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Using Educational Technology to Help Students Get Back on Track
Newswire #50 | May 13, 2008
IN THIS ISSUE
Community Colleges: Pathways to Opportunity
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.
From High School to Success In College
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.”
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