Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
Forty-five percent of four-year graduates studied — at least for awhile — at a community college, reports a new study. Forty percent were enrolled only for one or two terms.
Also on Community College Spotlight: The wine industry has saved Walla Walla, Washington — with the help of the local community college, which trains new wine workers.
If at first you don’t succeed, try again—for free –at Missouri State University-West Plains. “We’re telling students that if they go to all of their classes, do all of their assigned homework, communicate with their instructors and advisors and use our free tutoring services, they will earn acceptable passing grades,” said Chancellor Drew Bennett. “If, however, they faithfully do all of these things and still earn below a 2.0 grade point average, we will let them, for one time only, retake courses where they earned a D or F grade tuition free the next regular semester.”
Enrolling in community college raises the odds students will earn a bachelor’s degree, says a new study. Most don’t make it. But for most, the alternative to community college isn’t a four-year college or university. It’s no college at all.
The $10,000 bachelor’s degree will be a reality starting next year at University of Texas of the Permian Basin. UTPB “science scholars” will be able to earn a degree in chemistry, computer science, geology, information systems or mathematics for $2,500 a year, compared to the regular cost of $6,452 a year.
“Science scholars” must be Texas residents enrolled full-time who do not need any remedial coursework.
An excellent student from a blue-collar family in Canada, Kathy Shaidle thinks not going to university was “one of the smartest decisions of my life.” With a two-year media degree from a community college, she launched a successful career and “paid off my relatively puny student loans in short order.”
Challenged by Gov. Rick Perry to offer a $10,000 bachelor’s degree, a Texas university, working with community colleges, will offer a bachelor’s in information technology for $9,700. Another university plans a bachelor’s in organizational leadership for $10,000 or less by 2013.
More than 30 percent of U.S. adults hold bachelor’s degrees, the highest level ever, reports the Census Bureau. Women are on the brink of surpassing men in educational attainment.
As of last March, 30.4 percent of people over age 25 in the United States held at least a bachelor’s degree, and 10.9 percent held a graduate degree, up from 26.2 percent and 8.7 percent 10 years earlier.
Asian-Americans are the most educated: 50.3 percent have at least a bachelor’s degree and 19.5 percent hold a graduate degree. By contrast, 34 percent of whites, 19.9 percent of blacks and 14.1 percent of Hispanics hold a bachelor’s degree or more.
President Obama wants 55 percent of Americans to earn a college degree.
Super-sizing the number of graduates, which would require doubling enrollment, won’t make us more prosperous, argues Peter Wood. There’s no “straightforward correlation between the percent of the population holding college degrees and the nation’s prosperity or its international competitiveness.”
Can the Middle Class Be Saved? asks Don Peck in an interesting (and depressing) Atlantic story.
College graduates with a four-year degree are doing better than non-graduates, whose prospects are “flat or failing,” he writes. But the only people earning more are those with postgraduate degrees.
The less-educated middle class — people who made a decent living without a bachelor’s degree — is suffering financially and socially, Peck writes.
In a national study of the American family released late last year, the sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox wrote that among “Middle Americans”—people with a high-school diploma but not a college degree—an array of signals of family dysfunction have begun to blink red. “The family lives of today’s moderately educated Americans,” which in the 1970s closely resembled those of college graduates, now “increasingly resemble those of high-school dropouts, too often burdened by financial stress, partner conflict, single parenting, and troubled children.”
. . . Between 2006 and 2008, among moderately educated women, 44 percent of all births occurred outside marriage, not far off the rate (54 percent) among high-school dropouts; among college-educated women, that proportion was just 6 percent.
National policy is to turn everyone into a college graduate.
Grants, loans, and tax credits to undergraduate and graduate students total roughly $160 billion each year; by contrast, in 2004, federal, state, and local spending on employment and training programs (which commonly assist people without a college education) totaled $7 billion—an inflation-adjusted decline of about 75 percent since 1978.
Peck likes the idea of “career academies” within larger high schools and apprenticeships linked to community colleges as ways to help students find “paths into the middle class that do not depend on a four-year college degree.”
Higher education shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all of K-12 education, writes “edu-traitor” Cathy Davidson, an English professor, in an Inside Higher Ed commentary.
Higher education is incredibly valuable, even precious, for many. But it is bad for individuals and society to be retrofitting learning all the way back to preschool, as if the only skills valuable, vital, necessary in the world are the ones that earn you a B.S., BA, or a graduate and professional degree.
Many jobs require specialized knowledge, intelligence and skills, but not a college education, Davidson notes. Yet our educational system “defines learning so narrowly that whole swaths of human intelligence, skill, talent, creativity, imagination, and accomplishment do not count.”
Schools are cutting art, music, P.E. and shop to focus on college prep, Davidson complains. (I’d say schools are cutting electives — especially shop — to focus on basic reading and math skills.)
. . . many brilliant, talented young people are dropping out of high school because they see high school as implicitly “college prep” and they cannot imagine anything more dreary than spending four more years bored in a classroom when they could be out actually experiencing and perfecting their skills in the trades and the careers that inspire them.
We need value “the full range of intellectual possibility and potential for everyone,” Davidson writes.
The brilliant, talented kid who drops out to pursue a passion for art, carpentry or cosmetology is a rare bird, I think. But Davidson is right about the college-or-bust mentality in K-12 education. Many students who are bored by academics could be motivated — maybe even inspired — by a chance to develop marketable skills.
Some 80 percent of new community college students say they want to earn a bachelor’s degree. They sign up for remedial or general education courses. Few succeed. Students who pursue vocational goals — a welding certificate, an associate degree in medical technology — are far more likely to graduate.
Young people need some postsecondary education to qualify for decent jobs, but a bachelor’s degree isn’t the only way to success.
Also on Community College Spotlight: Texas will provide counseling to help college drop-outs complete their degrees.
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