Closing Doors

The title of a Kevin Carey article in The New Republic is a question we’ve all been pondering for the past few years: “Why Are Community Colleges Being Treated Worst When They’re Needed Most?” Since the recession began, community colleges have been increasingly looked to as engines of economic recovery and to provide training for unemployed and low-income workers. Last week, President Obama once again touted their value during a speech at Lorain County Community College, an Achieving the Dream institution, in Ohio:

“When you take classes at a community college like this one and you learn the skills that you need to get a job right away, that does not just benefit you; it benefits the company that ends up hiring and profiting from your skills. It makes the entire region stronger economically. It makes this country stronger economically.”

Carey outlines at least three facets of a community college mission: “continuing education for adults, job training for local labor markets, and the first two years of a baccalaureate education.” Shining a spotlight on that mission and asking colleges to increase their productivity and flexibility isn’t a bad thing, but it has been accompanied by unprecedented resource cuts in state legislatures across the country. Calls for community colleges to do a better job are matched with slashed budgets, rather than with the investment and support that are needed for successful reform.

For decades, we’ve been working to expand access to higher education, while simultaneously trying to improve student success rates. Rising costs and reduced public investment are now threatening to reverse hard-won progress in higher education access and success. A new report by Gary Rhoades of the Center for the Future of Higher Education reveals that as enrollment caps expand and the number of educational programs narrow, many lower-income students and students of color are losing access points to postsecondary education. Rhoades explains:

“In a complicated ‘cascade effect,’ higher tuition and enrollment limitations at four-year institutions have pushed middle-class and upper middle-class students toward community colleges. This, in turn, increases competition for seats in community college classrooms at a time when funding for community colleges is being slashed and fees are increasing. As community colleges draw more affluent students, opportunity is being rationed and lower-income students (many of whom are students of color) are being denied access to higher education.”

Pushing low-income students out of the educational pipeline can only further entrench an increasingly immobile class system. A New York Times column from last month assembled some alarming data on the relationship between education and inequality. In 1970, 6.2 percent of students from low-income families attained a bachelor’s degree by the age of 24, compared to 40.2 percent of students from high-income families. By 2009, 82.4 of students from high-income families had completed a bachelor’s by age 24, but only 8.3 percent of students from low-income families were able to do so. Given that workers with a bachelor’s degree earn 82.8 percent more annually than workers with only a high school diploma, low-income youth are increasingly fated to remain low-income for their entire lives.

Remember, the Truman Commission warned us about this in 1947. When education is “prerequisite to occupational and social advance,” but is available only to the affluent, it will “become the means, not of eliminating race and class distinctions, but of deepening and solidifying them.”

With just over half of all entering community college students requiring developmental education courses, dev ed remains a main point of access to higher education. As we continue our push to improve the outcomes for students in these programs, we must not allow these programs to be rationed or slashed. Well-structured reforms can lead developmental education programs to accomplish what they are intended to do: help students, regardless of background and level of preparation, obtain a credential or degree and put them on the path to economic stability. As Carey explains, “opening the doors of higher education to ever more Americans is a perpetually unfinished project. But it’s a tragedy that we are simply choosing to watch some of those doors swing shut.”

This Week in Links: Equity, Policy, Analytics, and Peeps!

• Sara Goldrick-Rab posted this week about the assault on community colleges (and, by extension, on equity): “That's right—students are showing up at ‘open door’ colleges and being effectively turned away.  Welcome to the ‘new normal.’”
• Getting Past Go posted a video on Tuesday of Katie Hern’s presentation to the National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO). Katie, previously featured on Accelerating Achievement and director of the California Acceleration Project, gives a five-point policy agenda:

1. Set a statewide policy directive that limits the amount of time students spend in remediation
2. Incentivize colleges to develop accelerated pathways in reading/writing, ESL, and math
3. Fund professional development to train faculty to develop and teach in new accelerated models
4. Maintain a commitment to access while increasing completion – we need to cut the lower levels from our remedial sequences, not the students unlucky enough to be placed there
5.  Reject solutions focusing on the need for more and better placement testing, including “diagnostic testing.”

• The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning is “designing a system that will incorporate institutional records going back to 2008 on the longitudinal performance of cohorts of students designated for developmental mathematics at each of the 30 colleges participating in [their] community college mathematics pathways initiative. These data constitute a baseline for understanding institutional performance over time, for establishing college-by-college improvement targets, and for exploring the antecedents and conditions of performance going forward.” They are also “prototyping continuous data feed reports to faculty on their classroom context and individual student progress.” Pretty cool stuff.
• Remember last year, when we were inspired by the Washington Post’s Peeps Diorama Contest to use peeps to demonstrate key developmental education reforms, like contextualization and a strong peer support network? Sadly, we don’t have any new dev ed peep-oramas this year. But be sure to check out the winners of this year’s Washington Post Peeps Diorama contest.

Cowboys and Mavericks and Educators! Oh My!

This week, we’re in Dallas attending D.R.E.A.M., Achieving the Dream’s Annual Meeting on Student Success. We spent Tuesday with the 15 DEI colleges talking about the ideal pathway to completion for students that are underprepared for college-level work. Today, we went to several great sessions—and, sadly, missed some great ones because we haven’t learned how to be in two places at once. Here are some of the highlights:

• This morning, a plenary panel moderated by Eileen Baccus, ATD coach, focused on equity. Steven Murray, Chancellor of Phillips Community College of the University of Arkansas, shared how after several years of engaging the campus in conversations about race and class, Phillips is rolling out a community dialogue about racial reconciliation. Murray said that while the community has some significant tensions, and that there is no other institution as well-suited to start these much needed conversations about how to grow together.  Don Plotts, president of North Central State Community College talked about reaching out to a primarily African American and low-income portion of their community, by opening an Urban Center in a convenient downtown location. With feedback from students and community leaders, they developed the services of the center, which now include a business incubator. Tom Jaynes, executive dean for Student Development and Support of Durham Technical Community College spoke about how DTCC has been pushing for increased equity since they started their ATD journey. Jaynes noted that once you see the data improving, it can be easy to sit back and feel good about a job well done, but there is always more to do. DTCC is working to keep the wind in their sails with a new focus on connecting low-income students to financial aid and benefits. Finally, Millicent Valek, president of Brazosport College, said that because of ATD, her college now treats students as individuals with unique needs. This is a new way of thinking for them, and they are using the equity agenda as a driver for their student success work. Brazosport is sharing that message on campus with a video on equity featuring MDC president David Dodson.

• One of the first concurrent sessions we saw today featured Capital Community College and Housatonic Community College. These Connecticut colleges talked about how implementing the Statway program has given Connecticut community colleges a chance to take the benefits of the ATD core team model into a multi-college team to great effect. They’ve built on ATD data collection, enhancing it by adding additional variables and comparing across colleges; they’ve also seen how direct collaboration between researchers and faculty has enabled them to improve pedagogy.

• We spent part of the afternoon with five Ohio community colleges: Cuyahoga, Eastern Gateway, North Central State, Sinclair, and Zane State. These leader colleges have worked hand-in-hand with the Ohio ATD/DEI state policy and the Ohio Association of Community Colleges to convene regional and statewide meetings of ALL Ohio community colleges. They’re sharing Achieving the Dream core principles, committed leadership, data driven decision making, engagement, and systemic institutional improvement, in hopes that other colleges can realize some of the benefits that ATD colleges have seen. Some of those benefits have been changing the campus conversation, maintaining clarity about a student success agenda, and providing momentum  to pursue that agenda—all of these are particularly important as Ohio adopts a new performance funding system based on specific student achievement points. 

We know you’ll want more details and we’ll be providing them in posts in the coming weeks!

Birthday Wish: Equal Opportunity

Today, Accelerating Achievement turns one. This week, we’re looking back at some of the year’s highlights and thinking about where the next year will take us.

There’s a lot going on in the DEI network of colleges, states, and partners. All year, we’ve been highlighting learnings from our exchanges of information and ideas in DEI Dispatches. Our What’s Up with DEI series featured the work of all fifteen colleges and six states; one week last May, we brought you daily posts from a few practitioners who work at the intersection of equity and postsecondary completion. We kicked off that week with The Ladder of Educational Opportunity, which reminded us that supporting programmatic and policy innovations can help ensure developmental education programs accomplish what they are intended to do: help students, regardless of background and level of preparation, obtain a credential or degree and put them on the path to economic stability.

As Americans, we pride ourselves on being members of a society where equal opportunity offers everyone a chance at success. But mounting evidence suggests that children born into low-income families are not likely to ever improve their economic security. In a speech last Thursday, Alan Krueger, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, illustrated the lack of social mobility in America:

Studies find that your parent’s income is a good predictor of your subsequent income. Studies that use income data averaged over longer periods of time for parents and children tend to find higher correlations between parental and children’s income. A reasonable summary is that the correlation between parents’ and their children’s income is around 0.50. This is remarkably similar to the correlation that Sir Francis Galton found between parents’ height and their children’s height over 100 years ago. This fact helps to put in context what a correlation of 0.50 implies. The chance of a person who was born to a family in the bottom 10 percent of the income distribution rising to the top 10 percent as an adult is about the same as the chance that a dad who is 5’6” tall having a son who grows up to be over 6’1” tall. It happens, but not often.

Why is it that so few low-income young people are able to advance in America? The readers of this blog know from experience that our education system, the keystone of our society’s meritocracy, has fallen on hard times. The pipeline that carries students from childhood to postsecondary education and living-wage work is leaky, damaged, and archaic. A postsecondary credential is now more vital than ever for finding work, but the majority of students who enroll at community colleges are not prepared for college-level courses. Too many students who need developmental education never progress on to a credential. Dev ed practitioners and policy-makers know that as long as our dev ed programs allow so many students to stagnate, social mobility will remain low. Promising innovations all around the country are getting more students quickly through these programs and on to credit-bearing courses, but they need to be expanded and replicated. Transforming dev ed from a barrier and a burden for underprepared students to a stepping stone toward achievement will restore a crucial rung on the ladder of opportunity.

Guest Post: The Benefit Bank Helps Community College Students Claim Work Supports

We’ve looked before at different ways to help students build a safety net that enables them to meet school obligations as well as personal, family, and work obligations, including financial counseling and financial literacy instruction. Today’s post from Michael Schultz, MDC VISTA, details another MDC initiative that helps connect individuals to available financial supports that could make the difference between a completed semester or an early withdrawal.

Consider this: an estimated $70 billion in work supports goes unclaimed by eligible households in the United States each year. Unbelievable, right? Community college students are often eligible for federal work supports beyond financial aid, yet lack of knowledge and barriers to access result in federally apportioned dollars going unclaimed.

Most notably, many community college students may be eligible for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps. In order to be eligible for SNAP, full-time college students between the ages of 18-49 must meet at least one of the following criteria:

• They work at least 20 hours a week
• They work any number of hours in a federal or state work study program
• They are a married parent with at least one dependent under the age of 6
• They are a single parent with at least one dependent under the age of 12

Students must also meet the program’s income and asset limits that vary from state to state in terms of definitions, exemptions, and deductions.

Another work support likely available to community college students is the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Available to anyone who earns income during the year, the EITC is fully refundable, meaning even households that owe no taxes can still receive the EITC as part of their refund. The greatest benefit is to households with children. The maximum credit for a household with one child is $3,094, with two children it is $5,112; with three or more children, it is $5,751. Households without children are also eligible: a single person without children, over the age of 25, and earning roughly between $6,000 and $7,500 is estimated to receive the maximum $464 tax credit. The IRS estimates that as many as 1 in 5 eligible households fail to claim the EITC. This population almost certainly includes many community college students who don’t realize they are eligible. (Check out the EITC Carolinas website, an MDC initiative, for more information.)

MDC’s Works Supports Initiative seeks to connect eligible populations, like community college students, to the federal and state benefits for which they are eligible. This national initiative uses an online service called The Benefit Bank^® (TBB) in partnership with community and faith-based organizations to help clients fill out benefit applications, e-file taxes, and complete the FAFSA. The Benefit Bank allows individuals to complete multiple applications in a user-friendly format with simple prompts and gateway questions that determine when more information is required. With TBB, a client can receive help filling out benefit or tax forms at a familiar community organization with the trusted assistance of a counselor. With confidence, knowledge of the application process, and the proper forms in hand, TBB helps to make it easier to connect low- and middle-income households to work supports.

Benefit applications can currently be completed using The Benefit Bank in ten states: Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas. Federal benefits are accessed through state agencies with states having flexibility to shape their state’s version of the program. Thus, to complete benefits applications, TBB requires partnerships with the appropriate state agencies. Affiliate partners in each state help to build the necessary partnerships with state agencies and with the community organizations whose trained counselors use TBB to serve their clients. To receive benefits, the completed applications must be accepted by the proper state agencies that then determine eligibility, including checking the paperwork and identification.

Of immediate use in all states is TBB’s Quick Check feature, a one-minute benefit screener that estimates the likelihood of eligibility for a range of benefits. Also available in all states is TBB Self Serve, a free e-File service for federal taxes paired with a FAFSA application. The key strength of TBB is its ability to take the proper information from one form and pre-populate another benefit form. For example, after completing taxes using TBB, a significant portion of the tax information on the FAFSA will already be filled in when a user completes the application. This “bundling” saves time and is kept secure within each client’s individual password-protected portal.

In a time when community college students are hard pressed to make ends meet, connecting students with financial aid and works supports can help students stay in school. The Benefit Bank makes connecting students to works supports like SNAP and the EITC that much easier.

Michael Schultz is an AmeriCorps VISTA at MDC.