I got laid off,’ because before I never could fit school into my work schedule, and now I could.”
At first Sosa struggled to master what his teachers call “culinary mathematics.” Said teacher and chef James Lisanti, “They need to be able to buy the right amount of food and set prices for entrees if they want to make it in this business.” Added Lisanti, who works with missionary zeal, “We’re giving them a chance to change their lives. We’re giving them a chance to get out of the ghetto. We’re giving them a chance to get respect.”
Sosa made the most of the opportunity, enduring a daily four-hour commute and a housing crisis along the way. As the months wore on, he often thought about quitting. “Every night I am afraid that the next day I’ll just get up and not go to school, but if I start that routine, I’d never go back,” he said. “Still, it’s hard to get that initial foot out the door in the morning. Easy to quit school, hard to stay in it.”
Kay McClenney, who runs the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, understands. “When we do surveys of students, 95 percent say they came close to quitting, usually more than once.”
Why didn’t Sosa quit? “It would have been worthless to have gone this far and thrown it away,” he said. “It would be like what I did in high school, and what’s the point? This time it’s mine. I deserve this. I’m taking it.” He graduated in June 2006, with a job at a prominent Santa Monica beach club. When the club’s restaurant shut down for the winter, Sosa found a job at another Santa Monica restaurant, where, he reported, he was earning nearly twice as much as he was two years earlier.
Community colleges enroll hundreds of thousands of students like Sosa, men and women who are one paycheck, one sick child, or one small disaster away from collapse. Michael Kirst, an emeritus professor of education at Stanford, noted that most community-college students fall into the high-risk category: “They’re often the first in their family to go to college, and their own parents may not be high-school graduates. If they’re going part time, they probably can’t get financial aid. They may have to work very long hours to support a family. These are shoes that most of us have not walked in.”
Without that community college, José Sosa might still be going from one dead-end job to another. Instead he has done well and, said a former boss, chef Whitney Werner, “Within five years, I could see him running a corporate restaurant, and possibly in 10 years be an executive chef somewhere on his own.” And some years from now, perhaps he’ll be part of another trivia question: “What do actor Rosie Perez, former United States Treasurer Rosario Marin, and Chef José Sosa have in common besides their Hispanic heritage?”
Dropping the Remedial Ball
A huge percentage of incoming community-college freshmen have to take at least one “developmental” class in math or English, based on their performance on a placement test. “It’s a crisis,” said Nancy Shulock, a professor at California State University in Sacramento who studies community colleges. “Nobody has the exact numbers, but 60, 70, or 80 percent of incoming students at the community colleges need remedial education.”
McClenney calls remedial education “Job One” for community colleges, but remedial classes are most often assigned to new or part-time faculty with no training for the job. Aric Eidadu teaches remedial English at four Los Angeles-area community colleges, including Los Angeles Trade and Tech College. “I might get in trouble for saying this,” Eidadu said, “but a lot of times these are the classes that are very challenging, and a lot of people who are kind of higher up won’t necessarily take these classes.” So newer instructors get the courses that more-experienced faculty members don’t want to struggle with.
During visits to some three dozen remedial classes around the country, we found students wearing headphones, reading non-class material, and leaving after the break. For two hours one afternoon, we watched an instructor at Joliet Junior College lecture on algebra as many students worked on other assignments, text-messaged, or read. Whenever he asked the class if there were any questions, he received no response. At one point he assumed the role of auctioneer. “Any questions on this problem? Going once, going twice, gone!” Greeted by silence, he directed the class to turn to another page of problems. Afterwards, when we mentioned that that many students were otherwise occupied, he said, “They’re adults, and if they don’t want to pay attention, that’s their choice.”
The instructor, who was a biology major in college, works full time as the college’s Web master. Asked why he has been teaching remedial algebra for 15 years, he says, “It’s an extra-pay contract, it’s money, but I also enjoy teaching and working with students.”
Situations like these do not surprise Shulock. The colleges, she said, “are trying to do remediation on the cheap because they don’t have the money, and they don’t have the money because society thinks that it is cheap. It’s a circular logic that’s not going to get us out of this box.”
Students in this class must pass it and two other remedial classes before they are allowed to enroll in college-level mathematics. Over the last two years, only 45 percent of students taught by the instructor described above did well enough to move to the next level of remediation. The pass rate for all remedial classes at Joliet hovers at around 50 percent, which is on a par with that of many other community colleges (there are no reliable national data).
The most successful remedial teachers we saw were two women who involved themselves in the lives of their students. If someone misses two classes in a row, they get a phone call from the instructor. These teachers don’t stay behind the lectern; they move around, joking and talking and helping (and, incidentally, making sure their students aren’t text-messaging).
But because so many community-college students are undereducated, poor, and facing tough family and financial challenges, those circumstances have become a convenient excuse for failure, McClenney says. “With that truth as our shield, we have been able to defend ourselves against the massive reality that we simply don’t get enough of our students through to successful outcomes.”
Another student we met along the way, Krystal, was as close to being a typical community-college student as one is likely to find. “I’m a full-time parent, I have a full-time job, and I go to school full time,” she said. She also was close to the edge financially. She was sharing a small two-bedroom apartment with her parents, her boyfriend, her four-year-old daughter, a gerbil, and a cat. And she was behind academically. When we met her, she was taking remedial math for the fourth time.
She was typical in another way: She did not make it. Her 16-hour days left her no time to study or to see her professor for help. She flunked and dropped out of LaGuardia Community College, even though the college would have allowed her to try again—and again and again. Like most community colleges, it places no limit on how many times a student may enroll in remedial classes.
McClenney takes the long view of Krystal’s educational failure. “I emphatically do not blame Krystal,” she said. “We know that Krystal is not ready for college, but what is also evident is that the college wasn’t ready for Krystal.” After she failed the same course twice, McClenney said, LaGuardia might have brought her in for counseling and perhaps tried a different approach. “It’s the classic definition of insanity, sticking with methods that have failed in the past and expecting different results.”
George Boggs, president of the American Association of Community Colleges and a former community-college president, agreed that intervention was in order. “If a student is taking the same class for the fourth time, we probably aren’t doing the student a favor. I think that student could benefit from some career counseling.”
Kirst believes community colleges need to be held accountable for their students’ success. “We don’t know exactly how many students they take who could have succeeded with better teaching,” he said, but some community colleges practice what economists call the “churn” model, in which success is irrelevant. “As long as the number of students coming in the front equals the number of students dropping out the back door and side door, their enrollment and full-time equivalence is the same, whether they’re advancing and graduating or flunking out.” Because demand is high, he said, “There is really no incentive to spend a lot of money to serve these students with special counselors and trained teachers.”
Shulock agreed. “All the incentives are on the wrong end of a student’s career,” she said. “They’re all for getting students in the door. Colleges are not funded or rewarded for getting students out.”
Some critics of the community-college approach to remediation say that potential community-college students should be tested while they’re still in high school so they know whether they will have to take remedial classes (thus also perhaps motivating them to work harder while still in high school). Shulock said that community colleges just aren’t sending the right message to high-school students. “They need to say, ‘We have standards of college readiness, and you’re going to have a really tough time here if you don’t meet them.’ ”
Kirst also questioned the process by which students are placed in remedial classes. “Those placement exams are fairly difficult, and the majority of students fail them, which means they may have to take as many as three remedial courses before they’re allowed to take a regular college course.” He suggests giving students the incentive to learn on their own by offering them opportunities to opt out of remediation along the way, when they think they’re ready for credit-bearing work. San Diego City College, Northern Wyoming Community College, Middlesex (MA) Community College, and Palomar (CA) Community College are among the institutions that have adopted this approach.
“Many of these students—even recent high-school graduates—have been away from classroom math for some time,” said Rose Asera of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, “so of course they do badly on the placement test. We need to find ways to intensify and accelerate instruction. Pasadena City College, for example, organized a two-week summer ‘math jam’ that involved students in hands-on math problems and projects. When they retook the placement exam, more than half of the students moved up at least one course level.”
To me, it seemed that remedial classes were organized largely for the convenience of administrators. If educators know what knowledge and skills students must have, then why not make that the constant and let time be the variable? Why not tell students exactly what they must be able to do and then let them prove their competence whenever they feel they’re ready, the way the DMV licenses drivers? And if educators know how much mathematics someone needs to be successful in his or her chosen field, why not embed that material into the core courses, the way LA Trade and Tech does with “culinary math” for those seeking to become chefs?
“Community colleges are under-prepared to teach the under-prepared,” Shulock admitted, “but who is doing it better?”
The Glass is a Quarter Full
“I didn’t want to go to a two-year school, because I didn’t see it as really being college, and right now I’m focused on getting out of here,” said 19-year-old Jennica as she sat in an art classroom at her community college. “I thought of community college as being like ‘well, I’m not good enough to get into a four-year school.’”
In high school in Modesto, California, Jennica had set her sights on the University of California at Santa Cruz but learned that it was beyond her reach financially. She saw herself as a classic victim of “middle-class squeeze.” Both her parents work, her father as a high-school science teacher and her mother “in computers” for the telephone company. They don’t earn enough to pay for her schooling, she said, but make too much for her to qualify for financial aid. Even attending a community college where tuition and fees are less than a quarter of those charged at public four-year institutions, she was working 35 hours a week at a local art-supply store to make ends meet. “I eat a lot of peanut-butter sandwiches,” she said with a smile.
She enrolled at San Diego City College reluctantly, but what she found there surprised her. “You get more one-on-one attention in small classes,” she said. “I think I would feel overwhelmed if I had to walk into a class with 300 students.” She developed relationships with several of the teachers in her major, art. One of her favorite teachers is Wayne Hulgin, who teaches painting, drawing, and art history at SDCC. “I’m not only their teacher,” he said. “I’m also a mentor, a best friend, a counselor—many things besides an educator.”
Instructors like Hulgin are not unusual, according to Shulock. “The faculty at community colleges are teaching faculty,” she said, so unlike many university professors, “they don’t have split loyalties to their research and teaching. Not that they aren’t scholars and not that they may not do research, but they’re not there to be researchers. They’re there to teach.”
McClenney compared community colleges to small liberal-arts colleges. “Typically, you’re going to find those smaller class sizes and courses that are taught by faculty members and not graduate assistants. Typically you’re going to find that there’s a higher degree of personalization at community colleges.” At the same time, community colleges have a well-deserved reputation for scheduling classes at times and in places that are convenient to students—such as evening classes off campus—even if that inconveniences the instructors.
Border Crossing
Personal attention, small classes, convenience, and low tuition—what’s not to like? Here’s one thing: Millions of community-college students enroll with the hope and expectation that they will transfer to a four-year institution. But few do. Thomas Bailey, a professor of economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University said that only 18 percent managed to transfer after six years. Shulock said the number was somewhat higher in California, 24 percent, perhaps because many students there already have been admitted to state colleges and universities and are at a community college to save money.
There are significant obstacles to transferring. Kirst blamed what he called the “mission creep” of the 1970’s, when community colleges became market-driven. Most were run on a shoestring, receiving about half of what their state provides to four-year institutions, and so “they offered whatever would bring in money” and that meant “adult-education enrichment classes.” Kirst recalled then-California Governor Jerry Brown’s devastating comment: “Johnny can’t read, and Mom is studying macramé at the community college.”
Today many community colleges can’t afford to offer enough of the classes that would-be transfer students need, as Jennica discovered. “I wanted to take art history because that’s my major, but I couldn’t get in. So I took humanities instead. So I had two semesters of humanities that don’t really count for anything, but they’re there.” Matters got desperate one particular semester, she recalled. “I found myself taking the same classes, just the second semester of them. And if I didn’t like the first semester, why would I like the second semester?”
Said Terry Burgess, president of San Diego City College, with a sad smile. “We have a joke around here, an unfortunate joke. We call it the five-year plan for a two-year degree.” Burgess admitted, “Many students flounder waiting to get into a class that they need for graduation” and added that he believed most community colleges were in a similar position.
An equally serious problem is a shortage of counselors and advisors on community-college campuses to help students negotiate the path to the four-year college or university. At SDCC the ratio is 1,500 students per counselor, according to counselor Edwin Heil. “If every student wanted an hour of advising,” he said with a wry smile, “we’d never go home.”
Said McClenney,“I don’t think that sort of ratio is an anomaly.” That’s a great concern, she added, because “students tell us year after year that the most important service is academic planning and advising.”
The road map that good counseling provides is especially important to students who are the first in their families to attend college. “We have students who really don’t know why they’re there,” said Shulock. “That is not to say that they shouldn’t be there and couldn’t succeed, but they need help in figuring out why they’re there, what options are open for them, laying out a clear pathway for them to follow.”
Like many community colleges, SDCC relies on part-time counselors, some of whom also counsel students at other colleges. Said Anne Mathis, who works at four campuses, “Policies here are different from other community colleges, four-year colleges may have different rules too, and it’s easy to get confused. Sometimes I get confused myself.”
And when confusion reigns, students pay the price, as Jennica discovered when she went to see an advisor. “I went in there and picked out classes, and I asked them, ‘are they transferable?’ And they told me they were.” But when she began filling out forms for transferring, she discovered that she was “two classes short because classes they said were transferable to a UC campus were only transferable to state colleges.” In addition to losing time, she says, “that’s money out of my pocket that I lost on textbooks and the credits themselves.”
In the end, she persevered. Despite spending more than she planned, taking some unnecessary courses, and staying a semester longer than she had intended, she transferred to UC Santa Cruz in January 2007, where she’s now a junior studying art history. She’s still thinking of becoming a teacher. And she’s grateful to SDCC. “I don’t know where I would be without it,” she said. “Maybe in the military.”
The dismal transfer rates are now improving, but not because community colleges are doing a better job. The reason behind the increase is simple: Increasing numbers of college-qualified students are saving money by spending their first two years at a community college and then transferring. Reasonably savvy when they enroll, they don’t need the counseling and advising; they go about their business, save thousands, and transfer.
So graduation and transfer rates improve, and everybody’s happy—except perhaps the less-qualified students, who are being pushed to the back of the line.
What Should Be Done?
Based on what we saw over the two years we spent making our documentary, I have five recommendations for community colleges. They should:
1) Create a public-relations campaign based on the quiz I used to begin this essay, to let the world, especially high-school students and their parents, know about the accomplishments of community-college graduates.
2) Give placement tests in the 11th and possibly the10th grade to let students know that, despite open admissions and their commitment to help all students be successful, community colleges have standards.
3) Make remediation Job One, as Kay McClenney said. That means teaching basic skills in a career context wherever possible, instead of making remedial classes separate and distinct. It also means getting the best teachers involved, making skills the constant and time the variable, and giving students incentives and opportunities to “test out” early and often.
4) Make transfer Job Two, ensuring that students have the help and encouragement they need to navigate the tricky terrain between two- and four-year colleges.
5) Make a concerted effort to connect with the students, instead of creating a distance. As Willy Loman’s wife, Linda, says in Death of a Salesman, “Attention must be paid.” The kinds of at-risk students who turn to community colleges especially need to know they matter. Caring is not enough to get students over the many hurdles they face, but when they know that someone will try to move mountains for them, they won’t just disappear.
It’s easy to identify the shortcomings of community colleges. Too many failures in remediation and not enough successful transfers are two of the most obvious ones. A graduation/completion rate that’s below 50 percent means that the famous “open door” is for many a revolving door. There are other flaws as well: Many community colleges fail to connect with local high schools, and others waste time and resources on trivial courses like “Great Western Movies,” “Significant Conversations,” “Canine CPR,” and “Understanding Tennis.”
But let’s maintain perspective. Most community colleges are shamefully under-funded. They’re higher education’s second cousins, slighted by nearly everyone, including Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, whose Commission on the Future of Higher Education included just one community-college representative.
They offer many of their students what may be their only shot at the brass ring. Perhaps the best way to be reminded of that is to go to a graduation. This spring I spoke at a college graduation in New York at which half the graduates received two-year degrees. They all seemed to have a sizeable posse with them, and the joy was palpable. I was told that most of the graduates were the first in the family to attend college, and, because their tuition was low, the chances were they were not weighted down with debt.
For them, the American dream is now closer to reality, and a community college made it all possible.
John Merrow is president of Learning Matters, which reports on education for the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and also is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He has won several prestigious broadcasting awards during his 33 years of education reporting for NPR and PBS, and in 2000 he received the James L. Fisher Award for Distinguished Service to Education from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. He is the author of Choosing Excellence and co-editor of Declining by Degrees, a book accompanying his documentary of the same name. This article describes what he found during research for his 2006 documentary Discounted Dreams. He retains the copyight for this article.