Purpose of Comprehensive Community College

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Students Diverse Backgrounds and Purposes

Two words sum up the students: number and variety. To collegeleaders, the spectacular growth in student population, some- times as much as 15 percent a year, has been the most impressive feature of community colleges. The numbers are notable: enroll- ment increased from just over five hundred thousand in 1960 to more than 2 million by 1970, 4 million by 1980, nearly 6 million at the turn of the century, and over 7.5 million by 2010. During the 1960s, much of the increase was due to the expanded propor- tion of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in the population—the result of the World War II baby boom. More people were in the col- lege age cohort, and more of them were going to college. A similar phenomenon was apparent in the 2000s.

The top half of Table 2.1 shows the number of undergraduates in all types of colleges relative to the number of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in the American population for each decade from 1900 to 1970. The table accurately depicts the proportion of the age group attending college for those years, but because many undergraduates—nearly half the community college population currently—are older than twenty-five, the table must be adjusted to reflect what has been, since 1980, a more accurate depiction of the rate of college going. Thus, the bottom half of the table depicts the number of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds enrolled in college as a percentage of the college-age population; the figure equaled 41 percent in 2010. From the early 1960s through the mid- 1980s, between 45 and 55 percent of high school graduates were

Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278. Created from capella on 2020-04-18 10:16:30.

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Table 2.1. Undergraduate Enrollment in U.S. Colleges and Universities Compared with Eighteen- to Twenty-Four-Year-Old Population, 1900–2010

Year College-Age Undergraduate Percentage Population Enrollment

(in thousands) (in thousands)

1900 10,357 232 2.2 1910 12,300 346 2.8 1920 12,830 582 4.5 1930 15,280 1,054 6.9 1940 16,458 1,389 8.4 1950 16,120 2,421 15.0 1960 15,677 2,876 18.3 1970 24,712 6,274 25.4

Year College-Age Population

(in thousands)

Undergraduate Enrollment of 18–24-Year- Olds (in thousands)

Percentage

1980 30,022 7,716 25.7 1990 26,961 8,628 32.0 2000 27,144 9,636 35.5 2010 29,312 12,077 41.2

Source: NCES, Digests, 1970, 2011; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Popu- lation Survey, 2010

entering some postsecondary school within a year of leaving high school. In 2000, that figure was 63 percent, and by 2010 it neared 70 percent.

This chapter reports data on the numbers and types of students attending community colleges and offers discussions of student ability and academic preparedness, gender, race or ethnicity, and life circumstances. Other methods of classifying students and their intentions are examined, as are historic and contemporary methods for assessing and tracking them. The chapter provides information

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on enrollment patterns and reasons for the high incidence of dropout, but information on student achievement in areas such as transfer, degree or certificate attainment, and job getting are presented in Chapter Fourteen, on outcomes. Unless otherwise noted, data in this chapter derive from National Center for Educa- tion Statistics (NCES) reports published in 2011 and 2012.

Reasons for the Increase in Numbers

The increase in community college enrollments may be attributed to several conditions in addition to general population expansion: older students’ participation; financial aid; part-time attendance; the reclassification of institutions; the redefinition of students and courses; and high attendance by women, minorities, and less academically prepared students. Community colleges also recruited students aggressively; to an institution that tries to offer something for everyone in the community, everyone is potentially a student.

Demography has a profound effect on college enrollments. The number of eighteen-year-olds in the American population peaked in 1979, declined steadily throughout the 1980s, and was 23 percent lower in 1992, when it began increasing again. Overall enrollments in public two-year colleges doubled during the 1970s and then slowed to a 15 percent increase in each of the subsequent two decades before accelerating to a 21 percent increase in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This growth in a period of decline in the eighteen-year-old population reflects the influence of other factors on community college enrollments. However, it pales in comparison with the surge of students entering in the 1970s.

To make up for the shortfall in potential younger students in the 1980s, the colleges expanded programs that would be attractive to older students. Numbers of working adults seeking skills that would enable them to change or upgrade their jobs or activities to satisfy their personal interests enrolled because they could attend part time, and many more registered after losing their jobs in the recession. Older students swelled the roster. According to

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the American Association of Community and Junior Colleges (AACJC, 1980), the mean age of students enrolled for credit in 1980 was twenty-seven, the median age was twenty-three, and the modal age was nineteen. A national survey conducted by the Center for the Study of Community Colleges found that by 1986 the mean had gone up to twenty-nine, the median had increased to twenty- five, and the mode had remained at nineteen. But the percentage of students younger than age twenty-five has increased steadily in recent years, from 43 percent in 1995–96 to 53 percent in 2007–08. In the latter academic year, 30 percent were under age twenty. Dual enrollment, advanced placement, and similar collaborations with high schools have led to a 7 percent population of students who are younger than age eighteen; in 2010–11, 10 percent of the full-time equivalent enrollment in Washington community colleges was generated by dual-enrollment high school students (Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, 2011). Today, the national mean age is twenty-nine years, the median around twenty-two, and the mode just under age nineteen.

Note the discrepancy among these three measures. The mean is the most sensitive to extremes; hence, even a small number of senior citizens affects that measure dramatically. The median suggests that the students just out of high school and those in their early twenties who either delayed beginning college or entered community col- leges after dropping out of other institutions accounted for half the student population. This 50 percent of the student body that was composed of students aged seventeen to twenty-two was matched on the other side of the median by students ranging in age all the way out to their sixties and seventies. The mode reflects the great- est number; nineteen-year-olds continued as the dominant single age group. Thus, a graph depicting the age of community college students would show a bulge at the low end of the scale, a peak at age nineteen, and a long tail reaching out toward the high end.

The availability of financial aid brought additional students as state and federal payments, loans, and work-study grants rose

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markedly. From the 1940s through the early 1970s, nearly all types of aid were categorical, designed to assist particular groups of students. The largest group of beneficiaries was war veterans; in California in 1973, veterans made up more than 13 percent of the total enrollment. Compared with contemporary figures, this was an astounding number; in 2007–08, veterans and military service members together made up only 4 percent of all undergraduates (Radford and Wun, 2009). Students from economically disadvan- taged and minority groups were also large beneficiaries of financial aid; more than thirty thousand such students in Illinois received state and local funds in 1974. Since the mid-1970s, more of the funds have been unrestricted. Overall, 65 percent of full-time students and 45 percent of the part-timers received some form of financial aid during the 2007–08 academic year. Total aid averaged $5, 650 per full-time aid-receiving student.

Part-time enrollment increased as the age of the students went up. In the early 1970s, half of the students were full-timers; by the mid-1980s, only one-third were (see Table 2.2). Today full-timers constitute just over 40 percent of the student body, and these

Table 2.2. Part-Time Enrollment as a Percentage of Total Enrollment in Public Two-Year Institutions of Higher Education, 1970–2010

Year Total Fall Enrollment Part-Time Enrollment Percentage (in thousands) (in thousands)

1970 2,195 1,066 49 1975 3,836 2,174 57 1980 4,329 2,733 63 1985 4,270 2,773 65 1990 4,997 3,280 66 1995 5,278 3,437 65 2000 5,697 3,697 65 2005 6,184 3,797 61 2010 7,218 4,266 59

Source: NCES, Digest, 2011.

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figures do not include noncredit students enrolled in community or continuing education, dual enrollment courses, and short-cycle occupational studies. The pattern was consistent throughout the country; in nearly all states with community college enrollments greater than fifty thousand, part-time students far outnumbered full-timers, sometimes by as much as three to one.

The rise in the number of part-time students can be attributed to many factors: the opening of noncampus colleges that enroll few full-timers; an increase in the number of students combining work and study; and an increase in the number of reverse transfers, people who may already have baccalaureate and higher degrees; to name but a few. As examples of the latter group, over 48 percent of the 92,594 graduates receiving bachelor’s degrees from the University of California and the California State University systems in 2001 took one or more classes at California community colleges in the ensuing three years. Nearly all were credit courses. The colleges made deliberate efforts to attract part-timers by making it easy for them to attend. Senior citizens’ institutes; weekend colleges; courses offered at off-campus centers, in workplaces, and in rented and donated housing around the district; and countless other stratagems have been employed. In 2011, 59 percent of student credit hours earned at Arizona’s community colleges were in courses provided at alternative times and places or via alternative delivery methods (Arizona Community Colleges, 2012). Notable, however, is that even though the recent increase in younger students has decreased the ratio of part-timers, it is still close to 60 percent: 64 percent in Illinois, 63 percent in Florida and Washington, 65 percent in Texas and North Carolina, and 87 percent in California. And nearly four of five of all students were employed, with 40 percent working full-time (Horn, Nevill, and Griffith, 2006).

The community colleges also play a role in educating students from foreign countries. Fourteen percent of the more than 700,000 international students in U.S. higher education are in community

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colleges; Santa Monica College (California) and Houston Com- munity College (Texas) each enrolls more international students than any other public, two-year college in the nation, the latter admitting more than all but five universities. Most international students need to study English before attempting particular college programs. In the community colleges, even though they pay $6, 500 tuition on average, they find English as a Second Language courses offered at lower cost than in senior institutions and are less likely to have to qualify for admission. More than three-fourths of interna- tional students are between the ages of twenty and thirty-four; most are enrolled full time, often a qualification set by the conditions of their visas; and they stay enrolled for an average of more than six semesters (Hagedorn and Lee, 2005). The majority are from Asia, with China topping the list.

In addition to enrolling international students, community colleges also enroll most of the postsecondary students residing in the country illegally, primarily because the colleges cost far less than other institutional types. Although twelve states allow undocumented students who meet certain requirements (such as attending high school in the state for a specified number of years and graduating or receiving a GED) to pay in-state tuition at public colleges and universities, in most states these students are ineligible for federal and state financial aid. And because there are only a scarce number of private scholarships available to this population, relatively few attend college. The Urban Institute (Passell, 2003) estimates that only 5 to 10 percent of the roughly 65,000 undocumented students who graduate from high school each year do so. Nonetheless, community colleges—especially those in states with large immigrant populations—already serve a fair number of undocumented students; California’s 112 colleges alone enrolled 18,000 in 2005–06 (Gonzales, 2007). If the federal DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act, which was first proposed in 2001 and has been reintroduced

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several times since, is ever enacted, community colleges can expect further enrollment growth from this sector.

The growth in total enrollments did not result solely from the colleges’ attracting students who might not otherwise have partici- pated in education beyond high school. Two other factors played a part: the different ways of classifying institutions; and a redefinition of the term student. Changes in the classification of colleges are common. Private colleges become public; two-year colleges become four-year (and vice versa); and adult education centers enter the category, especially as they begin awarding degrees. The universe of community colleges is especially fluid. From time to time, entire sets of institutions, such as trade and vocational schools and adult education centers, have been added to the list. As examples, in the mid-1960s four vocational-technical schools became the first colleges in the University of Hawaii community college system, and in the mid-1970s the community colleges in Iowa became area schools responsible for adult education in their districts. Indi- ana’s Ivy Tech became a set of comprehensive colleges in 1999. Sometimes institutional reclassification is made by an agency that gathers statistics; in the 1990s, the National Center for Education Statistics and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching began including accredited proprietary schools to their community college databases, but data on those institutions are listed separately. And in 2005, they both, along with the American Association of Community Colleges, removed the community col- leges that had begun offering bachelor’s degrees. All these changes modify the number of students tabulated each year.

Reclassification of students within colleges has had an even greater effect on enrollment figures. As an example, when the category defined adult was removed from the California system, students of all ages could be counted as equivalents for funding purposes. In most states, the trend has been toward including college-sponsored events (whether or not such activities demand evidence of learning attained) as courses and hence the people

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attending them as students. The boundaries among the categories degree credit, non–degree credit, noncredit, and community service are permeable; student tallies shift about as courses are reclassified. Furthermore, the community colleges have taken under their aegis numerous instructional programs formerly offered by public and private agencies, including police and fire academies, hospitals, banks, and religious centers. These practices swell the enrollment figures and blur the definition of student, making it possible for community college leaders to point with pride to larger enrollments and to gain augmented funding when enrollments are used as the basis for accounting. They also heighten imprecision in counting students and make it difficult to compare enrollments from one year to another.

Nonetheless, the proportion of Americans attending college increased steadily through the twentieth century, and the avail- ability of community colleges contributed notably to this growth. In 2010, 40 percent of all students beginning postsecondary education enrolled first in a two-year college. Of the students who delayed entry until they were age thirty or older, 61 percent began in a com- munity college (NCES, 2012). As the following sections detail, the colleges have been essential especially to the educational progress of people with lower levels of academic preparedness, lower incomes, and other characteristics that had limited their opportunity for postsecondary enrollment.

Students’ Lives

Unlike full-time students at residential, four-year universities, whose lives may revolve around classes, peers, and social events, community college students often struggle to fit required courses, tutoring, and other educational activities into schedules constrained by part- or full-time jobs, family commitments, child-rearing responsibilities, long commutes, or other obligations. These responsibilities complicate educational progress for even the most committed students and are often cited as the primary

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reasons that community college students are less likely than their four-year counterparts to persist to a degree or certificate.

The U.S. Department of Education’s survey of students begin- ning postsecondary education in 2003–04 (NCES, 2012) illustrates these challenges. One-quarter of community college students had one or more dependents; almost half of these were single parents. A full 12 percent claimed some sort of disability. Of students cat- egorized as dependent, 28 percent came from the lowest income quartile, and 21 percent of all students reported incomes at or below the poverty level. When students first enrolled, 45 percent were working part time; another 33 percent held full-time jobs. A total of 12 percent spoke a primary language other than English. And 45 percent were the first in their families to attend college.

The colleges have initiated numerous programs to assist students in overcoming these challenges. But the social and economic realities that affect students’ ability to enter and succeed in college are not likely to disappear, and as long as the door remains open to all who desire higher learning, community colleges will be challenged to provide education and services in ways that better fit into their students’ lives.

Student Ability and Academic Preparedness

Classification of students by academic ability reveals a higher proportion of lower-ability or less well-prepared students among community college entrants than among those matriculating at four-year institutions. As Cross (1971) pointed out, three major philosophies about who should go to college have dominated the history of higher education in this country: the aristocratic, suggest- ing that white males from the upper socioeconomic classes would attend; the meritocratic, holding that college admission should be based on ability; and the egalitarian, which “means that everyone should have equality of access to educational opportunities, regard- less of socioeconomic background, race, sex, or ability” (p. 6).

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By the time the community colleges were developed, most young people from the higher socioeconomic groups and most of the high- aptitude aspirants were already going to college. Cross concluded, “The majority of students entering open-door community colleges come from the lower half of the high school classes, academically and socioeconomically” (p. 7).

Various data sets reveal the lower academic skill level of the entrants. The College Board’s Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) means for community colleges have been considerably lower than the norm for all college students and—like the norm for all students—has declined in recent years. In 2012 the average national SAT composite score was 1226 (411 Critical Reading, 416 Mathematics, 399 Writing) for students who indicated an asso- ciate degree as their objective, whereas it was 1433 (477 Critical Reading, 490 Mathematics, 466 Writing) for students with bach- elor’s degree aspirations (College Board, 2012). Since the SAT scores are highly correlated with annual family income (Michaels, 2006), these norms reflect not only the college’s lower entrance requirements but also the socioeconomic status of their students. Indeed, the socioeconomic status of dependent students attending two-year colleges tends to be lower than that of dependent students at four-year institutions: in 2003–04, 26 percent of community col- lege students but only 20 percent of four-year college students came from the lowest income level, defined as 125 percent of the poverty limit (Horn, Nevill, and Griffith, 2006).

Like most other institutions of higher education, the community colleges have also sought out high-ability students and have made special benefits available to them. For example, in 1979, Miami- Dade Community College began giving full tuition waivers to all students graduating in the top 10 percent of their local high school class, and in 1991 it extended that offer to the top 20 percent. Students in that group were eligible to apply for the Academic Achievement Award, which provided $3, 200 to cover in-state tuition and fees for two years. Those individuals graduating in the

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top 5 percent received $5, 000 for two years, which essentially covered not only tuition and fees but also textbook costs. The Achievement Award program has since evolved into an Honors College (Miami Dade College, 2012), but not before the idea spread to other states. New Jersey’s NJ STARS (Student Tuition Assistance Rewards Scholarship) program, created in 2004, offers scholarships to students in the top 15 percent of their high school class. These scholarships cover the full price of tuition for up to five semesters at New Jersey’s nineteen community colleges as long as the students maintain full-time enrollment in an associate degree program and a grade-point average (GPA) of at least 3.0. In 2006 the program was expanded, making NJ STARS recipients who earn an associate degree with a GPA of 3.25 or higher and meet the requirements for transfer eligible for the NJ STARS II program, which provides tuition discounts of up to $7, 000 at all of the state’s public four-year colleges or universities. In 2008–09, 4,300 NJ STARS students were enrolled in the state’s community colleges and over 1,400 in four-year institutions, together receiving about $18 million in merit scholarships (Nespoli, 2010).

The growth of merit scholarships and honors programs evi- dences the colleges’ welcoming the better-prepared students. White (1975) surveyed 225 colleges in the North-Central region and found that about 10 percent had formalized honors programs. Twenty years later, Peterson’s Guide to Two-Year Colleges, 1995 (1994) listed honors programs in over 25 percent of the institu- tions, and in 2011 they existed in more than one-third (Peterson’s College Search, 2011). Outcalt and Kisker (2003) found that over 9 percent of the faculty reported having taught at least one honors course in the previous two years. Often, universities get involved; UCLA has assisted colleges throughout Southern California in building honors programs and linking them with transfer oppor- tunities (Kane, 2001). The students in honors programs often receive priority registration, special academic advisors, and tuition discounts in addition to intensive courses. Montgomery College

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(Maryland) has honors programs on each of its three campuses. Its Montgomery Scholars enrolls students directly from high school and pays their tuition and fees for two years, including the cost of a summer studying in England. More than 80 percent graduate, and most transfer. A Sophomore Business Honors Program is open to second-year students. Two additional programs are designed for part-time, working adults at the college’s branch campuses (Ashburn, 2006).

The creation of honors colleges and scholarship programs for high-ability students certainly creates a lower-cost avenue to a bachelor’s degree for students who might not want or be able to afford four years at a university, but some question whether the inclusion of these students—and efforts spent catering to them—crowds out more traditional community college popula- tions, whose grades or test scores may preclude them from attending any other institutional type (Rhoades, 2012). Claims of diminished access and abandonment of the colleges’ egalitarian mission inten- sify as demand for enrollment surpasses what the states are willing to pay, but, as long as public universities face the same enroll- ment pressures, students who in better economic times may have attended a four-year institution directly will be welcomed into com- munity college honors colleges and transfer curricula, no matter what the critics say.

Gender

Probably because it is easier to sort students by gender than by any other variable, differences between male and female college students have long been documented. Historically, among less well-prepared students, fewer women than men attended college. When funds were limited, more male than female high-ability students from low-income families entered college. Furthermore, the women who went to college were more likely to be dependent on their families for support. Not until 1978 did the number of

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women attending college in the United States exceed the number of men. In 2010, women were ahead, 57 to 43 percent (the ratio is the same in community colleges). Overall, in each year since 1978, more women than men have earned associate degrees; in 2009–10, 62 percent of the degrees went to women.

Some slight change has occurred in the types of programs that community college students enter, although the traditionally gender-differentiated fields persist. The associate degrees awarded reveal these differences. In 2009–10, women earned 86 percent of the degrees in education; 85 percent in the health professions, and 65 percent in business. Men dominated in mechanic and repair technologies with 95 percent of the degrees; engineering technology, 87 percent; computer and information science, 76 percent; and physical sciences, 62 percent. Women had a slight edge in liberal arts degrees, and men in homeland security, law enforcement, and firefighting.

Although many community colleges have been focusing on increasing enrollment and completion among male students (Perrakis, 2008), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and several other federal and philanthropic agencies have spent a significant amount of money to increase female participation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. The NSF alone anticipated investing $100 million in community colleges in fiscal year 2012 (Patton, 2011), and a small but growing body of research is addressing the reasons that females may avoid STEM fields as well as the ways community colleges might redesign these programs to attract more women and minorities (Starobin and Laanan, 2008; Tsapogas, 2004).

Racial and Ethnic Diversity

The community colleges’ diligence in recruiting students from segments of the population that had not previously attended college yielded sizable increases in the college attendance of racial

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and ethnic minorities. In 1997, community colleges, with 38 percent of the total enrollment in American higher education, were enrolling 46 percent of minority students, up from 20 percent in 1976. This imbalance has stabilized in recent years as four- year colleges and universities have worked to improve access for underserved groups. Nonetheless, minority students make up a significant percent of the community college population: in 2010, they constituted 42 percent of all community college enrollments nationwide. Naturally, the pattern differed from state to state depending on the minority population. Hawaii, with 78 percent, as well as California and New Mexico, with over 60 percent, had the highest percentages of minorities among their community college students. Minorities were also enrolled in significant numbers in other locales that had well-developed community college systems or high minority populations: Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey, Maryland, Nevada, Florida, Arizona, and the District of Columbia were above the national average.

When the enrollment figures are disaggregated by ethnic groups, they are even more revealing of the community colleges’ contri- butions to access: 15.6 percent of all community college students are African American (African Americans make up 12.6 percent of the total U.S. population); 18 percent are Hispanic (16.3 per- cent of the U.S. population); 6 percent are Asian American or Pacific Islander (5 percent of the U.S. population); and 1.1 percent are American Indian or Alaska Native (0.9 percent of the U.S. population). As these data show, proportions of minority students enrolled in community colleges exceed their share of the national population; this holds true for most states as well. Indeed, the African American proportion of community college enrollment in 2011 exceeded the African American proportion of the eighteen- to forty-four-year-old population in all fifty states. Comparable figures for Hispanic enrollments were found in all but Mississippi and South Dakota, where the percentages were equivalent.

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More so than in the universities, the community college stu- dent population tends to reflect the ethnic composition of the institution’s locale. Community colleges in cities with high pro- portions of minorities—Chicago, El Paso, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Phoenix—enroll sizable numbers of minority students. In 2010, 94 percent of the students at Laredo Community Col- lege (Texas) were Hispanic; 79 percent of the students at Lawson State Community College (Alabama) were African American. The evidence of neighborhood attendance is revealed when the community college has several campuses in the same city. At East Los Angeles College in 2010, 65 percent of the students were His- panic; at Los Angeles Southwest College, 63 percent were African American; at Los Angeles Pierce College, 36 percent were His- panic, 32 percent white, and 13 percent Asian. Just a few miles inland, at Glendale Community College, half of the study body was white. More than thirty community colleges enrolling around twenty thousand students have been established especially to serve American Indians; Diné College (Arizona), Oglala Lakota College (South Dakota), and Navajo Technical College (New Mexico) are notable examples. The federal Tribally Controlled Community College Assistance Act of 1978 and the grants awarded by Congress beginning in 1980 gave a great impetus to the development of these colleges, now functioning in twelve states.

Because the issue of minority students’ progress in college has been so charged politically, the question of whether the com- munity colleges have enhanced or retarded progress for minority students has been debated at length (see, for example, Astin, 1982; Bailey, Jenkins, and Leinbach, 2005; Long and Kurlaender, 2009; Richardson and Bender, 1987). Those who say that the community colleges have assisted minority students point to ease of access, low tuition, and minimal entrance requirements. They note the numer- ous programs that provide special services to minority students and applaud efforts made to recruit them. Their most telling argument

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is that a sizable percentage of those students would not be in college at all were it not for the community colleges.

Several analysts have charged that minority students who begin their postsecondary education at a community college will do less well than those of equal ability who enroll at the senior institution and that this differential is greater for them than it is for the majority of students. These detractors have taken the position that, because students who begin at a community college are less likely to obtain degrees, minorities are actually harmed by two-year institutions. Table 2.3 presents evidence typically used to support this assertion, showing that the percent of associate degrees earned by white students is greater than that group’s share of total community college enrollment, while the percent of degrees earned by various minority groups is equal to or less than each group’s share of enrollment.

Despite the achievement gaps illustrated in Table 2.3, it is difficult to disaggregate the effects of community colleges from the characteristics of the students who enter them. In general, students who enter community colleges instead of universities are less academically prepared, have lower aspirations, and are from a lower socioeconomic class. The various studies that have attempted to control for those variables frequently also attempt to

Table 2.3. Percent of Community College Enrollment and Associate Degrees Earned, by Race/Ethnicity, 2010–11

Race/Ethnicity Percent of Percent of Associate Enrollment Degrees Earned

African American 15 14 American Indian or Alaska Native

1 1

Asian or Pacific Islander 6 5 Hispanic 19 14 White 55 65 Two or more races 2 1

Source: NCES, Digest, 2012.

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control for the fact that minority students are more likely to attend school part time. However, as Adelman (2005) noted, “The studies often highlight variables over which the community college has but modest control—gender, race and ethnicity, first-generation college status, SES, second language background, marital and parental status” (p. 118). He concluded that the colleges can do little to change them but must work with the students they have.

The question of whether community colleges are beneficial to minority students is thus unresolved. If sizable percentages of minor- ity students would not attend any college if no community college were available, and if the act of attending college to take even a few classes is beneficial, then community colleges have certainly helped. But if the presence of a convenient community college discourages minority students from attending senior institutions and reduces the probability of their completing the baccalaureate, then for those students who wanted degrees the college has been detrimental. However, the latter contention is tempered by the numbers of minority students who enter community colleges and subsequently transfer to selective senior institutions where they would not have been admissible as freshmen.

The question is not whether minority students tend to be concentrated in two-year colleges; they do. The question is not whether they tend to go through to the level of the associate degree and then transfer to the university; as a group, they do so at lower rates than white or Asian students, although in colleges that have a transfer rate substantially higher than the national norm the transfer rate for African American and Hispanic students is higher than the national norm for all students (Szeleyni, 2002). The question is whether community colleges are working to serve all students, no matter their background, intentions, level of aca- demic preparedness, family or community responsibilities, ability to pay, commitment to full-time attendance, or intervening life circumstances. And the answer is: mostly they are, as evidenced by the sheer amount of philanthropic money sought to improve

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student progress and outcomes in the colleges as well as the sub- stantial attention paid by practitioners and scholars alike to closing achievement gaps and implementing best practices. The colleges are not designed exclusively for the purpose of passing students through to the baccalaureate. The issue of student achievement must be seen in its total context; it is not encapsulated by statistics about minority student progress.

Whom do the community colleges best serve? Egalitarians would say that the institutions should maintain parity in the percentage of each minority group attaining each of the following goals: entering college, enrolling in transfer-credit courses, persisting in any courses, gaining the associate degree, gaining admittance to a high-level technological program, graduating from such a program, and transferring to the university. In practice, however, this level of equivalence is impossible to attain, short of imposing strict quotas at every step. For the minorities as for any other identifiable student group, the question should be put more broadly: “The community college or what alternative?” For most students in two- year institutions, the choice is not between the community college and a senior residential institution; it is between the community college and nothing.

Classifying Students and Their Intentions

The classification of students into special groups is often more polit- ically inspired than educationally pertinent. Women, minorities, and the disabled were able to have their concerns translated into special programs only after they became politically astute. From the college perspective, the temptation to place courses or students in separate categories was always present. The mature woman with a bachelor’s degree, taking an art class for credit because it was taught by someone she admired and was scheduled at a time of day that was convenient for her, was not deserving of the special treatment accorded to “returning women,” “the aged,” or “students

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intending to transfer.” She was there for her personal interest. Yet because of politically and institutionally inspired definitions, she would be counted each time the institution reported its numbers of women, aged, and transfer students.

At other times, students are excluded from one classification or another, when in reality they fit better in that category than the one for which they are counted. Schuetz (1999) provided a relevant example: the definition of an adult student (currently those over age twenty-four) might be more accurate if it included anyone who is at least eighteen years old and working at least twenty-five hours per week, raising a child or children while enrolled, or both. In other words, there may be value to classification schemes where the students’ life conditions become more important than arbitrary markers such as chronological age, although the complexity of building such a scheme on a national scale may be prohibitive.

Classifying students takes other forms as well. Assessments of community college students have been made from perspectives that span the social sciences: psychological, sociological, economic, and political. To the psychologist, community college students are pragmatic, little concerned with learning for its own sake. They are not self-directed or self-motivated; they need to be instructed. To the sociologist, the students are struggling to escape from their lower-class backgrounds; some do, but many are inhibited by a bias against leaving family and friends that a move in class would engender. To the economist, students from low-income families pay more in the form of forgone earnings as a percentage of total family income than their counterparts from higher-income groups, a differential that more than offsets the savings gained by attend- ing a low-tuition institution. To the political scientist, students attending community colleges are given short shrift because the institutions are funded at a lower per capita level than the uni- versities, and hence the students do not have equivalent libraries, laboratories, or faculty–student ratios available to them.

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But determining the reasons that students attend college is not an exact exercise. They come for a variety of purposes, and the same person may have a half-dozen reasons for attending. As an example, when the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study offered stu- dents the opportunity to cite their reasons, 52 percent chose “transfer,” 43 percent “complete associate degree,” 17 percent “complete certificate,” 42 percent “job skills,” and 46 percent “per- sonal interest” (Horn, Nevill, and Griffith, 2006). Much depends on the way the questions are asked and the interpretations that the respondents make. There can be little doubt that although most students attend community colleges to better themselves financially, a sizable percentage are there for reasons of personal interest having nothing to do with direct fiscal benefit. In 1986 the Center for the Study of Community Colleges (CSCC), sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, asked students their primary reason for attending and found 36 per- cent seeking transfer, 34 percent job entry skills, 16 percent job upgrading, and 15 percent personal interest. Hoachlander, Sikora, and Horn (2003) found comparable figures almost two decades later: 59 percent of the students were seeking transfer, degree, or certificate; 23 percent entered to improve or attain job skills; and 16 percent were enrolled for personal interest.

The conventional belief is that community college students— in contrast to students in four-year colleges—are less interested in academic studies and in learning for its own sake; instead, they are interested primarily in the practical, which to them means earning more money. Although some research evidence supports that belief, the perception that higher education is to be used particularly for occupational training seems pervasive among students in all types of institutions.

Whether these characterizations are correct, they mean little to institutional planners. Certainly, community college students are realistic in the sense that they use the institutions for their own purposes. But what students do not, in schools where attendance is

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not mandated? Certainly, more are from lower social classes than those attending the universities, but their class base is higher than that represented by the sizable percentage of Americans who do not attend college at all. Certainly, many are from the lower-income groups, but their attendance usually leads to higher earnings. Certainly, they welcome an instantly responsive institution, but the effects of nonpunitive grading and of forgiveness for past educational sins on their proclivities for learning have not yet been traced.

Unaware of all these analyses, the students continue attending the community colleges for their own purposes. Those just out of high school may matriculate merely because they have been conditioned to go to school every time September appears on the calendar. Students of any age wanting a better job may attend because career programs are connected to employers. Those who have jobs but want additional skills may hope to find a short-term program that will teach them to use new equipment introduced in their industry. Many begin at the introductory level and learn complete sets of job skills enabling them to qualify for trades that they might have known nothing about before entering the programs. Some students seek out special interest courses, ranging from The Great Books to Beginner Yoga, taking a course or two whenever one that strikes their fancy appears in the class schedule. Some use the community colleges as stepping-stones to other schools, finding them convenient and economical entry points to higher education and the professions.

The community college certainly serves a broader sector of the local population than does any other higher education institution. In 2010, the community colleges in twenty-three states enrolled 6 percent or more of the population aged eighteen to forty-four, up from nine states twenty years prior. Eight states, all in the West or Midwest, enrolled at least 8 percent; five of these enrolled more than 10 percent (NCES, Digest, 2011; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2010). Much depends on demography—the percentage of

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population that is over age seventeen—but more relates to the overall college-going rate in the state, the availability of other postsecondary forms, and the accessibility of community colleges.

Assessment and Tracking

Curriculum tracking within the colleges has risen and fallen with the times. Throughout their early years, the community colleges typically administered achievement tests to matriculants and attempted to place students in courses presumed to be conso- nant with their abilities. Students were shunted from transfer to developmental or occupational programs, a practice that gave rise to the cooling-out thesis postulated by Clark in 1960. Most insti- tutions also maintained academic probation, F grades, one-term dismissal of students not making satisfactory progress, transcripts required for admission, entrance tests, midterm grades, penal- ties for dropping classes after the eighth week, mandatory exit interviews, required class attendance, and mandatory orientation courses. However, during the early 1970s, these practices fell into disfavor as many students demanded the right to enter courses of their own choosing. Furthermore, measuring students’ abilities has never been an exact science; a student deficient in one area of knowledge may be well qualified in another, and stories of abuses in program tracking are common. Educators rationalized their inabil- ity to assess their students accurately by saying that anyone had the right to try anything, even if it meant failure. The 1970s saw an erosion of course prerequisites as surely as dress codes had been abandoned in an earlier day.

By the end of the decade, the pendulum had swung back, propelled more by the students than by changes in institutional philosophy. The occupational programs were being reserved for the favored few, while the transfer curricula were entered by those unqualified for the technologies or uncertain of their direction. This use of the collegiate courses by the less able, those waiting for

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billets in the more desirable programs to open, and those trying to make up deficiencies in prior preparation may have contributed to high dropout rates. Subtly but decisively, the transfer programs were being transformed into catchalls for unable and uncommitted students.

During the 1980s, the community colleges groped for a middle ground between linear, forced-choice, sequential curricula and the lateral, laissez-faire approach of letting students drop in and take any course they wanted. Recognizing that neither of the extremes was tolerable and that neither best served the students, the staff in most institutions attempted to maintain some semblance of counseling, orientation, and testing to determine why students had appeared and how they could best be helped. But students were using the college for purposes other than those anticipated by program planners. Except for those enrolled in the selective admissions, high technology, and allied health fields, few students attended courses in the sequence envisaged by program planners.

Moves toward encouraging students to matriculate in and to complete programs gained momentum during the 1980s. One of the first requirements was to test the students at entry, place them in programs commensurate with their aspirations and abilities, and demand that they make steady progress toward completing the pro- gram. For example, Miami-Dade Community College established a policy of assessing students, mandating certain courses, and placing on probation or suspending students who were not making satisfac- tory progress—in short, reinstating the policies under which most institutions had operated fifteen years earlier (Middleton, 1981). During the first two years that the policy was in effect, several thousand students were dropped from the rolls, but enrollments eventually stabilized and student attendance patterns increasingly reflected the changed policy.

The practice of requiring testing and program placement spread, often prodded by legislators who were appalled at the dropout rates. Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Texas mandated that

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all entering students or students seeking degrees or transfer take tests in the basic skills. And numerous community colleges in states where testing had not been mandated were beginning to require testing on their own. The Southern Regional Education Board (Abraham, 1987) found that in the 1980s twice as many two-year colleges as four-year colleges in its region had policies governing testing and placement. A national survey from the same time period found that, although the majority of the two-year colleges accepted all persons over age eighteen who had earned a high school diploma, almost 90 percent of them used tests to place first-time students (Woods, 1985).

The move was not without its detractors. Some felt that state- mandated testing would lead to a reduction in institutional ability to serve various types of clients. In 1988, a group of Latino rights organizations sued a California college on the grounds of discrimination in access. This led to a state mandate that entrance tests be validated in relation to student achievement. Others deplored the tests’ effects on curriculum; students take the courses that teach them to pass the tests, and mandated exit tests invariably are built on generalized content. In recent years the controversy has centered on the validity of tests designed to determine incoming students’ placement into developmental or college-level courses. While the vast majority (92 percent) of two-year colleges offer such exams (NCES, 2003), some recommend only that students enroll in the suggested level; other institutions mandate developmental enrollment based on a specified cutoff score. The risk of the former strategy, of course, is that too many students enroll in and fail college-level courses for which they are not prepared. The risk of the latter, some argue, is worse: that students who might have succeeded in college-level courses are instead shunted into remediation, an educational purgatory from which only a small percentage will emerge. This question is only the latest reincarnation of the decades-long debate about tracking in community colleges (see Chapter Eight on developmental education), a persistent issue due

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to the important questions it raises about academic quality, social justice, student needs, and the individual and social benefits of college attendance.

Enrollment Patterns and Dropout

To transfer to a senior institution, enter the job market, get a better job, or merely learn for one’s own purposes: these are students’ chief reasons for attending community colleges. And these same reasons go a long way to explain enrollment patterns characterized by a substantial number of dropouts (students who withdraw from a college), stop-outs (students who withdraw but then subsequently enroll some time later), and swirling students (those who attend multiple institutions, sometimes concurrently, en route to a degree or certificate). The community colleges pride themselves on open access, which translates into ease of entry. In general, this means that students may register with little advance commitment and enroll in classes without completing a plan of study. Part-time attendance is not discouraged, and withdrawing from classes without penalty and reenrolling is considerably more typical student behavior than that found at the universities. The colleges have made numerous efforts in recent years to tighten requirements by demanding advance registration, preenrollment counseling, filing of matriculation plans, and mandatory testing and advisement. But the attendance patterns that were encouraged during an era of laissez-faire, open-access policies still dominate.

Not surprisingly, these attendance patterns lead to retention rates that are significantly lower than those at four-year institutions. Among first-time, degree-seeking community college students in fall 2009, only 60 percent returned for fall 2010 (the corresponding rate at public four-year institutions was 80 percent). Add in students who may have enrolled for reasons other than a degree, and retention rates slip to slightly over 50 percent; among part-time students it is lower still: 41 percent (NCHEMS, 2010). Retention

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rates tell only part of the story; several additional questions are justified. Which students persist? Who drops out, stops out, or swirls and when? Who completes the programs, transfers, or satisfies their reasons for entry? More studies of student attendance patterns have been conducted than of any other area within the institutions. Students are tracked, transcripts are analyzed, the dropouts are surveyed, and grade-point averages earned by transferring students are reviewed, all in an attempt to learn how and why students stay or leave. The presenting reason is to determine how the college can better serve its matriculants; the result is a wealth of research tracking students into and out of the institutions.

Swirling Students

In 1990, Alfredo de los Santos and Irene Wright coined the term student swirl to describe patterns of enrollment in Phoenix’s Mari- copa Community College District in which students took courses offered by multiple institutions, sometimes concurrently, at times and places that were most convenient or had space available. The swirling phenomenon is apparent in most states, particu- larly in metropolitan areas. In 2011, close to seventy thousand California community college students attended two institutions concurrently; nearly five thousand attended three; and at least four hundred took classes at four or five colleges (Rivera, 2012). Many swirling students also enroll in community college courses after transferring to a university, a phenomenon since titled reverse transfer.

A recent report from the National Student Clearinghouse (2012b) illustrates the extent of the swirling phenomenon: among students who first enrolled in a community college in 2006, one- third transferred at least once in the ensuing five years. A full 61 percent of these transferred to a four-year institution; 38 percent transferred laterally, that is, to another community college. Fur- thermore, between 41 and 52 percent of students who began at a four-year college and transferred to another institution earned

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at least some credits from a community college, often during the summer months. The report concluded that “the linear view of college access and success that focuses on the initial institution attended often fails to address the realities on the ground” (p. 48) and called for new analytical approaches in which “students are the unit of analysis and institutions are viewed as stepping stones along a diverse set of educational paths” to learn more about the factors associated with success for mobile students (p. 48).

Dropouts

Most of the hundreds of dropout studies conducted over many decades have relied on surveys of nonreturning students. The reasons that students drop out are quite varied, but in general most of them are related to situations beyond the college’s control. A change in work schedule is often cited, along with such personal reasons as health problems, difficulty in obtaining child care, family conflicts, financial burdens, change in residence, or attendance at another institution. Many of the early leavers have already attained the objective for which they attended; they wanted to take only a course or two. Hence, their leaving had nothing to do with college policies or procedures; they got what they wanted and then withdrew. And in studies that asked students whether they intended to return, a majority of the respondents indicated that they would be back one day. The availability of the institution seemed quite popular and may even have contributed to the lack of persistence: Why not leave when other demands interfere? You can always return.

Although most of the reasons for leaving school are beyond the college’s ability to amend, some of the reasons suggest that institutional intervention might be helpful. One discovery is that decisions to drop out are usually made early on. As an example, Kangas (1991) interviewed students who withdrew and found that 71 percent of them thought about leaving in the first four weeks; 85 percent did not talk to their instructor about withdrawing. And

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although he found that only around one student in six offered reasons related to the classroom, the instructor, or the college, the students who withdrew indicated that they had never really gotten involved with the college; most of them studied alone, and most were working forty or more hours per week outside school. Nationally, of the students entering community colleges in fall 2003 and leaving by the end of their first year, 27 percent indicated they had never participated in a study group, 24 percent had never socialized with faculty or advisers, and 27 percent had never spoken with faculty outside class (NCES, 2012).

Retention can be enhanced if actions are taken to integrate the students with the college. This must be started early, even before the instructional term begins. Programs of early start and summer involvements have been tried and have been demonstrably successful. Adelman examined several large-scale data sets and concluded that summer-term credits “held a consistently positive relationship to degree completion” (2006b, n.p.). The National Science Foundation funds summer bridge programs to increase the number of secondary school, community college, and four-year college students entering science, mathematics, and engineering curriculums. But these reach only a few students; those who in the main are already committed. The rest of the beginning students need to be alerted to the availability of advising and, more important, to the campus services that can help them in making the transition from their life in the community to life as a student. Child-care facilities, now found in most colleges, are essential. And early alert systems, which identify students who are at risk for academic failure so that a faculty or staff member can offer assistance, are becoming prevalent; 56 percent of two- year college campuses have some sort of early alert system in place within first-year courses (Barefoot, 2005). Interestingly, few colleges have created sizable numbers of on-campus jobs for aides, paraprofessionals, peer tutors, teaching assistants, clerical workers, or custodial assistants, all jobs that might bring the students into

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closer association with the institution and thereby encourage them to work fewer hours away from the college.

The admissions procedures alone, which allowed students to enter classes almost at will, certainly contributed to the dropout rate. Studies of the reasons that students drop out of college rarely consider the strength of their initial commitment, but it seems likely that a student who petitions for admission, takes a battery of entrance tests, and signs up for classes six months in advance of the term is more genuinely committed to attending than one who appears on the first day of classes with little preliminary plan- ning. Data on students’ ethnicity, prior academic achievement, and degree aspirations pale in comparison with the essential com- ponent: the degree of their personal commitment. NCES (2009) defined strongly directed students as those who reported an inten- tion to complete a program of study, attended at least half time during their first year, and enrolled in a formal degree or certificate program. The strongly directed were less likely to drop out than their moderately directed or not directed peers, a finding corroborated by several state-level studies (North Carolina Community College System, 2007a, 2007b). This group also tended to be younger.

Determining the intrainstitutional procedures that affect dropout tells only part of the story. The colleges’ efforts to recruit and enroll sizable numbers of students must also be considered. As open-door, noncompulsory institutions, community colleges have historically made tremendous efforts to bring in sizable numbers of students. Over the years they established off-campus recruitment centers and sent vans staffed with counselors into shopping centers and parks. They advertised in newspapers and on billboards and conducted telephone solicitations. Some of the advertising campaigns were planned as carefully as sophisticated marketing plans used by private businesses. By 1988, a sizable percentage of the nation’s community colleges had organized marketing divisions (Bogart and Galbraith, 1988). These efforts certainly contributed to maintaining enrollments, but for many years they

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also tended to attract students with only a casual commitment to college-level studies. The wholesale, intense marketing efforts have ceased recently. In fact, many overcrowded colleges are turning students away as reduced state and local allocations force a reduction in enrollment slots.

Studies of student dropout may be only marginally relevant to an institution that regards accessibility as its greatest virtue. The community colleges have organized themselves around the theme of ease in entrance, exit, and reentry. Having made a considerable effort to recruit students and offer them something useful, most faculty members and administrators do want to keep them enrolled, at least until degree or program objectives have been fulfilled. But it is difficult for an institution built on the theme of easy access to limit easy exit.

Still, any institution needs to demonstrate its usefulness to society if it is to continue to be supported. When a school that people are not obligated to attend continues to enroll greater segments of the population, its administrators can argue that it must be offering something of value to those who are investing their own time and money. They can also argue that enrolling ever greater percentages of the population is a social good because the more people who are exposed to schooling, the more likely it is that intellectual leaders will emerge from among them. If intellectual ability in the population is distributed on a probability basis, intelligent people will come forth if more are given access to schooling. By that line of reasoning, any restricted educational system runs counter to social policy, whether the restriction is by wealth, sex, race, or scholastic test.

Questions of program completion fade in that light. The better question to ask is: Of what value is the community college even to those people who do not graduate or transfer to a baccalaureate- degree-granting institution? By their nature, by deliberate intent, the community colleges sought to become open-access institutions. Who can estimate the extent of the social need they were fulfilling?

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In summation, if the purpose of the collegiate enterprise is to pass most students through to the baccalaureate degree, then the community college is a failure by design. But as the president of La Guardia Community College emphasized, “It does matter if a community college moves an adult from reading at the 5th grade to the 9th grade level, or learns how to compute percentages, or develops the capacity for the intellectual problem solving necessary to get and keep a job” (Mellow, 2008, p. 3).

Issues

Institutional planners will continue to face questions about the numbers and types of students enrolled. For example, which groups have first claim on the institution? If enrollment limitations mean that some students must be turned away, who shall they be? Those of lesser ability? Those with indistinct goals? Those who already have baccalaureate degrees? Historically, colleges have influenced the types of students they attract by expanding or contracting off- campus or off-hours classes and enforcing student probation and suspension procedures more or less stringently, to name but two obvious means.

More direct methods may have to be developed in the future. While colleges will likely stop short of creating lists placing the categories of potential students in order from highest to lowest pri- ority, some have flirted with slightly subtler strategies for essentially doing the same. In 2012 Santa Monica College (California) pro- posed opening additional sections of high-demand courses during the summer months, asking students to pay roughly four times the normal tuition in hopes that the courses would raise revenues and help ease overcrowding during the school year. The plan was even- tually tabled after intense student protests, but community colleges in at least six states—Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, and South Dakota—are already charging differential tuition based on the cost of course delivery (Friedel and Thomas, 2013). Colleges

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across the country may well follow suit as resource constraints and enrollment pressures build, the possibility of which raises an impor- tant question: Who should decide on these policies (and hence the student types), the colleges or the states?

Historically, the community college student has been defined as one who is enrolled in a course. But it may be time to modify the definition of student to include only those who are enrolled past the first census week or even longer than that. Counting everyone who registers, even those who take no classes or who drop out after the first couple of sessions, distorts the data on student success.

Other open questions include the following. How will start-and- stop enrollment patterns and a growing willingness by students to piece together a mobile education affect the ways colleges offer courses and support services? How might it change our understanding of student progress and outcomes? How will the recent moves toward assessing students at entry and demanding that they make continual progress toward completing a program affect enrollments of various groups? How will they affect retention and program completion?

And the broadest questions of all: Which people benefit most from, and which are harmed by, an institution that allows all to attend at their pleasure? For which students should society pay full fare? The personal and social implications of these questions give way rapidly to the political and fiscal as soon as they are put to the test.

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