Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
Community colleges that receive federal job-training grants are required to share any learning materials developed. But software publishers are lobbying for a new law banning “open educational resources” developed with federal funding.
Also on Community College Spotlight: IBM will help Chicago design new six-year high schools that will combine technical training and college classes leading to an associate degree and an IT job.
Florida’s dual-enrollment students are double dipping, analysts complain. After earning a tuition-free associate degree in high school, students use state scholarships to fund three or four years at the University of Florida. Only six percent complete a bachelor’s degree in two years.
Also on Community College Spotlight: A Mississippi college will offer a military tech degree for veterans and active-duty soldiers.
Most people don’t need a college education to do their job, but they need a degree to get hired, writes Daniel Indiviglio in The Atlantic. It’s a very expensive way to identify who’s smart enough to do a job, he writes.
. . . when high school standards declined and college became more popular, some applicants stood out above others as being more educated and potentially smarter than those with only a high school diploma. If the trend keeps up, however, a time will come when a college degree isn’t enough either: masters degrees will be commonly sought, as the value of college degrees fall to be worth as little high school degrees are today, since so many applicants will have them. If this trend keeps up forever, perhaps we’ll one day have locksmiths with PhD’s.
Waitresses with a college degree earn more money, but it’s probably not the degree, argues Andrew Gillen.
College is the best investment on the market (for those who complete a degree), counters Derek Thompson, also in The Atlantic. Over a working lifetime, “the typical college graduate earns $570,000 more than the average person with only a high school diploma.”
Let’s say you’re deciding where to invest $100,000 at age 18. Maybe you think to put it in gold, corporate bonds, U.S. government debt, or hot company stocks.
The $102,000 investment in a four-year college yields a rate of return of 15.2 percent per year, more than double the average return over the last 60 years experienced in the stock market” and more than five times the return in corporate bonds, gold, long-term government bonds, or housing, according to a report by Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney.
Note that the associate degree’s rate of return is 20 percent, higher than the pay-off for the bachelor’s degree. I’d guess that’s because the costs of attaining the degree are lower and many associate degrees go to nurses, who make good money.
College classes for low-achieving 11th graders? It’s a hot idea, writes Community College Dean. And a bad one.
Also on Community College Spotlight: First, he earned an associate degree. Next he’ll graduate from high school.
At an innovation conference, Community College Dean has a “stupiphany” — the sudden realization that you were an idiot for not knowing something before. The more classes a remedial student must take, the more likely the student will give up. Each class is an exit point.
Another stupiphany: Remedial students are much more likely to succeed when basic skills are taught along with vocational skills. Yet California’s community college system eliminated many “contextualized” classes that help students earn an occupational certificate in favor of traditional remedial classes geared toward associate degrees.
Spotlight features my long-awaited (at least by me) freelance story for McClatchy News and the Hechinger Report: With “middle-skill” credentials — an occupational associate degree or certificate — it’s possible to earn a middle-class living without heavy student debt. But most students aim for a bachelor’s degree. The A and B+ students usually have the academic skills and motivation to complete a four-year degree; weaker students usually end up with nothing. Many are “majoring in debt,” as Georgetown Professor Anthony Carnevale puts it.
Also on Spotlight: Nearly everybody’s going to college these days, but many graduates aren’t ready for the workforce, writes Julian Alssid of Workforce Strategy Center.
Florida’s community college graduates with vocational certificates and two-year occupational degrees start at higher salaries than state university graduates with bachelor’s degrees, the state reports.
Why? Two words: health careers. With an associate degree in applied science, community college graduates are earning serious money as nurses, medical technicians, etc. Others are prepared for jobs as computer techs, paralegals and utility workers. I’m surprised six-month certificate holders are earning more than four-year graduates, but many of those bachelor’s degrees are in non-technical majors with little labor market value.
Community college students in career programs aren’t pondering the meaning of life, but neither are most four-year students, who are piling up a lot of debt for that sociology degree.
On Community College Spotlight: California students face long waiting lists to get into community college classes, forcing some students to delay college or commute between different campuses to pick up a class here and a class there.
Some 80 percent of new nurses should earn a bachelor’s degree before entering the profession, urges a new report. Nurses with two-year degrees would have to earn a bachelor’s within five years. Community college leaders charge degree inflation: Associate-degree nurses are just as likely to pass the licensing test as nurses with four-year degrees.
The Gates-funded Early College High School Initiative aimed to graduate high school students with an associate’s degree or two years of college credit. Programs are rethinking expectations, The Hechinger Report finds.
Since 2002, the Early College High School Initiative has opened over 200 schools, with the two largest concentrations in North Carolina (61 schools) and California (38 schools). The program will soon expand to 250 schools nationwide.
Early college isn’t aimed at top students. Reformers hope at-risk students will be motivated to pass college classes, despite below-grade-level reading and math skills. That’s not always realistic.
In 2009, early-college high schools’ graduation rate was 85 percent with 65 percent of graduates were accepted to four-year colleges. Nearly 83 percent of early-college ninth-graders were enrolled in at least one college-prep math course, compared to 67.3 percent of their peers.
Still, only about 11 percent of early-college graduates nationwide received associate’s degrees, far below the original goal of 100 percent. And the average early-college student graduates with just 22 credits, less than a year’s worth of college coursework.
Hostos-Lincoln Academy, a high-performing, all-minority school is located on the campus of Hostos Community College in the South Bronx. A third of the 90 rising-seniors – the first early-college class – expect to receive associate’s degrees. Another third will graduate with significant college credit.
Hostos learned that while many students rise to high expectations, others simply don’t. Some needed constant prodding to turn in assignments on time. They may have lacked maturity and felt uncomfortable approaching a professor with questions.
The program still aims to teach high-schoolers how to operate in college, primarily through weekly advisory seminars covering basics like taking notes during a lecture and following along with assignments in the syllabus. In the past, students took this course at the same time as their first college course and had to figure out differences between college and high school on their own.
Last year, Hostos-Lincoln decided to let students leave the college track if it’s too much for them.
Starting this school year, all ninth-graders will take an extended seminar in the fall. If they prove during this time that they’re mature enough to take a college course, they’ll be enrolled in the spring.
Hostos will also create an eighth-grade elective for its middle school, taught partially by high school teachers, that will emphasize writing skills and cultural literacy.
Frankly, if early-college programs push schools to improve at-risk students’ writing skills, boost the graduation rate and get the most motivated students to earn a semester or two of college credit, that’s a big success.
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