Community Colleges and the Access Effect

Why Open Admissions Suppresses Achievement

J. Scherer, M. Anson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137331007
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Taking on the cherished principle that community colleges should be open to all students with a high school education, Scherer and Anson argue that open access policies and lenient federal financial aid laws harm students and present the case for raising the minimum requirements for community college entry.

Chapter 1

Open Access in Higher Education

When the inaugural president of the University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper, first met with his faculty in 1892, he presented an idea that exemplified why the new president was thought of not only as an academic prodigy, but also a visionary. The university, resurrected from recent bankruptcy through generous gifts from Harper’s friend John D. Rockefeller and a collection of distinguished Chicago philanthropists, was designed in its new incarnation to be a Harvard or Yale of the Midwest, with the most accomplished faculty that money could buy and a mission focused on scholarship and research.¹ During his rise to the presidency, Harper declared that he had “. . . a plan which is at the same time unique and comprehensive, which I am persuaded will revolutionize university study in this country.”² In his faculty address, Harper pronounced it an unwise commitment of university resources for these handpicked professors to spend time on the general, lower-division education of freshmen and sophomore students. Instead, this general education should be relegated to a collection of junior-level colleges—something akin to thirteenth and fourteenth years of high school, where all high school graduates could enroll in college-level courses in a broad array of general, but essential, fields of study. When this general education was completed, the student could apply then to the university for more education in specific disciplines, leading to a scholarly and research-focused bachelor’s degree.

Some who listened to Harper’s junior college concept praised the idea, seeing value in having talented faculty who taught and worked only with upper-division and graduate students. Others saw in the recommendation a dangerous precedent—the suggestion that anyone with a high school diploma could continue on to the first two years of college without more stringent admission requirements.³ While Harper never succeeded in moving the first two years of the baccalaureate off campus, another friend and colleague, the superintendent of the area’s Joliet Township High School, applied Harper’s ideas to the creation of an experimental postgraduate high school program. Under the administrative leadership of Superintendent J. Stanley Brown, Joliet Junior College was established in 1901 and enrolled its first six students. Within a year, this postgraduate high school program received formal approval from the district’s school board, and open access to postsecondary education for high school graduates was born.⁴

Not until the 1940s, though, as thousands of soldiers returned from the World War II to the benefits promised by the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, did open access to higher education reach full stride. The “GI Bill,” signed into law that year by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, provided federal government aid to returning soldiers for readjustment to civilian life and “was in effect the largest scholarship program in the Nation’s history.”⁵ While these federal funds also assisted veterans with hospital bills and provided capital for home and business investments, the most meaningful long-term benefit associated with the G.I. Bill was financial support for postsecondary education opportunities.

The American community college has not always functioned as the open access institution it effectively does today; entry to the first, Joliet Junior College, for example, was firmly reserved for high school graduates. In 1922, at the second meeting of the American Association of Junior Colleges (now the American Association for Community Colleges, or AACC), the junior college was described by the AAJC as “an institution offering two years of instruction of strictly collegiate grade”⁶ [emphasis added]. Altering its junior college definition two years later in 1925, to include a wider curriculum scope in the community college, the AACC specifically impressed that “It is understood that in this case, also, the work offered shall be on a level appropriate for high-school graduates”⁷ [emphasis added].

As World War II came to a close, President Harry S. Truman convened a special Commission on Higher Education to address the unique educational needs of these returning soldiers, many of whom had postponed their secondary education to go to war. Between 1939 and 1945, approximately 500,000 fewer high school diplomas were issued than in the previous six years. In its 1947 report, Truman’s Commission on Higher Education called for the creation of a national network of community-responsive colleges, with entirely open enrollment policies, to more easily accommodate the vast number of soldiers without recent formal education records and/or high school diplomas. By some estimates, approximately 25% of the veterans who attended college directly after World War II would not have enrolled if not for the benefits provided by the G.I. Bill, and they chose to attend in unprecedented numbers. Nearly one million World War II veterans represented half of the men who graduated from college from 1940 to 1955.⁸ These young veterans were returning to a changed America, often without a completed secondary education or adequate postsecondary job training, and with the added challenge of competing against hundreds of thousands of fellow soldiers in a society where more jobs than ever before required some formal job training.

The Commission’s report also acknowledged that the abundant manufacturing jobs that built America during the Industrial Age, roughly between 1860 and 1920, had gradually declined in number as major railroads were completed, large cities constructed, and as mechanization replaced thousands of manual workers. Of the eligible secondary student population in 1924, only 30% graduated from high school, a rate that by 1960 had risen to 75%.⁹ And whereas in 1910 just 5% of eighteen-year-olds enrolled in college, that rate had increased nine-fold by 1960. In the fall of 1939, nearly 1.5 million students were enrolled in college; by 1959, that number had more than doubled to 3.6 million.¹⁰ By observing the growth in America’s higher education enrollment between 1940 and 1960, the country can be seen taking its first significant steps toward a knowledge-based economy in post-industrial America.

During the decade of the 1960s, a new community college emerged somewhere in the United States at a rate averaging nearly one per week, leading one historian of the movement to anoint the community college as “the new land-grant institution; the people’s college in the truest sense.”¹¹ Simply put, the community college movement was the most remarkable development in education in America—perhaps the world—during the twentieth century, and was driven by the nation’s need to make a college education accessible to every qualified American.¹² President Truman’s brand of open access extended into the next decade as America struggled to accommodate the influx of college-age Baby Boomers, though not all community colleges were founded in the 1960s with open door policy, as much as historians and enthusiasts like to recall. Even institutions founded with admissions standards, though, eventually began practicing open enrollment as the nation’s community colleges grew throughout the 1960s to enroll previously underrepresented populations in response to the equality-driven demands of the civil rights movement.

Community college chroniclers McCabe and Day described this pursuit of educational equity in America, coupled with other efforts to extend social equality to previously marginalized groups, as “the access revolution,”¹³ and Lavin and Hyllegard proclaimed open admissions to be:

The most ambitious effort to promote educational opportunity ever attempted in American higher education. . . . One of the last great examples of the 1960s commitment to the idea that social policy could and should be used to advance equity in U.S. society.¹⁴

Federal legislation, driven by evolving social and educational philosophy, encouraged higher college attendance by racial and ethnic minorities, women, persons with disabilities, and those without the financial means to self-fund. Specifically, through Title VI of The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Higher Education Act of 1965, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act in 1973, and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, postsecondary education was transformed from being an opportunity reserved most commonly for America’s affluent whites, to one extended to students without regard to race, gender, religious orientation, or disability.¹⁵ Arguably, no institution in higher education has so consistently, efficiently, and appropriately responded to society’s changing needs as the community college.¹⁶

Response to the Unprepared

The burgeoning growth of the college-going population, though, was not without its critics. As enrollment increased, many four-year colleges and universities inundated with low-skilled applicants responded by instituting stricter admissions criteria. As a way to assess ability and potential among those applying, standardized tests were employed more routinely, such as the SAT and the ACT, the latter of which became available in 1959.¹⁷ Students unable to qualify for enrollment at more selective institutions flooded the nation’s open access community colleges. Between 1965 and the turn of the century, community college enrollment grew by 500% while only doubling in the four-year public sector of higher education.¹⁸

As early as the 1970s, scholars began to debate the merits of open admission as unprepared students allowed to enroll in college-level courses experienced unconscionable rates of failure.¹⁹ In 1973, Palinchak observed that community colleges in particular were beginning to struggle with a new set of philosophical dichotomies—“quality v. quantity; pedantic v. realistic; elite v. mass; idealism v. pragmatism; standards v. democracy; privilege v. right.”²⁰ In his vanguard text, Evolution of the Community College, Palinchak was one of the first to criticize the appropriateness of open door policy as the community college student body showed ever-widening disparities in preparation and abilities, noting:

A distinct problem arises over the interpretation of what is euphemistically called the “open door” policy. . . . When a “two-year” institution admits anyone and everyone, as a true open door would, it is often done with a sincere attitude of extending democracy and bringing more rights to our citizens. At this point, however, many institutions discover that they are unprepared or unable to provide adequate programs for “students” who are unconventional by all traditional criteria.²¹

Open door policy, responsible for allowing some students to enroll in college-level courses they were not prepared for, eventually became pejoratively termed “revolving door” policy,²² which is still the unfortunate experience for a large number of students who enter community colleges, enroll beyond their abilities, fail, and leave. Many community colleges that had previously employed wide open access to their college-level courses responded by toeing the door slightly shut in the 1980s and 1990s by way of instituting mandatory assessment policies for the purpose of evaluating entering students’ college readiness and more effectively advising them into appropriate courses.²³ Developmental education course design and enrollment exploded during these decades. “Right to fail” philosophy at the nation’s community colleges had officially yielded to “right to succeed” as concerned community college faculty and administrators sought to limit the casualties of what Richard Fonte termed “laissez-faire open access.”²⁴

Mitchell’s 1989 description of his community college’s conversion from a laissez-faire open door policy to one with mandatory assessment and placement components draws back the curtain on prevailing thought at the time—that any college not employing mandatory assessment and placement with an open door policy was acting fraudulently:

If our standards were high, our attrition rates were also extremely high, leaving us open to the charge that we were committing the fraud of promising and charging for educational services that we could not deliver because we gave “students the right to fail” and provided programs that all but insured that they exercised that right.²⁵

. . . Either we could commit the other fraud—allowing students to continue to enroll in virtually any course they wanted while we raised standards so high that many, if not most, had no chance to pass the courses—or we could do the right thing and prepare them for college level work before we allowed them to attempt college level work. We could “give them the right to fail” or “give them the right to succeed.”²⁶

That same year, Ed Morante argued that mandatory assessment and placement should not be viewed as a penalty, but rather as an important indicator of a community college’s stewardship.

Essentially proponents of (“right to fail”) philosophy argue that, as adults, students have the freedom to choose courses even if there is a low probability of succeeding in these courses. This philosophy . . . is based on the concept of freedom and a process of decision-makin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Chapter 1   Open Access in Higher Education
• Chapter 2   The Trouble in Tucson
• Chapter 3   The Price of Completion at Any Cost
• Chapter 4   The Perils of Paying for Performance
• Chapter 5   The Revenue Reality
• Chapter 6   Honoring the Letter and Spirit of Federal Student Aid
• Chapter 7   The Disabilities Dilemma
• Chapter 8   The Access Effect
• Chapter 9   Creating a New Admission Standard
• Chapter 10   Providing Meaningful Postsecondary Options
• Chapter 11   The Equity/Excellence Enrosque
• Chapter 12   The Impact of Global Competition
• Chapter 13   Restoring America’s Culture of Learning
• Notes
• Index