Friday Fragments, April 30th
Free community college & an innovative faculty development success story
What I’m reading…
I have some concerns about this article in the Chronicle: Biden’s Plan Would Make Community College Free. It Could Also Have Unintended Downsides. I'm particularly concerned about using low bachelors’ completion rates to show that students should not enroll in a community college, but should instead enroll directly in a 4-year school. I think we need to look at why students who start at a community college do not end up earning a bachelor's degree and address those root causes. The article notes that:
Studies have shown that about 80 percent of students entering community colleges plan to earn a bachelor’s degree, but fewer than 15 percent end up with one.
Without having a really strong understanding of why students do not finish, I think it's disingenuous to say that a "downside" of free community college would be that fewer students complete a bachelor's degree.
“If free community college is a reality, it’s possible even more students will enter and even more students will be stymied in their pursuit of a bachelor’s degree,” said Loni Bordoloi Pazich, program director of the Teagle Foundation…“If the goal is just access, we pretty much have that already,” for low-income students, Pazich said. “But if the goal is access to a bachelor’s degree, free community college is not the way to do that.”
I also have an issue with the concern about credits not transferring. Transfer agreements and articulation agreements between community colleges and four-year schools are so important, but rarely fail on just one side of the partnership. In my experience working at a community college for the past 11 years, our faculty and administrators bend over backward to make sure that our courses are meeting the frequently changing needs of various 4-year partners with which we have articulation agreements. Again, it seems unfair to lay the issue of lost credits at the feet of community colleges, and even less fair to use that as a reason why students should not be given free tuition to attend a community college.
All that said, I'm certainly open to being convinced otherwise! I'd love to hear your thoughts...
If you’re interested in looking back at last summer and reading about what one faculty development center did, you might enjoy this from Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship: Innovation in a Time of Crisis: A Networked Approach to Faculty Development
This article explores how one center for teaching and learning (CTL) rapidly designed and launched a Summer 2020 Course Design Institute in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the need to reach a significant number of faculty in a short period of time proved challenging, it also created an opportunity for our CTL to engage with faculty who otherwise might not have worked with us—not only on issues of teaching with technology but also on engagement, inclusion, and other key issues.