Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
Community colleges have lowered reading, writing and math standards to avoid failing their poorly prepared students. Many high school graduates leave 12th grade to study 8th- and 9th-grade material in community college, writes the NCEE’s Marc Tucker. About a third are not ready for 8th-grade work.
Trauma is part of the job for many community college instructors, writes Wick Sloane, who teaches writing at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston. He suffered “secondary trauma” after one of his students was murdered in 2007 for no known reason. Another student in the same College Writing I class: Tamerlan Tsarnaev. He cut frequently, e-mailed some excuses, then dropped out.
Community colleges are developing special programs to improve the success rates of black male students.
Community college students are learning how to learn online — or perhaps the courses are improving. The completion gap is narrowing between online and traditional courses, according to a survey of community colleges. Nearly half of colleges said online students do just as well as students in face-to-face courses.
Self-paced, online courses backed by data analytics could help community colleges get remedial students up to speed, said Khan Academy founder Salman Khan in a keynote speech at the American Association of Community College convention. Some community colleges are creating their own online tutorials, often geared to remedial students.
California will continue to let community college students take as many credits as they wish at very low rates. Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposal to limit low-cost credits to 90 — 30 more than the minimum for a two-year degree — died in the Legislature.
“Flipping” and “blending” a San Jose State engineering class raised pass rates dramatically. The university partnered with edX on the pilot.
Eighty randomly selected students in an entry-level engineering course watched online lectures from MIT (the flip), while solving problems in class, with the professor’s help (the blend). Ninety-one percent of the flipped students passed the class. Only 55 and 59 percent of non-flipped students passed.
All-online classes tend to have low pass rates. Community college students say they feel “on their own” in all-online courses.
Only 49.2 percent of degree-seeking community college students reach their goal or transfer in six years, according to California’s new Student Success Scorecard. Graduation-and-transfer rates fell as more students face wait lists for entry-level classes and difficulty transferring to state universities.
New York City high schools are flooding community colleges with unprepared students. Eighty percent need remedial reading, writing or math — especially math — when they enroll, up from 71 percent a few years ago. “Faculty members have been transformed into de facto high school teachers,” complains the Village Voice.
The city’s community colleges are trying intensive math catch-up courses to improve abysmal success rates for remedial math students.
Retraining adults for high-demand jobs and improving graduation rates are the priorities for Iowa community colleges. Half of enrollees earn a credential or transfer in three years. That’s better than most states, but Iowans think theycan do better.
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