GLIB, NARCISSISTIC, AND QUICK TO PALM OFF THE GRUNT WORK TO someone else, Jeff fit to a T the stereotype of the callow young lawyer on the make, his suits as shiny and pricey as his Ivy League pedigree. Then everything fell apart. With his degree exposed as issuing forth from Colombia, the for-profit degree mill, not from the famous Columbia University, Jeff was suspended from his law firm, disgraced and disbarred. He resolved to start over.
As in all morality tales, Jeff’s plummet from social grace ended up being his saving grace, maybe even his salvation. His detour from a life of great material rewards became an opportunity to find deeper human riches. Even with intermittent backsliding on his way to a moral path, Jeff gradually dropped his defenses and learned humility, patience, hard work, and respect for others. Slowly, step-by-step, he traveled a long road toward happiness. He grasped a second chance to live life on a different scale—better, more human, humane. His path began at Greendale Community College.
Meet Jeff Winger, played by actor Joel McHale, the star of the cult NBC comedy series Community. Created by comedian and writer Dan Harmon and based on his experiences attending community college, the plot of Community is straightforward. Still at square one on his winding road to salvation—that is, an associate’s degree—Jeff is determined to seduce a fellow Greendale student, Britta Perry, a radical activist and high school dropout who is returning to community college after traveling around the world. To get closer to her, Jeff invites Britta to join him in a study group. She agrees. But because she really intends to work, she invites several classmates to join: Abed Nadir, the Palestinian-Polish popular-culture trivia addict who sits somewhere on the ADHD spectrum; Troy Barnes, the handsome African American jock who uncomfortably reveals he is a geek at heart; Annie Edison, the insecure young brainiac working to overcome social anxieties and a high school addiction to Adderall; and Pierce Hawthorne, the affluent, closed-minded senior citizen “returning student” who (played by the perfectly unctuous Chevy Chase) spouts platitudes of self-discovery to anyone he can bully into listening.
This is the eccentric, diverse cast of characters commonplace on sitcoms. In the segregated world most Americans inhabit, rarely does one actually encounter such diversity in everyday life. Except perhaps at an actual community college, where one finds people of all ages, backgrounds, races, economic classes, religions, and forms of intelligence, preparation, and determination. What is shared among this singularly diverse social group is a common goal: gaining an education. This TV roman à clef gets the demographics right. As our elite universities become ever more bastions of the 1 percent, with exorbitant tuitions that only the affluent can afford, community college works in the opposite way, by being open to those who need that second chance.
Welcome to college for everyone! Most of us grasp the purpose of community college. What we understand less is that all the rest of higher education has much to learn from these low-status schools. Because its mission, structure, and institutional design are almost the mirror image of Eliot’s research university, community college offers a counterpoint to Eliot’s university, above all a release from the tyranny of selectivity. Community college thus offers us a host of ideas for the new education.
The biggest difference between Eliot’s four-year institution and the two-year community college model is mission. Whereas the research university puts its institutional reputation first, community college prioritizes student growth. Rather than beginning from a fixed standard of what counts as expertise—as recorded by a GPA or SAT scores—community college takes any student at any level in order to help that student reach their goal. You could be, in the example of Community, a disgraced and disbarred lawyer starting over from the professional and moral bottom or a former prescription drug addict or a lonely senior citizen seeking companionship or a smart, beautiful, formerly middle-class young woman who spent a little too long backpacking around the world in search of herself. None of these potential students is likely to be admitted to Stanford or Harvard because none is going to boost either university’s rankings or likely add to its future glory.
The strength of community college and its ability to innovate and directly address the needs of its constituents lies in the fact that it is not part of the same ranking system used for four-year colleges and universities. If you are a new president at a four-year university, whether Harvard or a larger state school, one of your main goals is to increase your school’s ranking, because improving rankings is seen as improving quality. Improved rankings also make it seem as if a new president is doing a good job.
The single fastest way a president can improve a university’s ranking is to become more selective, because a chief factor in rankings is the admittance rate. Selectivity comes with other bonuses, too. Because you are recruiting better-prepared students, you almost automatically raise your institution’s GPA levels, retention rates, and graduation rates, all without making other institutional improvements. Because public K–12 education in the United States is financed locally, we have one of the most unequal public education systems of any developed nation. Because local school systems are tremendously uneven, owing to class and de facto racial segregation, raising “standards” (that is, admission selectivity) means you are also likely to be selecting from a pool of wealthier and better-prepared students.
One result is that more of your students are likely to be full-time students. Although 62 percent of students in college today also work, more do at the large public universities than at elite privates, and far more do at community colleges. Holding down a job, not surprisingly, slows your time to graduation and affects your academic performance. Without the pressures of outside employment responsibilities, students who don’t work are more likely to graduate sooner.
It’s a perfect, closed circle. More elite students from more elite families in more elite K–12 schools more often end up at elite colleges and universities, where they graduate faster. Of course, in such an approach to admissions you limit diversity, racial and economic. Because of how economic and racial segregation work in our society, you are also likely to have fewer black, Hispanic, and new immigrant students. Community colleges are more diverse because they are not chasing rankings—and they are not chasing rankings because of their founding mission.
The infrastructure of the research university is based on exclusion, sorting, selecting, and ranking; the infrastructure of the community college is based on inclusion, remediating, improving, and offering first chances—and second, third, or however many are required for success. As a result, the way professors teach, the way students learn, and the metrics for success are different in community college. In the research university, those carefully selected students are judged against an implicit standard of excellence and expertise, represented by a distinguished faculty. In community college, virtually everyone is admitted, and the task is not for the student to replicate the expertise of the professor but, rather, for the student to gain the basic literacies required to move ahead.
By definition, community college centers on the student because there is no preset, a priori admission standard or criterion of selectivity based on a presumed, ranked hierarchy of status. There is no implicit or explicit ranking with Harvard and other elite universities at the pinnacle, setting the standards against which each and every student, professor, department, and institution is judged. A great community college keeps asking who in its community is not yet being served—disabled vets, the newly paroled, senior citizens, refugees, undocumented workers, stay-at-home moms—and figures out alternative ways of helping them reach their goals.
When your mission is to accept everyone, everything else about your institution has to support every student’s success. This means low tuition and fees, access to financial aid, academic flexibility and variety, basic literacy and numeracy training, basic language and cultural training (including for immigrants), specialized skills-training opportunities based on the specific and up-to-date occupational requirements of a local community, professional certifications to augment traditional degrees and diplomas, personalized attention (with an emphasis on advising and small class size), extracurricular components, and online course offerings to supplement local courses and offer flexibility to those juggling the scheduling demands of school, jobs, and home life. The community college is set up to focus on the student—not the professor, not the profession, not the discipline, all of which are central to the status of the research university.
There is as much variety across different community colleges as there is across the array of four-year institutions. Some are primarily designed as trade schools or for specific vocational training programs, a role increasingly important as secondary schools abolish vocational training in the face of cutbacks. Others are designed to be feeders into four-year research universities and so duplicate the general education patterns of the first two years of traditional schools.
However, by design, community colleges are not mere substitutes for the first two years of a four-year college or university. They are student-centered, and this means their goal is to improve student knowledge, starting from whatever students come in with. The general education courses cannot assume that students enter college with the basics that solid, middle-class high schools provide in history, literature, the arts, social science, natural science, and math. So, rather than reject students as “unprepared” (as a four-year institution would), community colleges embrace the students and help them fill in the gaps in their knowledge and preparedness.
No wonder, then, that at a recent two-day workshop on leadership and peer mentoring for undergraduates from all over the City University of New York (CUNY) system, several of the students who were currently enrolled at four-year colleges after having completed an associate’s degree at CUNY’s two-year colleges came to me genuinely alarmed to plead that I talk to our system-wide CUNY chancellor: “You have to tell him. You have to let him know there’s a terrible problem at our four-year colleges. Everything is backward there. It’s almost as if they don’t care about us, as if we don’t count. Students are failing and getting lost!”
These were all exceptional students, A students, at three different (and selective) four-year colleges in the CUNY system. They were shocked when I informed them that, no, there wasn’t something terribly wrong at these four-year institutions. These universities were actually doing what they were designed to do: “weed out” students who weren’t prepared, who weren’t “ready for college,” as the phrase goes. Four-year institutions do not make it their job to nourish each and every student, from any background, to success. At their first gathering as a freshman class at a four-year institution, the dean of students often tells students, “Look to your left. Look to your right. Only one of you will be walking through graduation.” At community college, the two who didn’t make it would be welcomed with open arms and challenged to find a place from which they could build toward success.
At a faculty meeting at a four-year institution lamenting the poor preparation of incoming freshmen, the likely topics might be how to maintain standards and prevent grade inflation. At a community college faculty meeting confronting the same circumstance, the discussion well might center on how to address the need for remediation of students suffering under the current regime of rampant high-stakes testing and the corrosive effect of so much teaching to the test.
Like Jeff Winger smirking his way through his first day at Greendale in Community, we are unused to thinking of the community college as having something to offer the rest of higher education. We have internalized value systems that put community college at the bottom. “Santa Monica Community College is basically Grade Thirteen” one of my nieces was told, derisively, by her friends—even though it was the ideal college for her to hone her dream career to be a fine jewelry designer and to found her own business. Appreciating what we can borrow from community colleges means suspending over a hundred years of valuing the credential over the student, of valuing the mastery of expertise over actual learning, and of requiring that students learn from experts rather than empowering them to become more expert (at whatever level) themselves.
FROM ITS NINETEENTH-CENTURY BEGINNINGS, COMMUNITY COLLEGE was intended as an alternative form of postsecondary education, not as a “lesser” institution in the four-year model. It was planned with a different standard of inclusiveness entirely. It was not designed to educate a professional-managerial class, the new kinds of leaders who could take America into an ascendant role on the global stage. It was not set up as an “also-ran” to four-year universities but, rather, was conceived with a distinct function and purpose.
Before 1850, only a handful of two-year institutions offered some form of postsecondary training, mostly teacher training. The great boom came in the decade from 1909 to 1919, when the number of community colleges nationwide grew from about twenty to nearly two hundred. Called “junior colleges,” they increased in number at the same time that secondary school expanded beyond elites bound for college. The passage of state laws requiring students to stay in school until their mid-teenage years meant there was a general teacher shortage. There was also a shortage, specifically, of vocational education teachers. As high school became more inclusive, new vocational subjects were added to the curriculum, but, because the four-year colleges did not teach these vocational subjects, there wasn’t a robust mechanism for training vocational teachers for secondary schools. Both factors led to the doubling of the number of junior colleges after World War I. New junior colleges were sometimes private, sometimes public, and they included church schools and for-profit schools offering specialized vocational teacher training.
As with four-year colleges, the new community colleges were designed specifically to meet the economic challenges of industrialization but with a focus on non-elite students. The global economic changes occasioned by industrialization required a more skilled, better-educated, more cosmopolitan or “worldly” population, or what might loosely be thought of as a literate middle class. This was, of course, one of the main reasons Eliot strove to remake and expand American higher education. But more than three-quarters of those who graduated from high school in 1900 did not go on to college or university, commonly because they did not have the desire or the financial resources or the flexibility to go away from home to a residential college. Community colleges offered training in specialized skills, a low-cost form of advanced education that could be pursued without disrupting one’s home or work life.
Joliet Junior College is considered to be the first official modern-day junior or community college. It began as a combination high school–community college at Central High School in Joliet, Illinois. Students could attend the high school even after graduation to pursue specialized and advanced work in teacher training, vocational education, or citizenship (a general civics curriculum). Soon, the higher education component was moved to facilities away from the high school campus. Since the founding of Joliet, more than a hundred million people have attended community college in the United States.
From the start, community colleges had several distinctive features. Often, they were small overall and emphasized small class size. Unlike most four-year institutions, they opened to women early on and often emphasized training elementary school teachers. In states such as Missouri, which did not require that grammar school teachers have a bachelor’s degree, it was common for over 60 percent of community college students to be women preparing to teach K–8 public education. Early on, community colleges became places where immigrants and minorities went to college, for economic reasons and because many residential colleges operated under overt or covert racist (e.g., segregationist, anti-Asian, and anti-Semitic) admissions policies.
Today, there are 1,166 community colleges in the United States, and about half of US undergraduates attend community college. For many of society’s poorest, newest, and often most ambitious, determined, and potentially productive members, community college is their hoped-for route to the middle class and out of poverty. Approximately 44 percent of students with family incomes of less than $25,000 per year go to community colleges directly after high school graduation (compared to 15 percent of high-income students). Some 38 percent of first-generation college students go to community college first, whereas only 20 percent of those whose parents graduated from college do. Nearly half of all Hispanic students, 31 percent of African American students, and 28 percent of white students begin at community college. Community college is also a disrupter of the so-called school-to-prison pipeline, in which secondary school “zero tolerance” policies increase police involvement in schools and in students’ lives. By admitting students who have come out of the criminal justice system and by sponsoring programs in prisons, community colleges are a small force against America’s shameful distinction as the world’s leading jailor.
Community college works. Average community college students earn significantly more income over their lifetime than do individuals from the same demographic groups who do not earn either a professional certificate or an associate’s degree. One large-scale study of community college students from six states shows that students completing an associate’s degree earn an average $5,400 a year more than students from the same background who do not complete the degree, a remarkable statistic given the high percentage of students who enter community college from families earning less than $25,000 a year. Nearly a quarter of those with associate’s degrees earn more than the median earnings of those with bachelor’s degrees. Community colleges rank higher than elite four-year universities if the standard isn’t selectivity but what is known as the “social mobility index,” a measure that calculates the difference between the income level of one’s family upon entering college and the income one achieves at graduation. Community college truly offers people a way into the middle class.
Community colleges don’t measure their success in supposedly objective measures of “excellence.” They admit everyone with a high school diploma or who has passed the General Educational Development (GED) test, regardless of college entrance exam scores or prior academic record. Sixty percent of first-year students cannot take first-year college classes without some kind of remediation, typically in writing, reading, and, especially, mathematics. If our educational mission is to ensure that each student learns and thereby moves into a position of greater knowledge, then we must throw out many of the metrics higher education generally uses, including the bell curve, which dictates a predetermined grade distribution for success and failure. Structurally, many large public and private universities control the flow into certain majors through the academic ritual known as the “flunk-out course,” typically a very large introductory lecture class in a subject area that can be graded by a standardized exam. Introductory math, statistics, and organic chemistry typically fall into that category where only a small percentage of students earn As. If the pre-med or math majors then require a certain grade point average for admission to the major, the lack of an A in that introductory course can be fatal to a student’s career ambitions. That gatekeeping structure is antithetical to the mission and the curricular design of community college.
The bell curve and the flunk-out course work only when a deficit model of pedagogy is employed, when the professor has the expertise and evaluates students backward from that standard, excellent to failing. In the community college mission of knowledge for everyone, “I don’t know” is a baseline, a starting place toward success, not a signifier of failure.
As selectivity at top private and public institutions rises, as GPA and test scores correlate ever more closely with affluence, and as income inequality grows, it is not surprising that we see soaring numbers of kids diagnosed with “learning disabilities.” In the deficit model, poor scores are a problem of the learner, not of the instructor or the institution. Educator Carol Dweck calls this the “fixed mind-set,” the idea that intelligence and talent are basic, inherent qualities. The opposite is the “growth mind-set,” the idea that one can learn, build on one’s foundation of learning to learn more, and increase one’s capacity to learn by reflecting on one’s own learning accomplishments and methods, and that anyone and everyone has the capacity for growth. Community college begins from a pedagogy of acceptance. Any growth constitutes success. The student is at the center.
WHEN PROFESSOR JOSHUA BELKNAP TEACHES ENGLISH AS A SECOND Language (ESL) at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), he might find himself in front of twenty-five students who each speak a different native language. The coordinator of BMCC’s ESL Lab, he uses a pioneering method of language instruction called a “translingual learning model,” a method that sees multilingualism as a benefit, not a deficit. One of the paradoxes of American culture is that elites prize being able to speak more than one language, multilingualism. Yet, for immigrants, accents and other traces of an original language are marks of shame. Translingual learning methods attempt to remove that stigma.
Before teaching his first English lesson in a given semester, Belknap assigns his students a project: they must research two especially notable features of their native language, write up their research in a short, formal paper, and present their linguistic research to their classmates in English. Before anyone focuses on improving their English grammar and syntax, the students have been allowed to be linguistic experts, authorities on the unique features of their language, and exemplary researchers who can communicate their ideas as a contribution to the group and relate perspectives on features of English that might prove tricky. English isn’t a “superior” language; the students are not “inferior” for not knowing it. They all come to the class with a rich store of other language abilities, and, from one another’s research, they gain sophisticated knowledge of the kinds of semantic, semiotic, and grammatical features that constitute a “language.” They are learning this in English, of course, before they have even begun formally studying English.
This is the paradigm of all active, student-centered knowledge transfer. The instructor finds out from students what they have to contribute and then creates opportunities for them to contribute what they know, challenging them to expand their capacities and often expecting far more than is expected in a normal, passive learning environment, where students simply need to learn what’s required and pass a final exam. Belknap’s students present their research in front of their peers and on a topic of great individual pride, yet in a new language—a scary prospect for any language learner, and even more so for immigrants. In active learning, you encourage students to use their existing knowledge as the foundation for gaining more knowledge. Ideally, you then let them contribute in some way to the public good, whether that is the community of the classroom or beyond it. Their accomplishment, in other words, is not something that only the teacher sees (and grades) but is part of a common project of everyone learning together. “Start Here, Go Anywhere” is the motto of the Borough of Manhattan Community College, and Professor Belknap is starting his ESL students off on the right foot for that journey to who knows where. They’ll be ready.
You cannot use a deficit model of learning if your goal is student success. Not knowing isn’t a deficit, a problem, or a source of shame but rather is precisely the inspiration and motivation for being in school in the first place. Not every professor at every community college gets this right, but they should if they are living up to the principles of inclusion, student-centered learning, and success in the world beyond that are central to the mission of their institutions.
This approach to teaching is possible because, unlike most professors at four-year colleges and research universities, community college teachers actually train and prepare for teaching. They don’t just teach the way they were taught by their graduate school professors—the apprenticeship model of learning where you imitate your mentor. They actually study effective methods for teaching students at any level. Like K–12 teachers, community college professors take pedagogy seriously.
It is one of the peculiar inheritances of Eliot’s reforms that the art of teaching is not factored into the system of hierarchical, institutional ranking. Nor is it factored in a significant way into the reward and recognition systems for faculty at four-year institutions. Good teaching counts. In decades of faculty meetings about hiring or tenure, including at two of the most elite private universities in the country, I have heard countless comments on someone being “a good teacher.” That said, it is rarely factored in to promotion decisions in the same way that publication is, and there’s no benchmark for it in the national rankings. Even the way we measure teacher effectiveness in four-year universities is an impoverished, flawed method: student evaluation forms. We know student evaluations track with racial and gender biases, that they don’t have much to do with how much a student has learned, and that they have negligible value in helping teachers improve at their craft. It’s shocking in this age of sophisticated data collection that four-year institutions haven’t found better ways of assessing teacher effectiveness.
Once again, we can learn from community colleges because improving pedagogy is key to their mission. In putting the student at the center, professors at community colleges strive to find the best ways to break through whatever lack of preparation, lack of aptitude, or fear students may think they bring to the enterprise of learning and to help individual, specific students learn something new.
“IT’S NOT JUST THE PERIPHERY BUT THE CENTER AND EVERYTHING else that is different when your mission is changing the bottom, not the top,” insists President Gail Mellow of LaGuardia Community College, in Long Island City, Queens.
Located in the renovated Ford Instrument Company building, which once served as a manufacturing plant for World War II military materials, and other adjacent low-rise urban buildings, LaGuardia has eighteen thousand students in fifty different majors, including liberal arts, health, math, theater, science, business, and technology. Approximately 58 percent of the students are full-time, 42 percent part-time. The students come from over 160 different countries and speak an astonishing 127 native languages. When you step inside LaGuardia Community College, you have to reverse-engineer your assumptions about higher education. As President Mellow says, “Four-year colleges and universities talk about selectivity, the grade point averages, or the test scores of the students they accept. We take the top 100 percent.” She is passionate about the school’s mission to elevate, serve, and address the intellectual, social, cultural, and material needs of those our society considers the bottom tier. It could not be further from the ideal of selecting from an increasingly narrow top. When you take the top 100 percent, Harvard’s values cannot be your yardstick.
President Mellow has a high, almost girlish voice, an open face, and expansive gestures. She has presided over this community college for fifteen years. She strides the modern, industrial, glass and steel urban campus as if it were her living room, picking up a piece of paper and throwing it in the trash, making a note of a gash in one of the wooden doors, mentally plumping the pillows as she goes. She has a smile and a greeting for everyone, and they smile back. President Mellow wants LaGuardia to shine—and it does. Widely regarded as an exemplary community college, LaGuardia’s luster comes partly from President Mellow’s leadership, energy, and pride. She is respected and emulated by community college administrators everywhere.
When we tour LaGuardia’s theater, she frowns at the condition of the carpet. “That will change this year!” she insists. “Our students and faculty produce some of the best original theater in this city. We are a training ground for incredible talent. We can’t have this place threadbare.”
She does not want the buildings disrespected and will not tolerate disdain for the students or faculty. She uses the words “talent” and “brilliance” often and is tough-minded in throwing contempt right back at those who disparage community college. “You get some types who think a community college is training refrigerator repairmen. There’s nothing wrong whatsoever about repairing appliances as an occupation—and our students who earn professional certification, in any field, do better in their professions and in the world. That’s a source of pride for everyone here. But vocational certification is not the only reason you would come to LaGuardia—or even the main reason. Our three core competencies for which we want to prepare each and every student are inquiry and problem solving, global learning, and integrative learning. Our signature competency is the second one: global learning. Our students come from all over the world. We are better at global learning than just about any other college or university anywhere.”
LaGuardia’s motto is “Dare To Do More.” That begins with President Mellow. In her high heels and black jacket trimmed in leather, she could be a CEO. Her look is strategic. She wants the students at LaGuardia to aim high in their lives beyond school. “We have students who walk from Flushing to take one class and then walk back to get to their part-time, minimum-wage job,” she tells me. “That’s ten miles each way. They are determined to get an education no matter what. You tell me we aren’t training our future leaders!”
President Mellow conveys warmth and also a determination to see each and every one of LaGuardia’s students succeed. One of her pet projects is the President’s Society, informally known as “The Bossy Moms.” It’s a leadership society for full-time students who have maintained a 2.5 grade point average for at least eighteen credits. Students who join receive a $1,000 stipend, which, for many, offsets the need for another part-time job. They commit two hours a week to the program and attend an array of extracurricular cultural events, speeches by industry leaders, motivational talks, and other kinds of professional development opportunities. They focus on career planning, public speaking and networking events, cultural appreciation, community service, and leadership. There is an unabashed etiquette component, an introduction to middle-class cultural literacy. Members of the President’s Society gain free admission to cultural events plus a Metro card to get to them. There is also a stipend for professional clothing and a “dress for success” personal shopper at one of the department stores, who guides them in choosing appropriate interview apparel.
“Community college is about identifying people who don’t have other opportunities for success in the world,” Mellow says. “Our society doesn’t offer these students random goodies—scholarships, opportunities, respect. We try. We give them a chance. It’s the opposite of selectivity. Our rankings don’t depend on how many applicants we turn down. It’s about what we do to ensure success for people where every odd is stacked against them. When you focus on the bottom, everything else has to change.”
This goes against the grain of “standards-based” education and exposes the truth of “objective” testing: what is supposed to be about achievement, test preparation, and hard work is often about material and cultural conditions, about—for want of a better term—existential hopelessness. Lani Guinier calls this the “tyranny of meritocracy,” in which those who do or don’t do well on standardized tests have the illusion that the tests are about intrinsic merit, not about test preparation that correlates with income level. Student-centered education, which community college champions, doesn’t allow students to be written off as academic failures, the future fixed at zero.
College for everyone is not an easy end to attain, however. Community colleges face all the challenges of a truly diverse student body, with diverse levels of preparation and radically diverse career goals. They are the most financially underfunded institutions in higher education and have experienced the worst cutbacks of all in recent years, even as they have become more and more valuable to students. The Delta Cost Project, a nonpartisan agency dedicated to analyzing funding in higher education, notes that historic enrollment increases in community college combined with steep declines in per student revenues from state appropriations mean that, currently, the subsidy for community colleges is less per student than it was a decade ago. Given these cutbacks, tuitions are rising and faculty are vastly overworked and underpaid. A majority of courses at community colleges are taught by adjunct or contingent faculty who make less than $2,000 to $3,000 per course, with no benefits and no job security. Calculated on an hourly basis, that salary is equivalent to between $10 and $15 an hour.
Those who achieve their associate’s degree and then move on to four-year institutions also run into structural problems. Until recently, there weren’t even data on the number of students transferring from community to four-year colleges, and the data remain scant. What we know suggests that it is slightly easier for students to enter a four-year research university from high school than from community college. According to the National Association for College Admissions Counseling, the national overall acceptance rate from secondary school is around 69 percent, and from community college around 64 percent. The pathway from community college to elite research universities remains almost nonexistent.
College for everyone faces formidable obstacles, in other words. And yet, for many students, community college offers an unparalleled opportunity. Dr. Jade Davis, associate director of Digital Learning Projects at LaGuardia Community College, puts it eloquently: “The students are not high risk, but high stakes. Every choice and every moment they spend imagining a future for themselves that is different than the narrative society has given them is a high-stakes moment. Coming to LaGuardia instead of working or doing something else is a high-stakes decision when you live in a household that has an income of only $25,000.”
JOHN MOGULESCU, DEAN OF THE SCHOOL OF PROFESSIONAL Studies at City University of New York, ended up at Brown University for athletics, he insists, not for academics. A tennis and basketball star, he would have been surprised, at age eighteen, to learn he would be heralded as one of America’s most important visionaries in the field of public higher education, his work cited in speeches by none less than the president of the United States. Over a long career, he has worked with virtually every government agency in the city of New York and developed programs for working adults, for adult and continuing education, for workforce development, for language immersion, for adult literacy, and for GED preparation. He’s developed special training initiatives for city and state workers and for welfare recipients. He led the team that developed the City University of New York’s seventh community college, the Stella and Charles Guttman Community College, a radical new institution specializing in outdoor, experiential, hands-on learning supplemented by classroom work.
Mogulescu’s most recent project has garnered national attention for its early and exceptionally promising results. He supervises Accelerated Study in Associates Programs, or ASAP, a program that has done what no other has: it has doubled and, in some schools and programs, even tripled graduation rates. “We have your back. And your books. And your Metro card.” is one of the slogans of the program, a succinct way of letting students know that their success is the program’s goal.
Dean Mogulescu ushers me into his bright, unfussy office in midtown Manhattan, a few blocks from Herald Square. He doesn’t have much truck with academic pretension. He insists he got into public education by accident, the same way he got into Brown. He ended up teaching at a public elementary school in Fort Green, New York. He began there without ever having done a day of teacher training. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Period. I was twenty-two. The kids were ten and twelve. They were great kids, but it was exhausting and I knew I couldn’t keep up with them.”
He’d always wanted to be a social worker, so he went back to school and earned his master’s in social work and went into community organizing, based out of New York City College of Technology. Working with his mentor, Fannie Eisenstein, and a small cadre of talented educators, he helped build programs in adult literacy, second language instruction, and GED completion for immigrants, workers, welfare recipients, people with developmental disabilities, and prisoners.
“Really, there was one uniting objective in all of this: How do you change the city? How do you get low-wage workers out of low-wage work?” Under CUNY chancellor Matthew Goldstein, one of Mogulescu’s assignments was working with the public schools and forging connections between them and CUNY. He began to build a team, mostly using grant funds, of highly skilled people who didn’t necessarily have conventional doctoral or other advanced degrees or even traditional academic experiences.
“We had values, mission—and a lot of energy. And so Chancellor Goldstein came to my group and presented us with a problem: we have community colleges, but we’re not graduating anyone. Ten percent, twelve percent. That’s not good enough. We have to do better.” They went to Mayor Michael Bloomberg for money to fund an intensive program to find a better way, promising a 50 percent graduation rate. The mayor came up with $6.5 million for the first year of the program and $19 million over three years.
“The chancellor said, ‘Can we really do this? Can we deliver?’ I said, ‘I have no idea, but we’ll try!’” Mogulescu helped put a planning group together, and they began asking what they could do differently, what would be important, what could move the needle.
“We had a team from all over—literacy, English language ed, math ed. The main thing was we weren’t traditional thinkers. We knew how to make change—and we knew what universities could do. We were willing to consider new kinds of solutions, new options that hadn’t been tried before. Our question, every minute of every day, was: What do we have to do differently to see this happen?”
From day one, they set up an assessment protocol. For each experiment they tried, they used an experimental group and a control group that continued in the traditional methods.
“We’d test and look at the results. If it worked, if the persistence rates increased, we’d focus there and build on it. Some of the changes didn’t seem that revolutionary. They didn’t cost a lot, didn’t require some fancy corporate sponsor or some shiny new technology. There were no headlines in the New York Times. Then, with two groups side by side, we would look at the results, not the promises, but real results. What we found was revolutionary. We got results. We kept going like that, trying new ideas, comparing the new with the old, building on what worked.”
Mogulescu is right: their new ideas don’t seem revolutionary in themselves unless you consider that, unlike most education reforms, these treated students as full human beings with complex lives, not just test takers or statistics. Mogulescu and his team concluded that they could easily offer certain simple material benefits that could drastically change outcomes for students.
“Metro cards was a big one,” Mogulescu says. A one-way trip on the New York City subway costs $2.75. Almost everyone going to community college has to take the trains, spending at least $5.50 a day. “If you have to think each time you have a class, do I spend the money on going to school or on food, it adds another disincentive at the most basic level, right when you should be doing the opposite. Some sacrifices people just won’t make in order to get an education. Feeding your kid is one.”
The experimental group of students who received Metro cards and other modest material assistance began outperforming the group who had to make that grueling, soul-crunching choice—school or food?—day in and day out. They also started to believe that CUNY believed in them.
ASAP’s other methods seem just as basic—and as profoundly against the grain of so much historical and contemporary thinking about higher education, from IQ and multiple-choice testing in Eliot’s time to the voguish commercial educational technology sector that focuses on tools and outputs, not on the whole student. ASAP targets commonsense factors, factors one can change and address quickly and easily and, given that CUNY is woefully underfunded, inexpensively. The program looks at the busy lives of its students and intervenes where it can to remove obstacles that block the successful pathways through school.
Although many ASAP students hold down jobs, one requirement for everyone in the program is that they must be full-time students. ASAP comes with intense and individualized advising on everything from course selection to study habits. Students join the program in cohorts and offer one another peer mentoring, team spirit, camaraderie, as well as a sense of moving together, with their group, class, and cohort. The program also attends to the everyday realities of living at or near the poverty line. If you have no margin of error, then one mistake—a missed student loan check, for instance—can spell the end of a community college career. If there are gaps in financial aid—Pell grants or other funding that doesn’t come through—ASAP counselors are ready to find ways to bridge the loans until your check comes.
Mogulescu and his team have also streamlined the pathways to a degree. ASAP operates only in a limited number of degree programs to ensure good advising but also so it can guarantee, again, within the stressed budgets of an urban public community college, that the course offerings students need to complete an associate’s degree are available. At a later date, more programs will be added, but for now, in a limited number of majors, advisers coordinate the sequencing and scheduling of each and every prerequisite and advanced course to make it as easy as possible for students to complete a degree on time. Multiple sections are available at different times to fit complex work, school, and life schedules. Attention is paid to the reality of jobs, families, commuting. Advisers look for bottlenecks and try to eliminate them.
Every university—even Harvard, even Stanford—can learn from ASAP. What we are seeing, especially at our major public universities but also at the elite private schools, is that students on the largest scholarships are also the ones most likely to graduate with high tuition debt, to need paid work that extends the time working toward a degree, and to drop out without a degree because the everyday costs, the debt, and the juggling of multiple roles are overwhelming. ASAP is for community college students, but the model can be imported by any university that adopts student success as the chief metric of its own excellence.
In ASAP, the structural change that spells success is that deans all work together on everything—curriculum, financial aid, scheduling, pedagogy, and advising—instead of separating into bureaucratic silos (a dean of students maintains a separate turf from the dean of faculty, for example). The goal is to ensure that student needs are addressed from every perspective. Integrating the administrative functions happens only occasionally in four-year institutions and constitutes a departure from current technological remedies that purport to “save” college by assuming that it is about “content delivery.” The focus in ASAP is on the student, not the tools, consonant with the mission of community college. This should be the mission of all higher education institutions, of the new education designed to prepare students for a world in flux.
“Constant advising is important here, too, because it turns out that, by staying in continuous contact with the students, they help us,” John Mogulescu notes. “The students know the problems before we do. ASAP wouldn’t work without them working with us. They let us know where we need to pay attention. You can’t fix problems if you don’t know they are there. The students know, but in the past they’d be discouraged, assume the system couldn’t be fixed or was rigged against them, or that they didn’t have the power to change. Now, they know we want to hear from them.”
No one could believe that well over 50 percent of students in ASAP would graduate on schedule, up from 23 percent. Some CUNY ASAP programs now have a 60 percent graduation rate. And, because assessment was built in from the beginning, administrators didn’t have to bring in a special team to measure what had happened and why. The program has data on every change, what worked, what didn’t work, where there were positive results, and where a change hadn’t really made a difference. A new city government didn’t dampen enthusiasm for ASAP. Mayor Bill DeBlasio put up the funds to expand the program. ASAP started with 1,192 students in the first cohort. In 2016, the number of participants was 25,000.
Dean Mogulescu is convinced the ASAP principles are so clear and simple they could be replicated anywhere, including at four-year institutions and liberal arts colleges. At community college, the translation is easy because the infrastructure for student-centered learning is firmly in place. At four-year institutions, in addition to all the other rankings and ratings and accreditation criteria, a new one might be added for how each student is being assessed, not just by standardized tests but also in progress toward a degree. A school might build in checkpoints for students who might be losing their way as well as small material forms of support. To do this requires some institutional redesign because financial aid is separate from student services and academic advising, but this would be far less costly to the institution than having a student drop out of school without graduating.
Given ASAP’s success rate, it now practically pays for itself. A very large percentage of CUNY students live below the poverty line and are on financial aid. By proceeding expeditiously to graduation, ASAP students free up financial aid and resources for other students. Of course, most important of all, graduates become contributing members of society. “ASAP has turned failure into success and become an incredible engine of social mobility,” Mogulescu says. Indeed, because he also oversees workforce education and work placement for the city, Mogulescu can help students with career placement and the city with finding the best new employees.
That’s what community college should be. It is a model that all colleges and universities can learn from. But Mogulescu doesn’t stop there. He believes that higher education has to be actively, persistently involved in every part of civic life, and he agitates for a living wage in the kinds of jobs for which community college prepares its students. He shakes his head mournfully when I mention the studies that repeatedly show that just having an associate’s degree, though it likely improves life outcomes, doesn’t guarantee someone will have a middle-class life.
“It’s true—but is that the fault of higher education or society? If we are doing our job, preparing students, giving them the so-called skills they need to thrive—math and reading and writing plus skills in majors that are useful and contribute to the city’s welfare—then society has to do its part and make sure those jobs are worth having, that the people who do vital, important work in our society are compensated for that work.”
Like President Gail Mellow, he is determined to help community college graduates be as ready as possible for the workforce. But he also hopes that his ASAP students have the confidence to be social reformers, not just passive workers. As educated voters and taxpayers, they can contribute by working together to ensure that educated citizens aren’t living below the poverty line. College graduates not finding well-paid jobs is too often presented as the “crisis of higher education,” Mogulescu insists, when it should be talked about as the “crisis of American life, the end of the middle class.”
Outside the dean’s glass office door, coworkers gather up papers, preparing to leave for the day. He waves to some of the workers and notes that they aren’t actually going home. They’ll all be heading to a workshop at one of the CUNY campuses for an hour, maybe two, before they are off for the night. He nods at a big “Education That Works as Hard as You Do” banner in his office. “Hard work only gets you so far. Graduating on time can make you ready for a job. But there’s another part of this. If you are going to get low-wage workers out of low-wage work,” he says, “you can’t do it alone just from an education side. You also need a society that values and is willing to pay for the labor that allows it to function. If we don’t accept the status quo as an absolute in education, we can’t accept it in society either. We are committed to doing better. We can do our part—we can give them a good education, we can ensure they graduate. But if the jobs they are going into are paying seven dollars an hour, then that’s not the fault of higher education. That’s the fault of a greedy society.”
So many studies blame higher education for not preparing students for remunerative work. You can read the stories, see the bar charts. Graduates with a bachelor’s degree don’t earn as much as they should; those with an associate’s degree earn even less. The implication of such data is that education is failing this generation, that education needs to be doing a better job, really concentrating on skills, on workforce readiness.
As Mogulescu says, “It’s not higher education’s fault that our graduates don’t make as much money as they should. If the going wage for healthcare aides is kept artificially low, say, eight dollars an hour, it doesn’t matter if we are turning out great healthcare workers. That’s not an education problem. It’s a social problem.”
The language of a “crisis of higher education” makes it seem as if the problem is only that higher education is in crisis. As John Mogulescu points out, higher education can and must fix many things. But broader social problems must also be addressed. “That’s not saying higher education is perfect,” he insists. “We hope ASAP will be a model that lots of places will modify for their own needs, their own students, but really try. It works. It seems simple, maybe too simple, but it’s not magic. We just asked ‘who are these students? What about their life in and out of school makes them drop out, give up?’ And then we focused all our energies and resources right there.”
THE ECONOMIC DOWNTURN AND THE HIGH COST OF COLLEGE (especially residential college) mean more students are seeking a cheaper way to earn a bachelor’s degree. Over half of all college students today are enrolled in community colleges. Increasingly, even the children of professional, college-educated parents consider community college as an option. This shows a pressing need to integrate community college graduates into the flow of life at four-year colleges and research universities because those who achieve an associate’s degree and then move on to an institution that grants bachelor’s degrees face challenges. Data suggest that, where four-year colleges do not allow transfer credit or where they put up other impediments to community college transfer students (such as preventing them from applying for college scholarships or honor societies or receiving academic awards), there are disparities in graduation rates between those who begin at and those who transfer into four-year colleges. However, where transfer of course credits is easy or seamless, the graduation rate for community college transfer students is indistinguishable from that of the rest of the student body.
Community college, as Jeff Winger learned, views students as unique human beings confronting challenges of many kinds, both academic and personal. At LaGuardia Community College, making sure students know how to dress for an interview and how to conduct themselves is part of the informal curriculum. At Borough of Manhattan Community College, a baseline of knowledge of how one’s native language works is a key ingredient for learning English as a second language. What we can learn from all of these community colleges is that higher education should not be about the selection rate. It should be about the success rate, about giving all students an opportunity and the best possible chance to do well, in school and after.
Understanding the different mission of community college helps us see the assumptions embedded in the rest of higher education, assumptions so deep they can be difficult to detect. In computer science, if you notice something unusual in a software program, you ask whether it is a feature or a bug. In the modern research university, failure is a feature, not a bug. The entire apparatus of the research university is based on weeding out: selectivity at admission, rankings based on selectivity, and the funnel from general education into a major and increasingly specialized courses that narrows much more for admission to graduate or professional school. By contrast, community colleges are designed not only to accept everyone but also to do what they can to help each student reach a goal, whatever the goal. Success is a feature.
A first step in revolutionizing higher education is being aware of these legacy assumptions. A second step is recognizing other models that respond to different assumptions. It is challenging to rethink the ways structures and methods might actually hinder mission. It is rare for any institution to examine its assumptions this deeply. Yet it is essential if we are going to revolutionize our traditional colleges and universities.
Thinking about community college is important in its own right, and it helps us think deeply about the assumptions of all our colleges and universities and consider alternative ways they could be responding to the realities of students’ lives today. I am not arguing that elite, Research One institutions such as Harvard and Yale and Stanford and Columbia (not “Colombia”) and Princeton and Duke should suddenly transform themselves into community colleges, forfeiting selectivity. That isn’t going to happen and it shouldn’t. These schools have different histories, purposes, audiences, intentions, and cost structures. Rather, I’m suggesting that even these top institutions have much to learn from institutions that are designed such that all students are supported on their way to mastery, no matter where their journey begins.
Metro cards. Cohorts. Inclusion. Bridge loans. Advising the whole person, not just the “student as customer” or the “student as credential seeker.” All of these are part of the larger mission of community college: teaching students to learn how to learn, to build upon their experiences and knowledge, to engage in original research, and to contribute to their community. Eschewing the deficit model and embracing active learning and emphasizing teaching, learning, and student progress as key components of a successful college—whether a community college or a four-year institution—these are all key elements of the new education.