May 15, 2008
Study Finds Varying Community-College Enrollments Among States
Enrollment in two-year colleges varies widely from state to state, according to a report being released today.
In some states, a higher share of the population is enrolling in community colleges than in other states, by as much as five to one, the report says.
The report, based on a study conducted by David F. Shaffer, a senior fellow at the State University of New York’s Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, urges researchers and policy makers to study the differences.
“The data indicate that the differences are real, and important,” wrote Mr. Shaffer, the report’s author. “What remains to be learned is what explains them.”
The report describes a link between lower tuition and higher percentages of students enrolled in two-year colleges. But tuition doesn’t tell the whole story, the report says, because some states offering low tuition at two-year colleges don’t have especially high rates of enrollment.
On average in the United States, tuition at a two-year college takes 3.6 percent of median family income, the report says. It points out that while states with the highest rates of adults enrolled in two-year colleges have the cheapest tuition, many states that have low two-year enrollments also offer low tuition.
Nationally, enrollment in community colleges in the United States grew more slowly than enrollment in public four-year colleges from 2000 to 2005, the study found. But in several states, including Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Michigan, Georgia, New York, and West Virginia, community colleges are outstripping public four-year colleges’ enrollment rates. —Kate Moser
Posted on Thursday May 15, 2008 | Permalink | CommentMay 13, 2008
N.C. Community Colleges Will Not Admit Illegal Immigrants After All
The tug of war over what to do with illegal immigrants who seek to attend community colleges in North Carolina continues, as the state’s 58-college system announced today that it would no longer admit students who had entered the country illegally.
“We asked the attorney general’s office for clarification of our present policy and will abide by their advice,” said the system’s president, R. Scott Ralls, in a written statement announcing the decision.
Last week federal immigration officials released a statement saying that “it is left for the school to decide whether or not to enroll” undocumented students. The community-college system is now heeding the advice of the state attorney general, Roy A. Cooper III, a Democrat. His office has asked the system to revert to a directive, issued in December 2001, that barred illegal immigrants from working toward a degree.
But the issue may not be dead yet. North Carolina’s governor, Michael F. Easley, also a Democrat, has challenged the attorney general’s opinion, The News & Observer reported today. Last week Governor Easley called on community colleges to continue admitting illegal immigrants who meet eligibility requirements.
The community-college system estimated that just 112 out of more than 297,000 degree-seeking students are illegal immigrants. Those students will be allowed to complete their degree programs at out-of-state tuition rates. —JJ Hermes
Posted on Tuesday May 13, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [40]May 8, 2008
Keep Admitting Immigrants, Governor Tells N.C. Community Colleges
A day after the state attorney general’s office advised North Carolina community colleges to drop their policy of admitting illegal immigrants who meet other eligibility criteria, the state’s governor is urging colleges to continue admitting immigrants, according to The News & Observer.
The earlier advice, in a letter to the system’s general counsel, suggested that the policy conflicted with federal law, but Gov. Michael F. Easley, a Democrat, said in a written statement today that federal law on the issue was not settled. He added that he was asking the attorney general to seek clarification from Washington on whether illegal immigrants were eligible to attend community colleges. —Charles Huckabee
Posted on Thursday May 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [18]May 7, 2008
N.C. Community Colleges Urged by State Lawyer to Limit Enrollment of Illegal Immigrants
North Carolina’s 58 community colleges should drop their policy of admitting all illegal immigrants who meet the institutions’ other eligibility criteria and restrict access to those who meet standards outlined in federal law, the general counsel for the state’s attorney general said in an advisory letter issued today, according to the The News & Observer, a newspaper in Raleigh, N.C.
The general counsel’s advice runs counter to a directive issued last fall by the community-college system’s lawyer. In November, David Sullivan, the system’s general counsel, issued a memorandum in which he said that the community colleges should immediately begin admitting undocumented immigrants who meet the basic requirements of either having graduated from high school or being at least 18 years old. That overturned a policy of allowing the campuses to decide individually whether to consider applicants’ immigration status.
When he issued the memorandum last fall, Mr. Sullivan said his directive was based on a 1997 opinion by the state’s attorney general at the time — Michael F. Easley, a Democrat who is now governor — which said that the colleges could not impose nonacademic criteria for admission.
A spokeswoman for the community-college system was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that officials there would take today’s letter — from J.B. Kelly, the general counsel in the state attorney general’s office — under advisement. —Sara Hebel
Posted on Wednesday May 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [14]April 16, 2008
Math-Education Guru Describes Challenges and Solutions for Community Colleges
Arlington, Va. — Community colleges need to do a much better job of explaining to students how the course sequences in mathematics and science fit together and lead to degrees and careers, said P. Uri Treisman, a nationally recognized, prize-winning advocate for change in education, at the National Science Foundation here.
Mr. Treisman offered a blitz of advice and encouragement during his keynote talk at an annual NSF event highlighting education by community colleges. Mr. Treisman is a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, and he is known for his scholarly work in identifying factors that help minority students succeed in math courses. (He started his own academic career at a two-year institution, Los Angeles City College, where he was working as a campus gardener and studying landscape design when he overheard a mathematics lecture and became intrigued.)
He has visited many community colleges with NSF-financed projects to improve teaching. Two-year colleges play an important role in educating future scientists and engineers. More than half of minority students who earn bachelor’s degrees in those fields start their studies there. And community colleges are under pressure nationally to produce more technically trained workers who can help drive local economic development.
Mr. Treisman found that many instructors at community colleges were demoralized by their students’ high failure rates. “They’re working in a system that’s somewhat dysfunctional and broken, yet they’re teaching their hearts out,” he said. Effective teaching and career guidance are especially needed in those institutions because many of the students are poor, work part time, and constantly re-evaluate whether their studies will pay off.
However, many community colleges are wedded to traditional course sequences in math that aren’t clearly matched to career paths that might interest students, Mr. Treisman said. Instead of algebra and pre-calculus, he said, a more effective preparation for many jobs would often be a one-year sequence of general math followed by statistics.
Some institutions have succeeded at retaining students in technically oriented training programs — in biotechnology and in nursing and other allied health professions, for example — through some simple steps, he said. Those include enrolling students with similar interests in similar courses, the equivalent of learning communities.
Efforts like those, often financed by the NSF and other external sources, have helped some community colleges build “beautiful islands of excellence” in teaching math and science, Mr. Treisman said. But too often, the projects don’t survive when the money goes away, he said. Community colleges must build on one another’s successful approaches and not continually re-invent the wheel, he said (a challenge facing colleges of all types).
Despite the challenges, he was optimistic. Because of middle schools’ focused efforts at improving teaching, their students’ achievement in math has steadily improved. Why can’t that happen in community colleges? he asked. “Even on a crappy day, we can do amazing things for our students and our kids.” —Jeffrey Brainard
Posted on Wednesday April 16, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [7]April 7, 2008
For-Profit Colleges Have Advantages, but Community Colleges Have Some, Too
Philadelphia — For-profit colleges hold several advantages over two-year public institutions in the competition for students. But community colleges also hold several key cards, including a fundamental one — their community ties.
“That community involvement is our real strength,” Joe May, president of the Louisiana Community & Technical College system, told a crowd of more than 40 community-college leaders at a morning session here today at the annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges.
In Louisiana, for example, his system has been responding to local and state needs by training construction workers to help rebuild homes in New Orleans damaged by Hurricane Katrina; by training students in engineering-technology fields to work in the increasingly important regional industry of processing liquid natural gas; and by teaching welding, machining, and other skills vital to the work force in the state’s important ship-building industry.
Investor-owned companies might do some of that as well, if they saw it as a market, he said later, in an interview. “But they’re not going to do anything that’s not profitable to them,” he said.
Mr. May has spent most of his career in community colleges but worked for about two years for a for-profit company with colleges in the United States and overseas. In the morning session, Mr. May was quick to acknowledge that several trends are creating “a real opportunity for for-profits,” including declining state support for public colleges, which is forcing some of them to raise tuition, and a general shift in societal attitudes that now values higher education more as an individual benefit than a public good.
But he said community colleges could combat those trends with strengths of their own. For one, he noted, they are more comprehensive than most for-profit colleges, and so can better serve students who may decide partway through their education that they want to shift to a different program.
Most important, he said, community colleges could and should do more to improve service to their students on matters like advising and financial-aid counseling. For-profit colleges do that well, and even though they may be doing it as part of their “sales” strategy, he noted that “from a student’s point of view, it’s service.”
All of those services need not be so costly. One place to start, said Mr. May, is the college’s Web site, where right now, a lot of key information “is often buried.” Colleges could also do more with online advising and telephone-based counseling. “Technology,” said Mr. May, “can create a more level playing field.” —Goldie Blumenstyk
Posted on Monday April 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [6]March 27, 2008
Community Colleges in New Jersey Are Newest Focus for State Scrutiny
State investigators in New Jersey have apparently now turned their sights to the state’s 19 community colleges.
As first reported by the Asbury Park Press, the State Commission of Investigation is seeking records of the colleges for an investigation whose scope was not disclosed.
The state agency is the same one that had previously found financial wrongdoing in the operations of a number of the state’s 4-year public colleges and its school of medicine and dentistry.
A spokesman for the New Jersey Council of County Colleges said the advocacy organization was aware that officials at all 19 community colleges had received letters of inquiry from the commission, but had no further details. —Goldie Blumenstyk
Posted on Thursday March 27, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [5]March 18, 2008
Class-Action Lawsuit Over Textbook Prices Is Dismissed
A federal court on Monday dismissed a class-action lawsuit over textbook prices that was filed by two students at Daytona Beach Community College, according to Westlaw, a legal-research clearinghouse.
In November 2006, the students sued the college and Follett Higher Education Group, the nation’s largest collegiate-bookstore chain, seeking to recover at least $5-million in damages because of what they alleged were overcharges by Follett on sales of used textbooks and underpayment for buybacks of used textbooks. The students sought class-action status for the case, on behalf of students on other campuses where Follett runs bookstores.
According to Westlaw, the U.S. District Court in Orlando, Fla., concluded that the case lacked “predominance of common issues of law, as required for certification of the nationwide class.” One issue in the case was that the students were nonresidents, and would need to prove the application of consumer-protection laws in each state where book purchases were made and damages were suffered. Furthermore, the court ruled, the students had not proved they had incurred sufficient damages to warrant the amount they were seeking in restitution. —Elizabeth F. Farrell
Posted on Tuesday March 18, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [15]March 9, 2008
Arizona Community-College District Is Accused of Misusing Federal Grant Funds
A former electronic-library project administrator with Arizona’s largest community-college district has accused the boss who fired her last fall of misusing hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grant money that was designated for the library project, according to the East Valley Tribune, a Phoenix-area newspaper.
The Tribune reported, citing e-mail records, that the National Science Foundation was investigating the former employee’s complaint. A spokeswoman for the federal science agency, however, would neither confirm nor deny that it had undertaken such an inquiry.
The complaint relates to a $1.7-million grant the Maricopa County Community College District received from the NSF in 2005 for its Advanced Technology Education Center. A visiting review committee found the center’s progress “insufficient” on key projects in 2006, the newspaper said. The center’s director, Michael Lesiecki, fired the employee, Kim Grady, in September 2007.
Ms. Grady complained to the NSF that Mr. Lesiecki was using the library grant to pay for other activities of the center, the newspaper reported, and complained separately to the district that the money she had expected to receive from the grant was short by as much as $200,000 every month.
Mr. Lesiecki and other college officials did not respond to the newspaper’s requests for comment. If the NSF money was misused, the college could be at risk of losing millions of federal grant dollars. The district has hired an outside firm to conduct an investigation of its own, the newspaper said. —Charles Huckabee
Posted on Sunday March 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [5]March 2, 2008
Doing Remedial Education Right Can Mean More Money, College Official Says
Denver — Almost every community college has a project to improve remedial education. But most colleges struggle with expanding those programs to any meaningful level — from, say, 100 students to 2,000. The primary challenge: money.
Well, not so, says Robert Johnstone, vice president for instruction and institutional research at Foothill College, in California. Programs to improve remedial education often pay for themselves, Mr. Johnstone told college officials here in a session on the first day of the annual conference of the League for Innovation in the Community College.
Mr. Johnstone helped debunk the cost argument as part of a systemwide project to improve remedial education in California’s community colleges. That project found that the additional costs of enhanced remedial-education programs were generally covered by the resulting increase in student retention and, ultimately, enrollment.
For example, an intensive mathematics program at De Anza College serves 75 students a year and costs $81,990. But over a three-year period, the students in that program go on to complete 36 percent more contact hours than remedial students who aren’t in the program. That means higher enrollment and more money from the State of California — $213,357 more.
That money isn’t all profit, Mr. Johnstone said. But even so, it’s enough to cover the additional cost of the intensive math program. Which just goes to show, he said, that effective programs can be expanded without breaking the bank. —Elyse Ashburn
Posted on Sunday March 2, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [10]
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