Two Colleges Win MetLife Foundation “Excellence Award”:
Honored for Leadership in Serving Students of All Ages and Backgrounds
The Community College of Baltimore County in Maryland and South Texas College in McAllen, Texas, have received the 2008 MetLife Foundation Community College Excellence Award. Each college receives a $30,000 grant to continue creating and implementing effective strategies for aiding underrepresented students, as well as using data to target and assess strategies that improve student outcomes.
The award winners, announced at the 2008 annual convention of the American Association of Community Colleges, demonstrated determined leadership, innovative programming, and attention to outcomes. The result: clear improvements in meeting the varied learning needs of low-income, first-generation, immigrant, and working students.
The JFF Web site has information about the MetLife Foundation Community College Excellence Award and how the Community College of Baltimore County and South Texas College help low-skilled youth and adults to achieve their educational goals.
Achieving Success Profiles California’s Basic Skills Initiative
In the April 2008 Achieving Success, the quarterly state policy newsletter of Achieving the Dream, Bob Gabriner and Barbara Illowsky, two architects of California’s Basic Skills Initiative, discuss how this statewide program is funding experimentation to improve developmental education instruction and outcomes at each of the state’s 109 community colleges.
Advancing Adults into Community College Programs:
Data Tools from Breaking Through
The goal of Breaking Through, a collaboration of JFF and the National Council for Workforce Education, is to demonstrate that community colleges can restructure themselves to create clear pathways for low-skilled adults into professional/technical certificate and degree programs. Colleges participating in the initiative have found that incompatible data and data systems represent a significant barrier to creating pathways into college for adult students. Peter Ewell of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems has worked with the colleges to provide insight into solutions that would be useful to any college serving low-skilled adults.
Growth in College Spending Not Directed Where It Is Most Needed
While the public and policymakers urge colleges to provide more cost-effective education, few experts inside or outside of academia have had access to national data that can help explain why costs have been rising. The Growing Imbalance: Recent Trends in U.S. Postsecondary Education Finance, released by the Delta Cost Project, provides the first look in more than a decade at where the money is going.
The report shows that even as spending rose across all types of institutions, money spent on student instruction declined relative to other types of institutional spending. In addition, as colleges enrolled many more students, most of the enrollment growth occurred in institutions with the least resources available to invest in students’ academic success.
“For too long, the higher education establishment has focused on how to grow revenue rather than on how to better spend the money we already have,” said Travis Reindl of Jobs for the Future, the managing partner for Making Opportunity Affordable, the national initiative supporting the Delta Cost Project’s research. “We absolutely must talk about productivity—the linkage between resources and results—if our country is serious about competing globally and maintaining our quality of life.”
Leveraging Postsecondary Partners to Build a College-Going Culture:
Tools for High School/Postsecondary Partnerships
A number of schools and school districts seek to revitalize their partnerships with postsecondary institutions as a way to create pathways to postsecondary education and training for all students, not just those who enter high school academically prepared. JFF developed this toolkit for schools that wish to create, broaden, and deepen their postsecondary partnerships for maximum impact on college-going.
This toolkit draws upon the lessons of three important efforts to create clear, tightly designed pathways from high school to college on behalf of students traditionally underrepresented in higher education: the Early College High School Initiative; University Park Campus School in Worcester, Massachusetts; and entrepreneurial efforts undertaken by new small schools in Boston to leverage partnerships that benefit all students.
Recognition Grows for University Park Campus School
“The bar is high at this small public high school, and the hurdles are unusual,” writes Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Susan Snyder. “The school has earned international recognition and numerous accolades for its ability to take low-performing students and turn nearly all of them into first-generation college-bound teens.”
In her examination of what accounts for the success of University Park Campus School, in Worcester, Massachusetts, Snyder joins a national chorus of acclaim for UPCS. That success is also the basis of the University Park Campus School Institute for Student Success. This JFF project, a partnership with UPCS and Clark University, trains small school developers, leaders, and teachers to implement the leadership strategies and instructional techniques that have led to universal college readiness at UPCS.
To read more about the UPCS Institute, as well as other articles about the school, go to: http://www.upcsinstitute.org.
Working for Health: The Newsletter for Jobs to Careers
The inaugural issue of Working for Health, the newsletter of Jobs to Careers: Promoting Work-Based Learning for Quality Care, highlights the Wai’anae Coast Comprehensive Health Center. Located in the underserved Leeward O’ahu community, the center is one of Hawaii’s largest nonprofit service providers and the largest private employer in its community. Jobs to Careers support has enabled Wai’anae Coast to move its Graduated Competencies program into a college-based curriculum. This curriculum includes college-credit courses that have been designed and are taught by Leeward Community College staff, as well as non-credit courses taught by senior administrators at the health center.
Jobs to Careers, a $15.8 million national initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in collaboration with the Hitachi Foundation and the U.S. Department of Labor, seeks to advance and reward the skill and career development of the low-wage incumbent workers who provide care and services on the front lines of our health and health care systems. Working for Health is produced by Jobs for the Future, the National Program Office of Jobs to Careers.
Foundation Support Grows to Build Workforce Skills and Prosperity for Low-Wage Earners
In May, at the Council on Foundations 2008 Philanthropy Summit, the National Fund for Workforce Solutions announced over $3 million in new funding. The summit also highlighted programs of NFWS, a $50 million, 5-year effort to strengthen and expand effective workforce initiatives around the country, as emblematic of successful approaches to workforce development.
The new funding, from Microsoft Corporation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, will broaden the impact of NFWS programs in urban and rural communities nationwide. Microsoft will donate $2 million, plus software valued at up to $8 million. Knight Foundation’s contribution of $1.35 million will support peer learning meetings and exchanges among local partnerships, e-learning, and grants for special projects.
Workforce Innovations 2008
JFF invites you to join us at Workforce Innovations 2008, the U.S. Department of Labor’s annual conference promoting collaboration among leaders from workforce development, business, economic development, education, community-based organizations, and philanthropy. JFF, a conference sponsor, is partnering in three sessions:
Jobs to Careers: Work-based Learning and Career Advancement in the Health and Health Care Industry explores how creative partnerships between employer organizations and community colleges not only train and educate frontline workers but do so using a learning methodology that considerably increases the access and opportunity.
Pushing the Envelope: Expanding Policy Frameworks for Financing Higher Education for Workers Who Study will cover a range of innovations that states are undertaking or exploring, ranging from adjusting financial aid policies to better meet the needs of adult students, to exploring new frameworks that assess the costs of training for workers, employers, and states.
The National Fund for Workforce Solutions will offer a session on how the public workforce development system can engage with foundations.
Securing State Commitments to Family Economic Prosperity
This policy brief from the Working Poor Families Project examines recent state poverty initiatives and explores the tools and strategies states are pursuing to improve economic security, including establishing measurable targets for poverty reduction.
Systems Change: A Survey of Program Activities
Building on Sectoral Strategies for Low-Income Workers: Lessons from the Field, this Workforce Strategies Initiative report explores ways sector initiatives engage in “systems change” activities to help address structural issues—in industry practices, education and training infrastructure, and public policy—that hamper their success.
State Higher Education Leaders Release White Paper for Presidential Candidates
The members of SHEEO, the national association of state higher education executives, have written to the candidates running for President of the United States, urging each of them to “clearly and explicitly commit your campaign and your administration to reestablishing and sustaining a higher education system that is second to no other nation in its quality and productivity.” Signed by more than 90 current or former statewide educational leaders, the White Paper makes the case for a renewed emphasis on higher education to maintain national strength and economic security.
Graduation Rate Watch: Making Minority Student Success a Priority
In this Education Sector report, Kevin Carey highlights colleges where African-American and white students have similar graduation rates, those colleges that don’t, and the key differences between them.
JFF Board Member Interviewed for Public TV Special
Dr. Anthony Iton, health officer for the Alameda County Public Health Association, is a featured expert in Unnatural Causes, a four-part public television series that sheds light on mounting evidence of how lack of access to power and resources can get under the skin and disrupt human biology as surely as germs and viruses. Dr. Iton, who has received the prestigious Roemer Prize for Creative Public Health Work, stresses the role of education as a determinant of health. “Education is probably the single most important health policy in the state,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle.
JFF Resource Guide for Journalists
JFF has prepared this guide to experts on our staff who are available to discuss how the nation can strengthen education and the economy.
Welcoming Jass Stewart
JFF welcomes Jass Stewart as vice president of communications and information technology. Before joining JFF, Stewart served as the director for school development and public engagement at The Big Picture Company, an education advocacy organization. He founded and ran Invent Media, a social marketing and technology company serving nonprofits whose clients included MIT, the Smithsonian, and other high-profile organizations. In Brockton, Massachusetts, he was the city’s first-ever African-American candidate for mayor, as well as the first openly gay and youngest candidate. He came shy of winning by 700 votes.
Community Colleges: Pathways to Opportunity
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