Listening to Students: Higher Education and the American Dream: Why the "Status Quo" Won't Get Us There
by Sara E. Keene




The community college represents the only form of universal access to education, and is thus purported to be the gateway to low-income and minority students' realization of the "American Dream." But that dream is growing more and more elusive for a substantial number of people. Instead of breaking down ethnic and class barriers to economic and social opportunities, community colleges are often complicit in the maintenance and reproduction of social stratification, under the guise of a so-called "ethic of care" that attempts to cultivate students' "self-esteem" rather than the acquisition of collegiate competencies crucial to rigorous academic work, successful university transfer, and citizenship. My experiences in higher education-on both sides of the desk-suggest to me that remedial and dumbed-down courses may be simply another means of reinforcing and reproducing ethnic, gender, and class-based inequalities.

When I began one of a number of attempts at a community-college education, I was placed in a remedial math course. I was not terribly put off by this, since I was scheduled to take two sociology courses that looked extremely interesting. But after several weeks of mind-numbingly boring, irrelevant, and uninspiring classes, I dropped all my courses, adding three "withdrawals" to my transcripts from more than a half dozen community colleges. Five years of bouncing from one college to the next without having either achieved a two-year degree or fulfilled the requirements necessary for transfer left me unimpressed with academia and reinforced my belief that college was a waste of time. Everything I needed for "success," I believed, could be achieved instead through "life experiences."

After a frustrating year working in minimum-wage jobs, I decided to swallow my pride and return to the community college. This time, I vowed to complete my two-year degree regardless of how boring I found the courses to be, with the expectation that this perseverance would lead to a better job. But my perceptions of education were to be dramatically changed. At Columbia College-a community college in the California foothills-I met two professors, Ted Hamilton and Paula Clarke, who fundamentally challenged my worldview, my expectations of academia, my sense of my own academic potential, and my understanding of my responsibilities as a citizen. I became aware of the ways in which my lack of institutional knowledge, coupled with low aspirations, had unnecessarily constrained my academic and professional options.

Professors Hamilton and Clarke's pedagogy was radically different from anything I had ever experienced, and I began to realize why I so detested the remedial courses I had taken in previous college attempts. Such courses lacked significant challenge, and they did nothing to expose me to any of the exciting ideas that make a discipline worth learning or study worth persisting in. I was exposed to an explosion of ideas-many with which I would grapple for months, if not years, after completing the courses-and I was challenged (and required) to develop critical reading, writing, and reasoning skills. Education was suddenly meaningful and relevant.

The mentorship of these professors led to academic and professional outcomes that were extremely atypical for people in my community. Upon graduating from Columbia College, I transferred to the University of California, Santa Cruz, where I studied anthropology (and graduated summa cum laude), earned a M.Sc. in development studies from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, and completed an internship in India with UNICEF. I am now beginning a Ph.D. program in development sociology at Cornell University. And I'm only one of a large group of its students-some of whom came from extraordinarily disadvantaged backgrounds-who have successfully pursued academic and professional goals that are unusual for their geographic, economic, and social backgrounds.

I later spent a year teaching at the same community college in which my own life had shifted course, employing my mentors' teaching philosophy and pedagogy. That year was one of the most rewarding and challenging experiences of my life. I witnessed first-hand the effects that remedial and dumbed-down courses are having on students. From one group of them, I experienced outright resistance. I was informed that my expectations were too high: one student insisted that "we shouldn't be expected to do this kind of work; after all, we're only community-college students," and another questioned why my course demanded so much work when he had earned A's in similar courses without having opened any of the required readings. On the other hand, I had students in my classes who were as thrilled as I had been to encounter an alternative to the status quo. They too were searching for a meaningful education, although many of them had never considered themselves capable of serious academic work.

As time went on I saw transformations in the students who persisted in the course, who typically didn't fit the normative definition of "elite" students: many were minorities and/or came from low-income families, and several were non-native English speakers. But they began to demand more from their education and in turn invested significantly more effort and commitment in it. As these students developed an alternative conception of the ethical responsibilities of educators and students, they began to question their prior collegiate experiences.

One student told me that one of his instructors had given students the option of donating blood twice in the semester in lieu of taking a final exam. Several others shared stories of being discouraged by counselors from applying to prestigious academic institutions, under the assumption that the local state college should be "good enough" for them. These kinds of behaviors clearly violate academe's ethical and professional norms and cripple otherwise capable students.

In stark contrast to this ethos, Professors Hamilton and Clarke had created an environment that provided engaging coursework in the context of meaningful challenge and considerable support. But despite such successes, academically demanding and stimulating environments such as these are rare, the students in my classes told me. In the absence of authentic collegiate opportunities, I would have been, and many other willing and committed students have been and still are, casualties of academe.

Although, as I realized during the year of doing menial labor, higher education serves as a gateway into the economy, this is not its only, or even its most important, function. In an era in which employment is becoming increasingly uncertain and unstable, higher education must prepare people not just for work but for lives filled with more intellectually demanding challenges generally. Navigating the future's uncharted territory will require adults to possess a tremendous capacity for and tolerance of ambiguity, as well as commitment, creativity, and critical engagement. We are not likely to cultivate these characteristics through remedial courses. If we want students-and indeed citizens-to think critically, innovatively, and imaginatively, higher education is going to have to provide them with ideas worth thinking about, in an environment that facilitates the development of authentic collegiate competencies.

Breaking Bad Habits: Navigating the Financial Crisis by Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman The "Great Recession" of 2009 has brought an unprecedented level of financial chaos to public higher education in America. Programs are being reduced, furloughs and layoffs are widespread, class sizes are increasing, sections are being cut, and students can't get into classes needed for graduation. Enrollment losses upwards of several hundred thousand are being reported-and only time will tell whether the situation is even worse. Reports of budget cuts in public institutions in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 percent (Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, Florida, and California) are becoming common. Halfway through the 2009-2010 fiscal year, 48 states were projecting deficits for 2011 and 2012 (NASBO, 2009). Although states are reluctant to raise taxes, they evidently have less of a problem letting tuitions go up. And up they are going-California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Wisconsin, and Florida announced increases ranging from 10 to 33 percent. The normally tuition-resistant Florida legislature has authorized annual increases in undergraduate tuitions of 15 percent per year until they reach national averages for public four-year institutions. Around the country, the increases are setting off student protests reminiscent of the 1960's, variously directed at campuses, system boards, legislatures, and governors-complete with reports of violence and arrests. The New Normal Higher education has been through tough times before. The pattern of the last two decades has been a zigzag of reductions in state funds for higher education during times of recession, followed by a return to revenue growth about two years after the state coffers refill. But resources have not returned to pre-recession levels. So the overall pattern has been a modest but continuous decline in state revenues. Caption: Percent Change in Appropriations for Higher Education, 1960-2006

Inside Higher Education

Going For Distance
August 31, 2009
Online education is no longer a peripheral phenomenon at public universities, but many academic administrators are still treating it that way.
So says a comprehensive study released today by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) and the Sloan National Commission on Online Learning, which gathered survey responses from more than 10,700 faculty members and 231 interviews with administrators, professors, and students at APLU institutions.
"I think it's a call to action," said Jack Wilson, president of the University of Massachusetts and chair of the Sloan online learning commission. "The leadership of universities has been trying to understand exactly how [online education] fits into their strategic plans, and what this shows is that faculty are ahead of the institutions in these online goals."
According to the study, professors are open to teaching online courses (defined in the study as courses where at least 80 percent of the course is administered on the Web), but do not believe they are receiving adequate support from their bosses. On the whole, respondents to the faculty survey rated public universities "below average" in seven of eight categories related to online education, including support for online course development and delivery, protection of intellectual property, incentives for developing and delivering online courses, and consideration of online teaching activity in promotion and tenure decisions.
Still, more than a third of the faculty respondents had developed and taught an online course.
"The urban legend out there was that many faculty out there don't want to participate" in online education, said Wilson. "Contrary to popular myths, faculty at all ages and levels are participating."
Indeed, neither seniority nor tenure status held a significant bearing on whether a professor had ever developed or taught an online course. At the time the survey was administered, there were more professors with at least 20 years' experience teaching an online course than professors with five years' experience or less.
This despite the fact that developing and teaching a course online is more taxing than doing the same in a classroom -- according to the survey respondents, teaching online isn't easy. "Faculty who get involved in online teaching have to be more reflective about their teaching," Wilson said. Professors need to organize lecture notes and other materials with more care. They get more feedback from students. It's more apparent when a student is falling behind and needs special attention.
Almost two-thirds of the faculty said it takes more effort to teach a course online than in a classroom, while 85 percent said more effort is required to develop one. While younger professors seem to have an easier time teaching online than older ones, more than half of respondents from the youngest faculty group agreed it was more time-consuming. Nearly 70 percent of all professors cited the extra effort necessary to develop Web courses as a crucial barrier to teaching online.
So if teaching an online course is a ton of work and support from administrators is lacking, why bother doing it? Most professors said they are motivated by their students' need for flexible access to course materials, and a belief that the Web allows them to reach certain types of student more effectively.
"As a faculty member, when you're teaching online, suddenly you have to be teaching 24/7," said Samuel Smith, president emeritus of Washington State University. "…It's more difficult, but the students get more contact."
Given the extra work, more than 60 percent of faculty see inadequate compensation as a barrier to the further development of online courses. "If these rates of participation among faculty are going to continue to grow, institutions will have do a better job acknowledging the additional time and effort on the part of the faculty member," said Jeff Seaman, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group and the survey's lead researcher. For some, that might mean that their online work should figure into tenure and promotion decisions. For others, "acknowledgment" might equate to some extra cash in their paycheck.
This is not a new request -- nor is the fact that it takes longer to develop and administer a college course online a new revelation. The American Federation of Teachers report on guidelines for good practice in distance education acknowledges that it takes "anywhere from 66 to 500 percent longer" to prepare an online course than a face-to-face one, and "additional compensation should be provided to faculty to meet the extensive time commitments of distance education." The report noted that only half of the faculty it surveyed reported receiving extra compensation. That was in 2000.
The authors of today's APLU study conclude by recommending that public universities not only institute policies that "acknowledge and recognize" professors' online education efforts, but also work develop "mechanisms that effectively incorporate online learning into the fabric and missions of the institutions."
"It's now a factual statement that online learning is woven into the fabric of higher education," Wilson said. "It has grown faster over the last six years than any other sector of higher education … and it will keep growing."
- Steve Kolowich