LaGuardia Community College students: Enriching the fabric of American life

"We reflect the face of what the country's becoming in terms of this tremendous diversity." -- Gail Mellow

You could forgive Dr. Gail Mellow if she thought of herself as higher education's answer to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. Every day, the president of LaGuardia Community College goes to work at a school attended by nearly 13,000 students representing more than 150 countries and 110 different languages. Two-thirds of the students were born in another country and, of those, half have been here fewer than five years.

"There are great similarities between LaGuardia and the United Nations," Mellow says. "The difference is all LaGuardia's students, for the most part, want to be the next Americans."

This college, appropriately located within miles of the Statue of Liberty, exists in three converted factory buildings in Long Island City, N.Y., where biscuits, paper bags and automotive parts once were manufactured. The noisy No. 7 train rattles overhead, shuttling almost all of the students to and from this urban learning place.

By many measures, the trip appears to be worthwhile. The University of Texas-Austin's Community College Survey of Student Engagement (www.ccsse.org), funded in part by a Lumina Foundation grant, helps institutions evaluate their performance with students based on five benchmarks: active and collaborative learning, student effort, academic challenge, student-faculty interaction and support for learning. LaGuardia ranked in the top three among large community colleges (8,000-14,000 students).

"LaGuardia really did remarkably well on several of those benchmarks and does it in a context that is challenging: the proportion of U.S. students who were born in another country, for whom English is not the first language, who have other challenges related to poverty and the like," CCSSE director Kay McClenney says. "Not only did LaGuardia do well in the CCSSE survey, but other data indicate that with a highly diverse -- and some would say high-risk -- student population, it is doing some things right. It's just an extraordinary place."

What's creating these results? President Mellon and Paul Arcario, dean of academic affairs, cite four big contributions:

A highly motivated faculty that develops and nurtures programs such as the ePortfolio, which invites students to post their work and their goals on the World Wide Web for families and prospective employers.
The Learning Community program that links classes and faculty so that English as a Second Language and Intro to Computers, for example, are taught collaboratively.
The online groups in which faculty and graduates help students understand what it will take to get a degree and get ahead in their chosen fields. (See the portfolios.)
The annual exercise where the entire student body reads the same book. ("West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story" by Tamim Ansary was this year's choice.)

"I really have the highest respect for our faculty," says Arcario, who started at LaGuardia in 1988 teaching English as a Second Language, "because they're really a teaching faculty. They have worked hard to get beyond the lecture and multiple choice tests."

Nationwide, only about 50 percent of the freshmen enrolled at community colleges return in the second year. However, at LaGuardia, 65 percent of students come back for a second year. Surveys show that 69 percent of the LaGuardia graduates go on to four-year colleges -- a rate 16 percentage points higher than national results.

That's no small feat at a school where 90 percent of incoming students need remedial help, come from families with an average income of $26,400, and are studying in what for most of them is a foreign language: English.

"Imagine getting a college degree in your second language, reading all the textbooks in your second language," Arcario says. "That's what our students are facing. But I think we reflect the face of what the country is becoming in terms of this tremendous diversity. You can't be in a more exciting place."

"There is a sense of purpose at this campus and commitment to these students," says Mellow, LaGuardia's president for the past 3 1/2 years. "Maybe this is the mother in me, but there's an earnestness in these students, a deep desire to learn. Regardless of the barriers that face them, you see this hope shining forth, and you just can't help wanting to do everything you can to help them succeed. We don't make it with everybody, but I think a lot of students' lives are profoundly changed. And then, they change us."

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LaGuardia Community College students: Enriching the fabric of American life

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