SHARING THE EARLY COLLEGE PROMISE

Each year, close to half a million low-income young people give up on their high schools, and millions more are at risk of not completing a postsecondary credential. The best way to prepare all young people to succeed in college is to provide them with substantial college experiences while still in high school. This idea is central to the “early college design,” which blends high school and college in a rigorous yet supportive program, compressing the time it takes to complete a high school diploma and the first two years of college.

In this issue of Newswire, you can read about how early college designs work in one community and about state policies that can bring this highly effective strategy to many more young people.

College Success for All relates the successes of Hidalgo, Texas, where early college is the district-wide approach to raising the achievement levels of all 3,500 students in the system. More than 95 percent of Hidalgo’s graduating seniors this year earned free college credit.

The principles of early college should also be considered as a statewide strategy for supporting all students in achieving college and career readiness. JFF’s new Policymaker’s Guide to Early College Designs helps states plan for and implement this effective approach to improving college success. The guide outlines what it would take to systematize and scale up early college course-taking across a state.

Hidalgo’s on-the-ground story lends weight to the policies detailed in the guide. And both publications support our belief that offering college credit in high school should be the norm in every U.S. secondary school—especially for youth currently underrepresented in higher education.

—Marlene B. Seltzer, President and CEO, Jobs for the Future

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COLLEGE READY

COLLEGE SUCCESS FOR ALL: EARLY COLLEGE AS A DISTRICT-WIDE STRATEGY

In 2005, the Hidalgo, Texas, school district made a commitment: all of its students, not just a select group, would earn college credits on the nation’s southern border before graduating from high school. And this June, when the first group of young people to go through four years of the early college program graduated, they had accumulated a remarkable 3,743 college credit hours. College Success for All tells how this low-income, 95 percent Hispanic community created a college and career culture, established strong partnerships with local colleges, and developed high-quality course sequences and career pathways.

EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS ON THE EARLY COLLEGE HIGH SCHOOL MODEL

Like Texas, North Carolina is a frontrunner in adopting college-level work in high school as a statewide, full-scale reform strategy. According to ninth-grader results from a rigorous experimental study, North Carolina’s early college high schools are improving school environments for students, resulting in better attendance, reduced suspensions, and more students on track for college. These schools are also expanding the college preparatory pipeline for students of all backgrounds. The study was conducted by Julie Edmunds of the Serve Center at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

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COLLEGE SUCCESS

REDUCING THE TIME TO DEGREE: TOOLS FOR INSTITUTIONS AND POLICYMAKERS

Reducing college students’ “time to degree” and eliminating the excess credit hours many students take can help states graduate more students faster—and save money for students, institutions, and states. To improve data-driven decision making about time and completion, JFF has prepared online tools for diagnosing why students are not graduating on time and analyzing the factors that contribute to extended time to completion.

Currently available are:

• Time to Completion Tools for Institutional Data Analysis: This comprehensive resource includes research, a ready-to-use student survey, and templates designed to enable college administrators to use institutional data to conduct time-to-completion analyses, disaggregated by key student and institution factors.
• Time to Completion Policy Exploration Tool: This interactive tool builds from a research base on barriers and supports to timely completion. It enables a state or system to audit its own policies against powerful policy levers for improving time to completion. The tool yields a state policy profile that can help policymakers make decisions on improving time to completion.

HOW STATES AND SYSTEMS ARE TACKLING THE TIME DILEMMA

The challenge is all too familiar: The nation needs to improve postsecondary completion rates to ensure a competitive labor market, but how do we get more people to complete? This opinion piece by JFF Vice President Nancy Hoffman looks at the data confirming that if you want more students to finish, it’s critical to help them go faster. Time matters. But acceleration strategies have to be coupled with institutional change: policies, practices, and pathways that lead to degrees with fewer choices, better structures for completion, and clearer connections to the labor market and/or further education.

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CAREER ADVANCEMENT

POSITIVE ENERGY: GREEN-JOBS TRAINING PREPARES STUDENTS FOR CAREER SUCCESS

“The emerging green economy will create not just jobs, but—if done right—career opportunities across the United States,” according to Kevin Coyle, vice president of education and training at the National Wildlife Federation, and Maria Flynn, JFF vice president for building economic opportunity. At the center of this unprecedented moment are the nation’s nearly 1,200 community and technical colleges. As the authors report in the November issue of Community College Journal, “Good work is already under way in several states, including Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, and Texas.” These states are part of The Greenforce Initiative, a two-year collaboration of JFF and NWF to spur green-jobs education, innovation, and training on community college campuses.

WORKFORCE PARTNERSHIP GUIDANCE TOOL

High-quality workforce partnerships are among the most fundamentally sound strategies for helping low-wage workers succeed in today’s competitive economy, while at the same time improving the competitiveness of employers. This new tool from the National Fund for Workforce Solutions is designed to provide guidance not only to workforce partnerships but also to regional funding collaboratives that support them.

COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTERS: GROWING THEIR OWN WORKFORCES

Health care reform calls for unprecedented investments in the nation’s community health centers, paving the way to serve millions more Americans who are currently uninsured, underserved, or medically disadvantaged. Yet unless community health centers can resolve persistent workforce shortages, they will be hard-pressed to reach those in need and meet the demand for affordable, high-quality, cost-effective health care.

Through Jobs to Careers, four community health centers have partnered with education institutions and community organizations to change the way frontline employees are trained, rewarded, and advanced. Growing Their Own details how these partnerships have developed career paths and made them easily available to frontline employees.

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POLICY SOLUTIONS

ACHIEVING SUCCESS

The latest issue of Achieving Success, a policy newsletter published by JFF for Achieving the Dream, features an interview with Rose Asera, director of pathway connections for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. She talks about how the Statway Project to redesign college math pathways and engage developmental math students to and through transferable college statistics in one year.

A POLICYMAKER’S GUIDE TO EARLY COLLEGE DESIGNS: EXPANDING A STRATEGY FOR ACHIEVING COLLEGE READINESS FOR ALL

Ideally, all students should be able to begin college-level work as soon as they are ready. JFF’s Nancy Hoffman and Joel Vargas prepared this guide to help state policymakers make informed decisions as they plan for and implement early college designs. The goal is to support low-income high school students who, without significant assistance, may lack the skills and knowledge to enter and persist through college.

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PROFILE

NANCY HOFFMAN

In September, when Joel Vargas became vice president for JFF’s High School through College team, he assumed leadership for a body of work built by Nancy Hoffman and the early college team of which Joel was a part. Nancy remains as a vice president here and adds the title of senior advisor. Since 2001, she has been deeply engaged in JFF’s creation of early college high schools and expanding opportunities for college-level work in high school to a wide range of students. “The early college work is the most satisfying work I’ve done,” says Nancy, who was an academic activist and college professor for many years before coming to JFF. “It’s up there with participation in the civil rights and women’s movement in the 1960s and ’70s. I get tears in my eyes watching videos of early college students dressed in caps and gowns and going off to complete college.”

Nancy has written frequently for JFF on the topic of college and career preparation, and in her spare time, she completed research for the revision of Women’s “True” Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching, which was inspired by the stories of the many Northern women who went south during and after the Civil War to teach newly freed slaves. These days, Nancy is also a consultant for the OECD and has been engaged in its 17-country study of vocational education and training, Learning for Jobs. She is writing a book on what the United States might learn from countries that have strong secondary and postsecondary career pathways for young people.

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Jobs for the Future develops, implements, and promotes new education and workforce strategies that help communities, states, and the nation compete in a global economy. In 200 communities in 41 states, JFF improves the pathways leading from high school to college to family-sustaining careers.

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