Redesigning America's Community Colleges

A Clearer Path to Student Success

Thomas R. Bailey,Shanna Smith Jaggars,Davis Jenkins

• Éditeur: Harvard University Press
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674425958
• Sujet: Pedagogía
• Sous-sujet: Educación superior

In the United States, 1, 200 community colleges enroll over ten million students each year—nearly half of the nation's undergraduates. Yet fewer than 40 percent of entrants complete an undergraduate degree within six years. This fact has put pressure on community colleges to improve academic outcomes for their students. Redesigning America's Community Colleges is a concise, evidence-based guide for educational leaders whose institutions typically receive short shrift in academic and policy discussions. It makes a compelling case that two-year colleges can substantially increase their rates of student success, if they are willing to rethink the ways in which they organize programs of study, support services, and instruction.Community colleges were originally designed to expand college enrollments at low cost, not to maximize completion of high-quality programs of study. The result was a cafeteria-style model in which students pick courses from a bewildering array of choices, with little guidance. The authors urge administrators and faculty to reject this traditional model in favor of "guided pathways"—clearer, more educationally coherent programs of study that simplify students' choices without limiting their options and that enable them to complete credentials and advance to further education and the labor market more quickly and at less cost.Distilling a wealth of data amassed from the Community College Research Center (Teachers College, Columbia University), Redesigning America's Community Colleges offers a fundamental redesign of the way two-year colleges operate, stressing the integration of services and instruction into more clearly structured programs of study that support every student's goals.

1

Redesigning College Programs

NOWHERE are the features—and disadvantages—of the cafeteria model more apparent than in the design of community college degree and certificate programs. To achieve their goal of serving a diverse array of students, community colleges offer a wide variety of courses and programs, including both for-credit and noncredit options. In this book, we narrow our focus to for-credit programs leading to postsecondary credentials: “associate of arts” and “associate of science” programs, which are generally designed to prepare students for transfer to bachelor’s degree programs; and occupational certificates and “applied associate” programs, which prepare students for direct entry into jobs as diverse as respiratory therapy, protective services, and early childhood education. If a college serves large numbers of both occupational and transfer-oriented students, then it may offer hundreds of such degree programs. And when this number is multiplied by the dozens of programs offered by four-year transfer destinations, transfer-oriented students may have thousands of options—too many for even the most experienced advisors, let alone students themselves, to understand and evaluate.

In addition to the multiplicity of program choices, the course-taking path within each program is often unclear—many programs have a plethora of electives and course alternatives. This problem is particularly acute in transfer-oriented programs, which give students broad flexibility in the introductory liberal arts and science courses they must complete to meet requirements for “general education” curricula. Faced with a wide range of choices, students seeking to transfer to four-year institutions often express confusion about which courses to take. Moreover, in both transfer and occupational programs, course learning outcomes are not always tied to program learning outcomes, making it difficult for students to build a coherent set of skills as they progress across the curriculum.

In this chapter, we describe the cafeteria model’s focus on courses rather than programs, and examine the effects of this focus on students. We find that the typical student is overwhelmed by the many choices available, resulting in poor program or course selection decisions, which in turn cost time and money, and likely lead many students to drop out in frustration. In particular, the lack of coherence in transfer-oriented programs, and the poor alignment of such programs with requirements for transfer with junior standing in a specific major at a four-year college, create barriers to advancement for students.

What is a solution to the chaotic and confusing environment that confronts students when they arrive on campus? We argue that the guided pathways model can provide a route through college that is relatively easy to understand and follow, and that helps structure student choices. In this model, students who have chosen a major or program are provided with a program map that defines a default sequence of courses, each with clear learning outcomes that build across the curriculum into a coherent set of skills, which in turn are aligned with requirements for successful transfer or career advancement. New students who are undecided about a major must choose one of a limited number of exploratory or “meta-majors” that expose them to educational and career options within broad fields. The meta-majors also include program maps of default sequences of courses.

While this approach provides a more structured pathway through college, it does not eliminate student choice. Students can choose among programs or meta-majors; they can change programs; and they can customize their initial program map. But once they have chosen a program, if they do not explicitly decide to alter the default map, they will be in a coherent program that leads to a defined educational credential and explicit objectives for further education or career advancement. The maps are designed to enable students to complete credentials as quickly as possible, and make it possible for students and their advisors and faculty to track progress and intervene if students are not making headway or stray “off-map.”

The chapter is divided into four sections. First, we describe the confusing and inefficient pathways inherent in the cafeteria model that lead to low completion rates and weak student outcomes. In the following section, we present the guided pathways model and explain how and why it can overcome many of these problems. Then we describe some examples of the model in practice. In the final section, we argue that the redesigned program pathways described in this chapter provide a structure around which colleges can engage faculty and staff to rethink and improve the effectiveness of student support, instruction, and intake—examples of which are examined in subsequent chapters.

Complexity and Confusion in the Cafeteria College

As they enter community colleges, students are confronted with a series of complicated decisions they must make, often with little assistance. In this section, we review research from behavioral economics that analyzes the problems individuals face when confronted with a complex environment like a college, and we show that students often make poor decisions as they try to navigate through college programs. Next, we focus on transfer. Transfer is fundamental to the community college mission, since the large majority of students in credit programs state a desire to transfer and earn a bachelor’s degree. We show that the transfer process is particularly inefficient and confusing to students. Then we argue that the course-based structure of community colleges makes it difficult to create coherent pathways based on defined program-level learning outcomes.

Choice Architecture and Student Behavior

In a review of research from psychology, marketing, and behavioral economics, CCRC researcher Judith Scott-Clayton argues that the complex choices facing community college students may lead to poor decisions.¹ She cites three overarching findings that have implications for community college students. First, individuals are not necessarily aware of their own needs and preferences, and their choices may be affected by a variety of seemingly irrelevant contextual factors. In the community college context, this finding suggests that student decisions about programs and courses could depend in part on how various options are presented, or on other factors such as convenience of schedule or which courses their friends are taking—in other words, considerations that may be unrelated to the merits of particular options.

Second, even when individuals are aware of their own needs and preferences, they do not have unlimited time to research available options for a given decision, nor do they have an unlimited capacity to process vast amounts of information. Particularly when one is unfamiliar with a specific type of product or service, it is time-consuming and intellectually challenging to identify relevant information, understand it, apply it appropriately, and judge how well each option matches one’s needs and preferences. The process is even more difficult when choices involve tradeoffs. For example, a short occupational certificate program may be relatively easy to complete and may reduce a student’s earnings only briefly (while the student takes courses); but, on the other hand, it may increase the student’s long-term employment prospects only modestly. In contrast, a longer-term program will be more academically demanding and may reduce earnings for the longer period required to complete the program, but it may also lead to higher earnings and better advancement opportunities in the long run. Attempting to compare multiple dimensions of costs and benefits across a variety of options is a formidable exercise. Indeed, while people enjoy having choices in general, they dislike these types of complex balancing acts, and they tend to avoid situations that require such decisions. Perhaps as a result, when faced with complex decisions, people commonly choose the easiest or most obvious option, even when the benefits of doing otherwise are substantial.

Third, sometimes the easiest decision is not deciding—or at least delaying the decision. Researchers have found that people defer decisions when they are faced with multidimensional tradeoffs, when they are uncertain how to weigh different types of costs and benefits, and when they are unsure about the long-term consequences of each option. This notion of “decision deferral” is particularly troubling when we consider the choices that college students must make. If a student is confused about various course options for the upcoming semester, the easiest path may be to defer the decision. However, “later” may be too late if the student misses the financial aid deadline, or if required courses have filled up, or if life circumstances have conspired to make it easier to put off enrollment until the next term.

Scott-Clayton argues that the decision-making context confronting students at community colleges may be even more complex than that of their peers at elite four-year institutions, and the consequences of suboptimal decision making may be more negative.² In contrast to community colleges, which give students a broad choice of courses and programs and limited guidance, elite four-year institutions often offer many fewer program options, and much more individual guidance in selecting from a smaller set of majors; some also provide a more structured curriculum of first- and second-year courses. Scott-Clayton points out that Harvard University, for example, offers limited choices to its undergraduates: they can attend only full-time, they must complete a required core curriculum in a face-to-face setting, and they must choose one of forty-three majors leading to a bachelor’s degree.³ In contrast, nearby Bunker Hill Community College offers over seventy associate degree or certificate programs in more than sixty academic and applied fields, with no required core curriculum. Advisors are available, but there are too few to offer individualized support. Many students are left to decide on their own whether to enroll full-time or part-time, or whether online or face-to-face courses are optimal in each subject area. At Harvard, most freshmen follow a limited set of curricular paths, and they can consult with one another on their relatively limited options in terms of courses, professors, and programs. At Bunker Hill, a given student may not know another student who is following a similar path, and thus may garner only limited advice from his or her peers.

If community college students confront a more complicated set of choices than do students in elite four-year institutions, they also have fewer resources for managing complex decision making. James Rosenbaum and his colleagues have argued that the lack of structure in community college programs increases the importance of “social know-how” or “college knowledge,” which in turn tends to place already disadvantaged groups commonly served by these institutions—including low-income, minority, and first-generation college students—at a further disadvantage.⁴ Since they are often unable to ask a parent or sibling who has already been through college, these students are especially in need of effective guidance. Rosenbaum also finds that lack of clear guidance can lead students to make costly mistakes, such as taking credits that are not accepted for transfer credit in the specific major a student wants to pursue at a university and pursuing credentials that have limited labor market payoffs.⁵

It is also worth noting that, on average, compared to undergraduates at elite institutions, community college students are more often employed, are more likely to have young children, and have fewer family financial resources.⁶ Outside obligations and pressures further complicate their lives and may tax their mental and emotional capacities to make good decisions.⁷ Compared to their peers at elite four-year colleges, community college students may also be more easily derailed by bad decisions. In a 2006 article in the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, economist Marianne Bertrand points out that low-income people make the same types of mistakes as high-income people, but the consequences of their mistakes are more devastating:

People who live in poverty are susceptible to many of the same idiosyncrasies as those who live in comfort, but whereas better-off people typically find themselves, either by default or through minimal effort, in the midst of a system composed of attractive “no-fee” options, automatic deposits, reminders, and so forth, that is built to shelter them from grave or repeated error, less-well-off people often find themselves without such “aids” and instead are confronted by obstacles—institutional, social, and psychological—that render their economic conduct all the more overwhelming and fallible.⁸

Along the same lines, a student from a high-income family who discovers that he or she has taken a course that does not count toward graduation or transfer can shrug off the time and money spent as a minor hassle. In contrast, for a low-income student, the time spent on a semester-long course translates to at least a full week of time away from wage earning. The forgone wages, together with any tuition not covered by financial aid, may require cuts in basic household expenses for items such as groceries, health insurance, or children’s clothing. To realize that such painful sacrifices were wasted on an unnecessary course is no minor hassle. The outsize consequences of these types of small mistakes mean that the poor can afford fewer mistakes, and they may feel the need to avoid or exit contexts that tend to cause them.

Students Lost in a Maze

The research described above suggests that confusing pathways can make it difficult for students to make good decisions, and some empirical evidence reinforces this idea. Quantitative analyses of student transcript data show that many students pursue suboptimal enrollment patterns. For example, several studies have found that students who eventually earn an associate degree tend to earn a significant number of “excess credits.”⁹ A CCRC study of community college students in one state found that associate degree holders earned 12 percent more cr...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Redesigning College Programs
• 2. Guiding Students
• 3. Rethinking Student Instruction
• 4. Helping Underprepared Students
• 5. Engaging Faculty and Staff
• 6. The Economics of College Redesign
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index