The Transfer Function of Community Colleges & A Little Bit About PLAs

I have written here on the blog about community colleges on occasion and it is no secret that I am an advocate for community colleges. I believe they fulfill an important need in American postsecondary education. I also believe that more needs to made of the transfer function of community colleges, so does the Center for American Progress. Read a recent policy brief here. 

Better and more articulation agreements are needed so that students can move from a community college to a four year college and receive the appropriate credit evaluation. Of course, this is a multi-faceted issue (I mean what in education isn’t?). Community colleges need more resources so that they can provide advising to students who wish to transfer. Four year institutions also need to be willing to recognize credits earned at community colleges. If you are so inclined, an opinion piece (issue paper) I wrote on transforming transfers in Louisiana while raising admissions standards is available via google docs, see below. (I am sure the paper could use some more editing, but for what my thoughts are worth….)

I believe in the open access mission of community colleges, and believe they are essential for providing developmental education and sub-baccalaureate degree and certificate programs. Community colleges provide the means to preserve admissions standards at our selective institutions while still enabling all students with the ability to benefit to pursue postsecondary education.

In the policy brief from the Center for American Progress (mentioned above) it is also suggested that community colleges should give credit to students for prior knowledge through Prior Learning Assessments (PLA). I am a little weary of this though, unless students are passing a rigorous assessment of their prior learning through an extensive portfolio review or demonstrating mastery through an examination. I am a little concerned that credit will be awarded too freely. I am always concerned with upholding the standards that make higher education what it is– it’s from having started my career in admissions, I know.

Yet, if PLAs were adopted, it would be another task that community colleges would be taking on using their already strapped resources. If PLAs draw attention to the needs of community college and their students and result in more funding for the sector, then they might be an important innovation. But today’s community colleges cannot be asked to take on another role until they are better supported financially and have the ability to grow their staffs to meet the needs of their growing student population.

Work Better & Work Smarter with Community Colleges

A call for reforms (from today’s Chronicle of Higher Education)

In an article (commentary)  in today’s Chronicle, Daniel Yankelovich calls for some reforms to higher education. I couldn’t agree more with the suggestion below. 4-year colleges need to work better and work smarter with community colleges. This is especially true of public higher education in Louisiana.

“Better integration of two-year colleges. Our system of community colleges is a national treasure, all too often taken for granted and undersupported. A significant and growing percentage of the nation’s 12 million college students attend community colleges, and the number is likely to rise as the proportion of minority youths increases. Community colleges address the needs of our ever more diverse population, compensating for some of the failures of our K-12 system.

One of the country’s most troubling societal problems is that the college-completion rate of students from low-income families is disastrously below that of students from middle-income families. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation for Education are devoting major resources to finding strategies for narrowing the gap, and we should be grateful for that effort, but it makes one wonder why the government and higher-education institutions themselves are not doing more to correct this potentially explosive problem. With the disappearance of high-paying, low-skill jobs, earning higher-education credentials becomes the only way that tens of millions of Americans can better themselves economically.

We cannot depend on our two-year colleges to alleviate that problem without helping them to create closer ties with employers and four-year colleges. A closer integration with employers will help to ensure that students have jobs waiting for them, and it will sharpen their focus on the skills that are most in demand in the workplace.

The relationship with four-year colleges calls for a subtler strategy. Many four-year institutions take a condescending attitude toward community colleges, regarding them as mere steppingstones to the “real education” that the four-year colleges provide. If they were to take a less patronizing attitude, they might find it easier to cooperate with community colleges in developing programs to meet the needs of today’s economy. Such a strategy would enable the four-year colleges to keep faith with the mission that should mean most to them—a commitment to provide the broad-based education that promotes the intellectual growth of their students” (Yankelovich, 15 May 2011).