by Steve Giegerich

There wasn’t much talk about college during Rebecca Mathis’ formative years in south Florida. She grew up in a singleparent household, the daughter of a Haitian immigrant who pointed Rebecca toward life as a traditional wife –- one whose success would be measured by her abilities to cook, clean and care for her husband and family.

Rebecca took that path straight out of high school. She married at 17, and by the time she turned 21 she was the mother of two. Last year, Rebecca and her husband, Obed, welcomed a third child into the family. Fortunately, even as she moved quickly from high school student to wife and mother, Rebecca never lost touch with another message from her childhood. “My mother always told me that, when it seems that all the doors are shut for you, there’s always one door open,” she recalled. “You just need to walk through it.”

In January 2004, Rebecca found that open door –- at the admissions office on the central campus of Broward Community College in Davie, Fla. By walking through that door and enrolling in a community college, Rebecca joined a varied and growing group. She became one of the 11.6 million students attending one of the nation’s nearly 1,200 two-year institutions.

According to the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), these 11.6 million students represent 46 percent of all U.S. undergraduates and 45 percent of first-time freshmen.

Clearly, in terms of carrying the enrollment load, the nation’s two-year institutions (particularly its 979 public two-years) are doing yeoman’s work. This is especially true among students in groups that are typically underserved in higher education, including low-income students, first-generation students and students of color. Community colleges serve 47 percent of the nation’s black undergraduates, 56 percent of Latinos and 57 percent of Native Americans.

For Rebecca and millions of other underserved students, community colleges provide a precious opportunity. Without the accessibility, low cost and flexibility of Broward’s class schedule, Rebecca wouldn’t be a college student, and she might never reach her dream of being a registered nurse. In her words: “I basically wouldn’t get anywhere.”

In Rebecca’s case, Broward is a family affair. She and Obed, 26, are both studying to be registered nurses –- as is her 57-year-old mother, Juliette Mentor, a licensed  practical nurse. To attend Broward, Rebecca and Obed juggle family and work. When one is in class or on the job, the other is home minding the kids. After receiving their associate’s degrees, both plan to transfer to a four year institution to complete their education.

Because they took an indirect route from high school to college, Obed and Rebecca are classified as “nontraditional” students (those older than age 22).  Obed works 40 hours a week as a technician in a hospital psychiatric ward; Rebecca works 20 hours a week in a work-study program on the Broward campus. An average student through much of high school, Rebecca took a required prep (or developmental) class at Broward to get up to speed in algebra, a core subject. Broward required Obed, who arrived in Florida from Haiti at the age of 15, to take three prep classes –- reading, writing and math -– before he could begin earning credits toward his degree. When Rebecca receives her diploma, she will be the first in her family to graduate from college.

The Mathises’ demographic profile –- nonwhite, older, first-generation, employed, parents –- belies the commonly held image of a “college student.” Their lives have very little in common with that of a typical 18- to 22-year-old full-time student at a four-year residential campus. Yet, more and more often, community college students such as Rebecca and Obed Mathis reflect the realities of American higher education.

“There are so many competing issues in their lives,” said Kay McClenney, director of the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) at the University of Texas-Austin. “These students are really heroes; they are people who often have to choose between buying books and paying their rent.”

Working to widen the window of opportunity
As more and more students turn to community colleges to help them transform their lives, these two-year schools are seeking to transform themselves. At least two forces are driving this change: First is the widespread belief – and a founding principle of the community college movement –- that a college education should be accessible to all Americans who seek it. Second is the increasingly urgent message that a high school diploma, once considered the standard for economic success, is no longer sufficient to compete in the highly competitive, global job market.

With the cost of an education at four-year residential institutions skyrocketing, community colleges also have become an increasingly popular option for students who want to meet basic course requirements at lower prices before moving on to a four-year institution. Finally, with their emphasis on community, public two-year schools continue to serve workers who want to upgrade the job skills that keep local economies viable.

The multiple missions of community colleges are, policy-makers agree, both the bane and the blessing of the system. Almost universally acclaimed by the communities they serve, two-year schools offer a range of services that can sometimes leave the institutions grasping for definition and identity. That uncertainty, in turn, can feed a common misperception that community colleges are the second-class citizens of American higher education.

“We don’t always rank as the college of choice, even among the faculty,” said Kimberly McKay, outreach coordinator for student services and development at South Texas College in McAllen, Texas.

Lori Baker, dean of student services at Virginia Western Community College in Roanoke, believes that sentiment is evolving. She draws an analogy between an economy motel and a luxury hotel: “The community college doesn’t have all the amenities that four-year colleges have. We don’t have valets or bellhops, and … we certainly don’t put chocolates under the pillow. But at the end of the day, when you stay at a hotel, there’s only one thing you really want, and that’s a good night’s sleep. I think the community college system provides what we’re all truly trying to provide –- an education that will help students meet their goals.”

Still, there’s always room for improvement, and the nation’s community colleges are embracing that spirit and working to transform the culture of two year higher education. Some attribute the changes to natural progression, the transition to a new generation of leaders and faculty from those who have guided community colleges since their widespread inception in the 1960s and 1970s.

Community colleges have always filled at least two basic niches: preparing transfer students for four-year institutions and meeting the workforce
development needs of the communities they serve. What has changed, according to Thomas Bailey, director of the Community College Research
Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, is a shift in institutions’ focus from inputs (enrollment rates) to outcomes (rates of attainment or success).

This emphasis on accountability is making community colleges take a hard and honest look at how well they serve the students they enroll. Perhaps the students they’re looking at most closely are those who drop out after one semester or less. To meet the challenge of getting more students through the first year and beyond, community colleges are turning to a familiar but often-underused tool: student-outcomes data.

“There is a sense that accountability is something they need to confront,” said Richard Kazis, director of Jobs for the Future, a Boston-based advocacy organization for economic and educational development.

“In the past, it was not unusual for community colleges to say: ‘We have so many different kinds of students coming in for so many different things, so it’s very difficult to say what our retention rates mean or what our graduation rates mean.’ There is now a sense that they can no longer say that. … They now understand that data about student outcomes helps them improve what they’re doing. It helps them understand where they are weak and where they have value and where they need to improve.”

It’s not that community colleges have operated in a data vacuum. The numbers were always there; but these days, community colleges are crunching them in ways they’ve never done before. This data driven trend is part of the general movement toward greater accountability in education that is perhaps most evident in the federal No Child Left Behind law. The trend also is being spurred by efforts such as Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, a national initiative that aims to improve success rates among community college students, particularly those in underserved, at-risk populations.

The initiative, which began in 2004 with funding from Lumina Foundation for Education, now includes 10 partner organizations, including two additional funding organizations, KnowledgeWorks Foundation and the Nellie Mae Education Foundation. Achieving the Dream is at work in seven states, on the campuses of 35 community colleges.

One of those colleges is South Texas College (STC), one of the new kids on the community college block. Located in McAllen, barely 10 minutes from the Mexican border, the school opened in 1993. Registration lines wound around the block that first year, when STC served 1,000 students.

Today, more than 17,000 students attend STC –- a school that, along with the area’s low labor costs, has been a driving force behind the growth in light industry in Hidalgo and Starr counties.

Building ‘a culture of evidence based on data’
In turn, the driving force behind STC is Shirley A. Reed, the school’s first and only president. Tough and plain-spoken, Reed is an educational leader who’s never shy about pushing the state legislature for larger appropriations or urging greater productivity from faculty and staff.

Reed’s playbook has always contained volumes of data reflecting the make-up, character and academic level of STC students. The research also provided vivid evidence of the school’s Achilles heel: 25 percent of the school’s at-risk students departed between the first and second semesters, and fully half of them never made it to a second
year of classes.

As much as Reed was driven by the numbers, she struggled to convince the faculty to embrace the relationship between data and classroom performance. The faculty always pointed to anecdotal evidence from their classrooms –- unprepared students who needed to be held more accountable for their performance –- to trump the data. Eventually,
the two sides came together.

First, the president agreed that the faculty’s instincts about conduct were often correct. Students were indeed registering late, unwilling or unable to adapt adequate study habits and delaying important decisions, notably failing to line up the financial aid that would guarantee them funding for their second year at STC. “The more we looked at the factors,” said Reed. “The more it was clear we were accommodating bad behavior.”

But then Reed urged faculty members to look to the causes of that behavior. Faculty bought in to the idea, and STC is now much more systematic in using research data to better understand and address the challenges that so many students face.

“We came to the conclusion that we needed to build a culture of evidence based on data, not just what we thought made sense,” said Reed.

The root of the low retention rate was a lack of readiness: The STC entrance exam indicated that 83 percent of incoming freshmen were unprepared for college-level courses. Sixty-seven percent of them required remediation in English, reading or math. Arriving at college unprepared for class work is one obvious barrier to college success. And STC and other community colleges have identified other such barriers –- other factors that magnify academic shortcomings and put students at risk of dropping out. They include:

• Being the first member of the family to attend college.
• Being the product of a K-12 system that failed to develop students’ potential.
• Holding down a job, in most cases full time.
• Being a parent, often a single parent.
• Being a part-time student and dropping out periodically due to the demands of time or lack of resources.

Identifying these challenges was the first step; then came the hard part.

“They are all different challenges,” pointed out Frank Renz, executive director of the New Mexico Association of Community Colleges. “That makes it difficult for the community colleges –- especially in the student services offices. (These offices) could use a cookbook on how to support these students because they differ so much from one individual to another and one population to another.”

For the colleges that have joined Achieving the Dream, that means taking the education of at-risk students in an entirely different direction. Some call it a holistic approach –- education in the context of life. STC and others prefer to call it case management. Whatever it is called, it’s the acknowledgment that the classroom is usually just one part of an intricate web that constitutes life for these students –- a web complicated by financial distress, family obligations and other social and economic factors.

Fully appreciating these circumstances helped lift the curtain on a truth that many in community colleges seemed to overlook: Nontraditional students, who attend community colleges in huge numbers, often confront barriers that many four year students simply don’t face.

“It was the elephant in the middle of the room,” said Eileen Holden, vice president for academic affairs at Broward, another Achieving the Dream college.

“Everybody knew it was there, but nobody wanted to talk about it because then we’d have to do something about it. We never looked at the problem through the lens of the tremendous amount of courage it takes for people who test into three prep (remedial) classes to stay here.”

The steps colleges have taken to move at-risk students from registration to graduation aren’t exactly radical. But they’re close. “Nobody ever crunched the numbers  before,” said Michael Cook, coordinator of the first-year program at still another Achieving the Dream institution, Mountain Empire Community College (MECC), in Big Stone Gap, Va. “We’ve tried other things in the past, like early-warning systems. But they just didn’t work. I don’t think they were intrusive enough.”

At South Texas College (STC), intrusiveness begins the moment the school has a student’s placement exam in hand. The test includes an addendum that alerts counselors and administrators to the risk factors at play –- work, family, poverty and high-school achievement levels. Once at-risk students are identified, the school tracks their progress on campus, monitoring them for potential danger signs such as irregular attendance, slipping test scores, a tendency to switch majors, and other clues that failure or dropout may be imminent.

This is where the Student Success Center (SSC) enters the picture. Located in a state-of-the-art facility four times larger than the building it replaced, the center is, in effect, a safety net designed to catch at-risk students in free fall. It’s a net supported by a computer program that combines risk factors, faculty input and classroom performance. When a red flag goes up, the success center springs into action.

Patrick Murray, the center’s director, punched up the record of a student who came to the SSC’s attention after enrolling in the same basic math class five times. “We at first thought the student had a learning problem,” Murray explained. “Then we realized, after looking at the data, that he was just putting off the hard work in his classes because of math anxiety. He was in classes, but he wasn’t trying to pass the classes.”

Once a problem is identified, the center’s Structured Learning Assistance program takes over, offering intensive one-on-one peer and professional staff tutoring undertaken with a single purpose: to keep the student in school.

Student success has become a mantra on many two-year campuses. It is the watchword that motivates staff and faculty, and it’s used to inspire students who once were allowed to quietly fade away.

Success is at the center of the eight sections of the course that Leslie Sherman teaches at Broward’s North Campus in Coconut Creek, Fla. Sherman’s classes combine practical skills (time management, prioritizing), life skills (including how to balance a checkbook) and basic pedagogy. She also requires each student to learn 50 new words by the end of the semester. “Half of these kids have never written a report before,” she said. “They can read the words, but they don’t have any idea of how to put them together in a sentence.” By semester’s end, if all goes according to plan, the students will have learned what they must do to succeed in college.

As befits a “success course” teacher, Sherman works with boundless energy and patience. The assignment on a late November day required each student to deliver a short presentation, complete with background material, to describe his or her academic major and career goals. One student explained how a love for children pushed her toward being a social worker; a prospective psychologist discussed a penchant for helping others; a would-be FBI agent detailed the steps necessary to achieve her career goal. In the questions she asked and the gentle advice she offered, Sherman treated each student with the deference of a Harvard dean consulting with a doctoral candidate. Finally, a young woman stepped to the front of the class. Her objective: to become an elementary school teacher.

“What do teachers do every day?” Sherman asked.

The student hesitated. “Go to work?” she half answered.

Sherman didn’t flinch; she didn’t grimace. She pushed forward. “And what do they do at work?” she pressed. A student in the back of the room snickered.

“Um, they teach kids.”

“Exactly!” Sherman exclaimed with unbridled enthusiasm.

The young woman smiled. She’d aced Ms. Sherman’s test, such as it was. With a bounce in her step, the student returned to her seat.

“Is it frustrating?” Sherman asked rhetorically after class. “Of course it is. But I can’t let that come out. It’s my job to give these kids a second chance in life. So many of them have never had praise –- ever. Nobody ever said to them: ‘I believe in you.’”

One story speaks volumes about the personal relationships Sherman builds with her students. One day in late October, she received a call from a young woman in her success class. The student’s 2-year-old son had died 10 minutes earlier, losing a long battle with kidney disease. Leslie Sherman was the first person she called.

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