Group items tagged

By Elisabeth A. Barnett & Katherine L. Hughes and published by the Community College Research Center, Teachers College, Columbia University, October 2010. This Issue Brief was presented as part of President Obama's White House Summit on Community College (October 2010) and looks at partnerships that might improve college enrollment, college readiness at enrollment, and persistence in college.

Microsite produced by The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 2012. This space provides data and analysis about completion for all aspects of the college spectrum: public universities, community colleges, private colleges, and non-profits. All data is from the cohort that began college in fall 2004.

By Thomas Bailey & Sung-Woo Cho and published by the Community College Research Center, Teachers College, Columbia University, October 2010. This Issue Brief was presented as part of President Obama's White House Summit on Community College (October 2010) and looks at the integral role effective developmental education will play in improving community college completion rates.

By Alan Greenblatt on NPR, March 29 2010. Greenblatt reports that there was initially great promise for community colleges in the health care reconciliation bill that was passed at the end of March. However, "Congress ultimately took a pass on restructuring the mission of the nation's community colleges." The $12 billion American Graduation Initiative recognized the important role that community colleges could play in producing more college graduates, but the initiative was not included in the final law.

By Sara Lipka in the Students section of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov 11 2010. Reporting on the latest report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement, which states that "Increasing college completion is meaningless unless certificates and degrees represent real learning, which community colleges must work harder to ensure."

This three-part series from American Radioworks looks at the American higher education system and asks "what's the right kind of education to get? And why are so many Americans failing to finish college." The programs include: Some College, No Degree; Don't Lecture Me (also bookmarked); and Who Needs and English Major.

by Jon Marcus on The Hechinger Report, December 26, 2011. Open University, a successful British online public university to be used as a model in the U.S. The goal is to help students who are intimidated by higher education adapt to and succeed in college. Next Generation Learning Challenges, a Gates funded initiative, will adapt two free Open University, at-your-own-pace online courses for use at about a dozen U.S. colleges and universities this academic year: one to help students be more comfortable with math so they do better on placement tests or move more quickly through remedial courses, and another to teach students skills to prepare them for college.

By Amanda Ripley, part of Time's cover story on Reinventing College, Oct 18 2012. In this piece, Ripley provides a brief survey of the three major university-related MOOC suppliers: Udacdity, Coursera and EdX. The author describes a Udacity physics course (which she deems among the best of those MOOCs she sampled) and then compares it to physics courses at Georgetown University and University of DC.

Part of American Radioworks' Tomorrow's College series, this podcast looks at the changing face of the college lecture. You can listen to the program online or download an MP3 (runs just under 1 hour) or you can read the transcript. Program materials include Emily Hanford's "Report's Notebook."

Press release from The Century Foundation, Feb 2 2012. With President Obama's increasing emphasis on community colleges, "The Century Foundation is assembling a task force of distinguished individuals from two-year and four-year institutions, scholars of higher education, and representatives of the business, philanthropic, and civil rights communities to consider strategies to strengthen community colleges. "

By Jennifer Gonzalez, Students section, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February2 2012. The new project is being led by the Center for Community College Student Engagement and will analyze data from four different surveys: Community College Survey of Student Engagement, the Survey of Entering Student Engagement, the Community College Faculty Survey of Student Engagement, and the newly created Community College Institutional Survey. Reports will be produced annually for the next three years. See CCCSE tag for first year's report.

Press release from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, March 18, 2010. "A new study of national college graduation data by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) reveals that far too many four-year colleges and universities graduate less than half of their Hispanic students."

A program of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Statway focuses on helping community college students learn basic skills in statistics, data analysis, and quantitative reasoning as part of a one-year pathway. The ultimate goal of this pathway is preparation for college-level statistics. This home page to Statway also includes links to the project blog (called Pathways Connection) and to the project's mailing list. There are 19 community colleges affiliated with this project.

Published by Center for Community College Student Engagement, 2010. This report looks at the Survey of Entering Student Engagement (SENSE), launched fall 2006. From the report, "To date, more than 91,000 students from 197 colleges in 37 states have participated in SENSE, thereby helping to create a wealth of new and actionable data about the entering community college student experience."

Interesting look-see by retiring community college president Eric Reno in TX. He points out that the failure to get an AS degree is not an indicator of failure but simply that a person may have chosen a different transfer point to enter a four year college. Yet lawmakers and policy makers look to the AS completion degree as the end of story for community college effectiveness. According to this single measure, I am a failure because I did not obtain an AS degree but my sister who received an AS in nursing is a success! We both have master's degrees.

By Kara Spak, Chicago Sun-Times, May 31, 2011. This article cites a recent report released by the Alliance for Excellent Education, which finds that "as many as one-third of students entering higher education need to take some sort of remedial or developmental course...." Putting a human face on these statistics is the profile of one student who graduated from high school with a 3.0 GPA and a B in "College Algebra" but still needed to take a non-credit developmental math course when she got to community college.

By Nick DeSantis, technology column, The Chronicle of Higher Education April 15 2012. According to this article, at present most student-related data (grades, course selection, graduation rates, etc.) is "locked-up" within colleges. In this new era of "open data" the Dept of Ed and others are calling on colleges and universities to make this data more accessible to developers -- including students in their own institutions.

Published by American Association of Community Colleges, April 2012. From this page, you can download a PDF of the full report, as well as video about the report, information on the 21st-Century Commission on the Future of Community Colleges, and coverage of this report in the media.

By Caralee Adams in the College Bound section of Education Week, October 5 2010. Adams reports on the White House Summit on Community Colleges, held on October 5.

By Jennifer D. Jordan in the Providence Journal, Oct 20 2010. One state (Rhode Island) looks at the transition from high school to college and the steady need for developmental education among nearly 2/3 of its community college students, despite efforts made in K-12.