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Community Colleges Get Boost to Improve
Graduation Rates
In July, President Barack Obama challenged community colleges to boost their ranks of graduates by five million by the year 2020. Congress is considering offering community colleges an unprecedented incentive — $9 billion in new funding in exchange for improved graduation rates. In an effort to improve postsecondary programs and graduate more students on time and at a lower cost, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation for Education are helping colleges and higher education advocates create a new accountability system with $1 million in grants.
Until now, there has been no universal system in place that aligns with the multiple missions of community colleges, so measuring progress has been difficult. The new system will help us understand how to improve the graduation rates of the 11 million students who currently attend 1,200 community colleges across the United States. Right now, only 28 percent of these students complete a two-year degree within three years; the rate drops to 26 percent for Hispanics and just 23 percent for African Americans.
“Community colleges recognize that it is time we focus on success and not just access for our students,” said George Boggs, president of the American Association of Community Colleges.
The College Board and the Association of Community College Trustees collaborated with the AACC to launch the project, which began last year with support from Lumina Foundation. All three organizations will continue to work together as the work moves into its implementation phase.
“True opportunity for our young people is not the right to enroll in college but the opportunity to reach their goal of a credential or degree,” said Hilary Pennington, the director of education, postsecondary success and special initiatives for the Gates Foundation. “But you cannot begin to improve completion rates until there is an agreed-upon approach to accountability.”
The accountability system could ultimately be adopted by all community colleges in the country, offering them the common metrics and data points developed specifically for their sector and mission to evaluate their effectiveness, both internally and against one another. The following eight initial sites will participate in the pilot: Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Ohio; Dallas Community College District in Texas; Greenville Technical College in South Carolina; Ivy Tech Community Colleges of Indiana; Laney College in Oakland, Calif.; Louisiana Community and Technical College System; Oklahoma City Community College; and Pima Community College District in Tucson, Ariz. Twelve additional community colleges are expected to be added to the pilot program by 2011, resulting in the creation of a voluntary accountability system.
“The first step will be to get everyone speaking the same language,” said Lumina CEO Jamie Merisotis, whose foundation will contribute technical expertise as well as share the cost of the project. “For example, there is little consistency in how states report retention or graduation rates, so we first must agree on universal measures that are easy to calculate and are meaningful to both college officials and the general public.”
The new voluntary accountability system will help community colleges meet that challenge by establishing, for the first time, common performance measurements necessary to evaluate an institution’s effectiveness. It will help provide valuable feedback on programs and services to which officials should direct resources, and will allow them to benchmark each individual college’s progress against others. The new measures will also help assure lawmakers and the public that funding through the American Graduation Initiative will be well-spent and provide results.
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