July 5, 2009

Jill Biden Shines a Global Spotlight on American Community Colleges

Paris — Calling the community-college system in the United States “one of America’s best-kept secrets,” Jill Biden highlighted the virtues of an often overlooked sector of American higher education in a speech here on Sunday at an international conference at Unesco, the United Nations education-and-science agency.

The vice president’s wife, who has long taught at community colleges and currently serves as an adjunct professor of English at Northern Virginia Community College, told delegates to the 2009 World Conference on Higher Education that community colleges are of vital importance to President Obama’s goal of the United States having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020.

American universities are often cited as models of global excellence, but international attention is usually on elite research institutions, and the role community colleges play is neglected. In a time of economic crisis, that role is becoming increasingly important, Ms. Biden said. “More and more often in these difficult financial times, community colleges are an affordable way for students from middle-class families to complete the first two years of a baccalaureate degree before moving on to a four-year university,” she said.

Community colleges have for the past three decades been the fastest-growing sector in American higher education, Ms. Biden said, and the country’s 1,200 community colleges account for nearly half of all American undergraduates. A class she taught last year to a group that included students from 22 different countries illustrates the essential role these locally-focused institutions play in integrating recent immigrants — who have in many cases obtained degrees in their home countries — into their communities. —Aisha Labi

June 29, 2009

A Community-College President Tells Nacubo Attendees How He Approaches Fund Raising

Boston — For community colleges new to fund raising, it is essential to establish working relationships with business leaders before asking them for money, the president of the Community College of Rhode Island told an audience here today at the National Association of College and University Business Officers’ conference.

Ray M. Di Pasquale said that after he became president of the 17,000-student college, in 2006, he visited area business leaders and asked them what their needs were, especially in worker training. In addition to finding ways that the college could help businesses fill vacancies or train employees, the meetings gave Mr. Di Pasquale a chance to explain the college’s role in economic development, “what we’re doing to help make the state stronger.”

He left the business leaders with a four-page flier titled “This Is CCRI,” which includes facts about enrollment, degrees granted, the companies the college works with on employee training, and the number of students enrolled in programs that are meeting a need in the state, such as computer-networking technology and certified-nursing-assistant training.

Mr. Di Pasquale said several CEO’s wrote checks for $10,000 or $20,000 after those informational meetings, even though he hadn’t asked for a specific donation. The college is in the midst of a capital campaign with a goal of $5.5-million and has already raised more than $3-million.

The president of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce and a senior leader of a regional health network also spoke at the presentation, describing how they had worked with the college to establish mutually beneficial partnerships intended to bolster economic development and help people find jobs. (Rhode Island’s unemployment rate is higher than the national average, measuring 12.1 percent in May.)

It’s important that the partnerships go both ways, Mr. Di Pasquale said. If the college demonstrates that it benefits the business community, the community will give back. That giving might be money, volunteer time, or introducing the college to local philanthropists.

One benefit that the college provides to area businesses is the use of space on its four campuses at no charge, Mr. Di Pasquale said. (That approach is the opposite of what another community-college administrator suggested yesterday, that institutions should rent out space as much as possible for additional revenue.)

He also suggested that college leaders closely follow local business news, so they can adjust to current needs. “We can move quickly to helping,” Mr. Di Pasquale said. For instance, the college is starting nine new certificate programs, based on predictions of where companies need skilled workers. —Kathryn Masterson

June 23, 2009

How 15 States Are Working to Improve Remedial Education

Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit group focused on work-force development, released a report today on promising initiatives in 15 states to reduce the need for and to improve remedial education. The report, “Setting Up Success in Developmental Education: How State Policy Can Help Community Colleges Improve Student Outcomes,” is connected to a new program, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Lumina Foundation for Education, and MDC, to expand states’ efforts to improve remedial education. —Elyse Ashburn

Trustees Defer College's Plan to Rename Courses for Paid Sponsors

The City College of San Francisco’s Board of Trustees has temporarily repealed a plan to allow donors to sponsor classes that would otherwise be canceled, and to rename them in honor of their benefactors. The trustees said they had not been informed of the plan and needed to discuss it at a meeting on Thursday.

The college’s chancellor, Don Griffin, announced the plan on Monday but failed to notify the seven-member board beforehand. Board members told the San Francisco Chronicle they were irritated after they learned of the plan in Monday’s newspaper.

“Public education is not for sale,” Milton Marks, the board’s president, told the paper. “If someone wants to give money, that’s great. But getting publicity or feel-good points shouldn’t be necessary. It smacks of some sort of paternalism.”

Mr. Marks said there was no guarantee the proposal would ever be approved, but with the college facing cuts of $8-million to $12-million over the next few years, the board wasn’t ruling it out, either.

Since the plan was announced, no donors have offered the minimum $6,000 gift to save a course, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, though several potential sponsors have asked if they could make partial donations. —Erica R. Hendry

June 22, 2009

City College of San Francisco Seeks Donors to Sponsor Courses

The City College of San Francisco will face a cut of 800 courses this year — unless it finds donors to sponsor them.

For $6,000, sponsors can save one of the classes, which each meet three times a week for a 17.5-week semester, for about 30 students. If the sponsor designates the money for a specific course, its title would be changed to include the donor’s name.

The list of canceled classes spans disciplines, from elementary French and introductory accounting, to beginning piano and advanced kung fu.

California lawmakers announced they will cut about $630-million from the entire California Community College system — the largest community-college system in the country — over the next two years. For the San Francisco community college, that means drastically reducing its 9,800 course offerings, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The budget cuts also mean hundreds of students may be blocked from enrolling because of reduced class space and need-based subsidies, which help many students pay for the books, travel, and food necessary to attend college.

“These cuts will really hurt the mission of the college,” Chancellor Don Griffin told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Our goal has been to try to keep the access.” —Erica R. Hendry

June 4, 2009

Duncan Announces Grant Competition for Retraining Displaced Workers

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today announced a new $7-million grant program for community colleges to provide job training for laid-off autoworkers and other unemployed people.

“Community colleges are invaluable resources for adults seeking to acquire new skills that are needed by employers,” Mr. Duncan said during an appearance at Milwaukee Area Technical College. He is one of several cabinet secretaries and other high-level officials in the Obama administration traveling to the Midwest this week to visit communities affected by layoffs in the automobile industry.

The grants will provide seed funds for community colleges and other organizations to develop programs that help adults develop new career skills.

The new programs can offer services such as tutoring and academic and career counseling, or remove financial constraints for adults returning to college by assisting with child care, transportation, or textbook costs. The programs are meant to serve as national models that can be replicated elsewhere in the country.

The Department of Education expects by mid-September to award 28 grants of $300,000 to $750,000 each over a three-year period, with projects beginning on or about October 1. However, the new programs, which will be financed through the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, or Fipse, must be sustainable beyond the grant period.

The grant application will be published in Friday’s Federal Register. —Karin Fischer

May 29, 2009

Largest Community College in U.S. Will Cap Enrollment

Because of steep cuts in Florida’s budget for higher education, Miami Dade College, the largest community college in the country, has announced plans to cap enrollment, The Miami Herald reported.

Miami Dade had hoped to raise revenue through a special referendum asking voters to increase the local sales tax by a half cent, but a bill that would have put the referendum on the ballot failed in the Florida Legislature.

Eduardo J. Padrón, the college’s president, said the significant cut in state money would prevent Miami Dade from adding new class sections in the fall term. The college is also canceling all of the open-house events set for tomorrow on eight of its campuses.

Miami Dade, like most community colleges, traditionally has an open-door enrollment policy, but the college estimates that as many as 30,000 students will not be able to take the classes they need to graduate and more than 5,000 will not be able to register for any classes this fall.

Shrinking state budgets have also put California’s community colleges in a bind. The 110-college system is likely to reduce its enrollment by 250,000 students in the coming academic year. —Ashley Killough

May 20, 2009

Gates Foundation Awards Grants to 2 New Community-College Projects

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has thrown its support behind two new community-college projects as part of its continuing campaign to increase the number of financially needy students who complete a certificate or college-degree program.

The foundation announced today that it had given $560,000 to the City University of New York to help it plan a new community college that is being designed with the sole focus of sharply increasing graduation rates. The foundation also gave $350,000 to the Seattle-King County Workforce Education Collaborative, which includes 11 community and technical colleges, to help it design six postsecondary programs tailored to working adults. —Elyse Ashburn

May 19, 2009

Chancellor of Alabama's Community Colleges Resigns

Declaring that corruption in Alabama’s system of two-year colleges has been “cleaned up,” Bradley Byrne, the chancellor, resigned on Monday, The Birmingham News reported.

Mr. Byrne, a former state legislator, was hired in 2007 amid widespread turmoil in the system. A former chancellor and more than a dozen other officials were eventually charged with crimes including fraud, money laundering, theft, and conspiracy.

During his time in office, Mr. Byrne made enemies with the state’s powerful teachers’ union, which asserted that he had tried to weaken tenure in the system. A Republican who is considered a candidate for governor next year, Mr. Byrne is expected to make a formal announcement on his plans this month, the newspaper reported. —Paul Fain

May 14, 2009

Community-College Board May Make It Easier to Lay Off Tenured Faculty Members

Community colleges in Washington State could soon be able to lay off tenured faculty members much faster than normal, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

At its regularly scheduled meeting next month, the State Board of Community and Technical Colleges will decide whether to declare a financial emergency — a move allowed by a state law passed in 1981 to deal with budget crunches. Such an emergency would speed up the process for laying off tenured faculty members in that they would get only 60 days’ notice of layoffs and the grounds on which they could appeal the decision would be limited, the Post-Intelligencer reported.

Washington lawmakers have cut appropriations to the state’s 34 community and technical colleges by 10.7 percent in the 2009-10 operating budget. And because of that, the statewide association of community-college presidents asked the board to invoke the law.

Sandra Schroeder, president of the American Federation of Teachers’ union in Washington, told the Post-Intelligencer that most community-college presidents had let her know that they did not plan to use the law, but there is still the threat that they would have “additional leverage that they didn’t already have” when it comes to laying off tenured faculty members. —Audrey Williams June