Community Colleges: Pathways to Opportunity

Test Drive:
Six States Pilot Better Ways to Measure and Compare Community College Performance
Increasing demand for at least some postsecondary education in today’s labor market has met with stagnating college completion rates. As a result, states have a growing interest in better understanding the challenges to improving graduation rates and in tracking student progress and success. Six states in the Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count initiative have designed and tested a more complete and accurate way of measuring community college student performance and success. Test Drive describes this new approach and compares it to the current federal system, highlights key findings from the pilot testing process and the links between state policies and the varying state results, and identifies the group’s priorities for further refining the new measures and related benchmarks.

The ultimate goal is to design a set of measures that accurately describe and track the multiple successful outcomes that community college students attain and to identify the warning signs of struggling students early enough in their educational careers to help keep them on track. This richer set of measures will help colleges tell a more complete and true story of their students’ educational progress, help them identify stumbling blocks in the road, and ultimately improve progress and outcomes.

It’s Not About the Cut Score:
Redesigning Placement Assessment Policy to Improve Student Success
Placement assessment policy, which governs how colleges assess the academic skills of entering students and place them in courses that are appropriate for their skill levels, can be an important lever for increasing student success in community colleges. A coherent policy would indicate which students must be assessed, specify assessment instruments, set cut score standards, and articulate procedures to be used uniformly across a state. Well-designed placement assessment policies also can help increase student success in a number of ways, and they can be used to help improve the college readiness of incoming students.

With these benefits in mind, many states are evaluating their placement assessment policies, or lack thereof. As they do, they are finding that setting placement assessment policy is not a simple process. This brief by JFF’s Michael Lawrence Collins describes the experiences of Virginia, Connecticut, and North Carolina as they revised their placement assessment policies. It also explores current policies in all states and makes recommendations for states that seek to evaluate and revise their policies. Virginia, Connecticut, and North Carolina all participate in Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, a multiyear, national initiative designed to help more community college students succeed—complete courses, earn certificates and earn degrees. The brief includes a detailed resource guide on policies in Achieving the Dream states.

Pushing the Envelope:
State Policy Innovations in Financing Higher Education for Workers Who Study
Postsecondary education, accompanied by a credential documenting mastered skills, is an important ticket out of poverty for a significant portion of the working population. However, even community college can be out of reach for many low-income working adults. In Pushing the Envelope,JFF's Radha Roy Biswas, Vickie Choitz, and Heath Prince profile 12 states that have amended or created student aid programs to better serve adult students. States typically have done so based on the proposition that investing in the education and skills of the workforce produces a return not only to individuals but also to businesses and the state.

Pushing the Envelope is the second in a series of policy briefs from Breaking Through, a collaboration of JFF with the National Council for Workforce Education to help low-income, low-literacy adults succeed in community college occupational and technical degree programs.

Return to Top

From High School to Success In College

Graduation Day 2008:
News from the Early College High School Initiative
This spring, nearly 3,000 students graduated from early college high schools across the country. Their accomplishments, featured in the June issue of ECHS News, show that the challenge and supports offered by early college really do make a difference. Local media reported extensively on this year’s graduates—noting their success with college coursework while in high school and their plans for pursuing further education.

It has been a long road for many of these young people and for the faculty and school partners who continue to refine these new schools. All are paving the way for a growing number of young people who will benefit from the early college experience. We congratulate this year’s graduates and the many adults who have contributed to their success.

Return to Top

Academic Success for All Young People

Ensuring College Success:
Scaffolding Experiences for Students and Faculty in an Early College School
The Science, Technology and Research Early College School, working closely with Brooklyn College in a partnership supported by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, has amassed an impressive record in its first five years. STAR’s successful early outcomes are the result of the ambitious goals and careful planning of the school and its partners. The key is a multiyear transition plan that gradually introduces students to college-going experiences and the demands of college coursework, while providing a wide variety of supports tailored to individual needs. Ensuring College Success, by Anne Newton and Kristen Vogt, is a joint publication of JFF and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

State Action Urged to Help Raise Graduation Rates,
Better Prepare Students in Struggling Schools
The nation’s high school graduation rate remains flat and too many students drop out, yet most states are failing to take actions to reverse this troubling pattern. Raising Graduation Rates in an Era of High Standards: Five Commitments for State Action gives policymakers a detailed framework for helping all students persevere and succeed in and beyond high school. It also highlights more than 20 states and school districts that are already raising standards and graduation rates.

The report, by Adria Steinberg and Cheryl A. Almeida, comes out of a joint project of JFF and Achieve, Inc. JFF is helping states identify and implement aggressive policies to help more young people—particularly those from low-income families and low-performing schools—stay in school as states ratchet up academic standards and expectations.

On Ramp to College:
States Expand Dual Enrollment Policies to Reach Underserved Populations
Dual enrollment is no longer just for gifted and talented high school students hoping to get a head start on college, according to On Ramp to College: A State Policymaker’s Guide to Dual Enrollment. JFF’s Nancy Hoffman, Joel Vargas, and Janet Santos review trends in a growing number of states that see dual enrollment as a way to expand college opportunity—particularly for students who might not be considered college-bound.

The report shows how dual enrollment can serve as an “on ramp” to postsecondary education for students who are otherwise unlikely to attend college. It highlights examples of successful statewide dual enrollment efforts and provides a step-by-step plan for policymakers to create successful programs and policies and to assess their current approaches.

Return to Top

Improving Economic Opportunity

Advocating for Workforce Solutions
As part of its mission to improve employment, training, and labor market outcomes for low-income individuals, the National Fund for Workforce Solutions seeks to raise awareness of and promote federal and state policies that support the workforce partnership model for helping workers gain the skills they need to succeed and giving employers access to the skilled labor they need to compete. One of the first components of this policy agenda is the State Policy Advocacy Project for Financing Workforce Partnerships. The National Fund has selected three regional funding collaboratives in the initiative to receive additional support to carry out strategies to secure sustainable funding for workforce partnerships and their core functions. We congratulate the Bay Area Workforce Funding Collaborative, the New York Workforce Innovation Fund, and the Pennsylvania Fund for Workforce Solutions.

Later this year, the National Fund will release a set of policy documents based on an inventory of current state and federal policies that align with the workforce partnership model. The initiative also will continue to provide ongoing support to regional funding collaboratives as they develop and implement policy and systems change agendas to improve workforce development in their regions.

Return to Top

From Our Friends

Rethinking the Cost of Small High Schools
Education Resource Strategies, based on a three-year effort, has created a number of reports and tools to support district leaders as they consider and design small high schools.

A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education
In an ad appearing in the New York Times and Washington Post in June, a task force of experts in diverse public policy fields called for a “broader, bolder approach to education.” According to the campaign, “The nation’s education and youth development policy has erred by attempting to rely on school improvement alone to raise the achievement of disadvantaged children. Rather, school improvement, to be fully effective, must be complemented by a broader definition of schooling and by improvements in the social and economic circumstances of disadvantaged youth.”

State Policies on Student Transitions
The National Center for Higher Education Management Systems has issued State Policies on Student Transitions: Results of a Fifty-State Inventory. The study concentrates on key transitions that directly affect the number of college graduates a state can generate: from high school to college; from pre-college to college-level work; from two-year to four-year institutions; and from being enrolled in a postsecondary institution to having graduated from one.

Skills2Compete State Campaigns
250 diverse organizations, including JFF, have endorsed Skills2Compete, a nonpartisan campaign to ensure that the nation’s workforce has the skills needed to meet business demand, foster innovation, and grow broadly shared prosperity. In June, the Skills2Compete-Washington State campaign released Washington’s Forgotten Middle-Skill Jobs, which finds that middle-skill jobs—those that require more than high school but less than a four-year degree—make up the largest portion of the state’s labor market.

Reach Higher, America: Overcoming Crisis in the U.S. Workforce
The final report of the National Commission on Adult Literacy calls for a dramatically revamped service system with the capacity to effectively serve 20 million adults annually by the year 2020. It also calls for resetting the educational mission of this new system to demonstrated readiness for postsecondary education and job training.

Systems Change: A Survey of Program Activities>
Based on a survey of 250 sector programs that engage in systems change activities, this Workforce Strategies Initiative report explores how to address structural issues—in industry practices, education and training infrastructure, and public policy—that hamper success.

Return to Top