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7
General Discussion
During the discussion periods throughout the summit, participants
considered many issues, beyond those covered in the previous three
chapters, which have vital effects on community colleges. This chapter
combines important points from those discussions into several broad
topics. It also includes a box on major issues identified by the summit
participants in a pre-summit survey described in Chapter 1.
SUPPORT FOR COMMUNITY COLLEGES
Several participants at the summit pointed to the immense financial
challenges now facing community colleges. Community colleges “have
really been hit,” according to Jane Oates, and not just by the recent reces -
sion. Community colleges are often seen as having the capacity to raise
funds in ways other than governmental support. As a result, policy mak -
ers and funding organizations view higher education—and community
colleges in particular—as a lower priority than K-12 education, she said.
“We are not funding community colleges adequately,” said Alicia
Dowd. “We are not funding public education adequately.” The counselor-
to-student ratio at community colleges is at best 1 to 1,000, Dowd said.
Adjunct faculty need better compensation and responsibility for fewer
classes. Faculty need professional development and engagement with
their peers as well as with students. “We need to pay for public educa -
tion, including community colleges, and for faculty who are on campus,”
she said.
41
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42 COMMUNITY COLLEGES IN THE EVOLVING STEM EDUCATION LANDSCAPE
George Boggs agreed that if America is to meet the challenges of
the future, policy makers must support colleges and universities as well
as their students. States have cut funding to public higher education,
including community colleges, despite a surge of enrollments. As a result,
hundreds of thousands of students are being turned away because of
inadequate resources. Boggs also observed that although part-time or
adjunct faculty can do a great job in the classroom, a core of full-time
faculty is essential to make policy changes and to work with colleagues
at four-year institutions.
Mark Hubley from Prince George’s Community College in Maryland
pointed out that when he started at the community college in 2002 his
department had 15 full-time faculty. Today, the enrollments in his depart -
ment are twice what they were—and the department has 16 full-time
faculty. The faculty in the department teach at four locations in the county,
the college has a program on the campus that enrolls high school students,
and the department teaches dual-enrollment classes at five high schools
in the county. He said, “As excited as I get about things that we hear in
meetings like this, it also makes me feel overwhelmed.” In the future, said
Hubley, the college will continue to need to do more with less, comment -
ing that “anything you can do to help the faculty at community colleges
will be most helpful.”
Funding priorities can be a force for change. As Karl Pister, former
chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a member of
the organizing committee observed, community colleges face the simul -
taneous challenge of educating potential transfer students, adults com -
ing back to school, students taking developmental courses, and students
interested in technical programs. In contrast, many four-year institutions
have a “very monolithic culture” organized around conducting research.
Research universities in their modern form were created when the fed-
eral government began making large investments in research in higher
education following World War II. The same sort of change is required
to spur major changes at the community college level, said Pister. “It is
an application of the Golden Rule,” he said. “People change their culture
when the people with the gold change the rules.” For example, federal
agencies need to insist in their grant making that transfer be substantially
increased. In Pister’s view, “Without that kind of incentivizing, I don’t
think we are going to see much in the way of change.”
Malvika Talwar from Northern Virginia Community College talked
about the changes that targeted funding could make in the ranks of com -
munity college faculty. If community college careers were more palatable
or exciting for students who are in graduate school, more PhDs would be
interested in going this route. “When we are in graduate school, we don’t
really know much about community colleges,” she said. One possibility
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43
GENERAL DISCUSSION
would be postdoctoral teaching fellowships that are geared specifically
toward community colleges. Such options would allow more students to
explore that option and encourage mentors to talk about that route.
Support from policy makers and foundations is important, but the
goals of improving educational attainment, particularly in STEM fields,
will be met only if educators take responsibility for improving students’
success, said Boggs. College and university faculty and administrators
need to work together to improve completion rates and to facilitate
the transfer of students from community colleges into upper division
coursework.
Oates sounded a rare positive note regarding funding when she
pointed out that the number of students with Pell grants who are in
community colleges has gone up by more than 50 percent since 2009. She
also said that more scholarship money is becoming available for students
in both two-year and four-year institutions. The Obama administration
has called for far more students to go to college and earn STEM degrees
to help the economy grow. Revitalizing STEM education is not enough,
Oates said. The challenge, she said, “is to embed STEM education as fun -
damental to America’s future.”
BUSINESS PARTNERSHIPS
Community colleges tend to have particularly close relationships
with businesses and industries, for several reasons. Many offer career and
technical education for occupations in nearby communities. In addition,
employment is essential for many community college students. As Becky
Packard pointed out, some students work full time and take one course at
a time, though it may take them many years to earn a degree. Workplace
tuition reimbursement programs can be particularly attractive options for
such students.
Dowd suggested several other valuable roles that businesses could
play. One is to fund transfer scholarships, which could raise the prestige
of transfer students. Another would be to help establish and support
community-based individual development accounts in which businesses
would match money set aside for education. Celeste Carter from the
National Science Foundation mentioned the possibility of businesses pos-
ing problems to groups of students that they could solve collaboratively.
Packard added that linking scholarships with work-based internships
could spur career development for students, rather than having jobs con -
flict with education.
Elaine Johnson from Bio-Link cited the importance of internships
in steering students into STEM careers. Internships, particularly if they
provide mentors and role models for students, can have a profound influ-
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44 COMMUNITY COLLEGES IN THE EVOLVING STEM EDUCATION LANDSCAPE
ence by showing students examples of success. “How do we create that
environment of welcoming and getting over some of the fear that students
have that they are not going to be successful in STEM careers?” she asked.
Bill Green from Accenture, a $25 billion company with 250,000
employees around the world, thanked everyone in the room for work -
ing on this issue. Solving these problems is not easy, he said, “but at the
end of the day we are solving [these problems] for the competitiveness of
our country and the standards of living of our citizens.” He, too, empha-
sized the contributions business can make. “You are trying to solve this
problem on your own,” he said, while businesses are ready and able to
help if they are challenged. For example, business provides $3.5 billion a
year in philanthropy to education. “You can help us give it in a smarter,
a more focused, and an evidence-based way,” he said to other summit
participants.
UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH
One of the most effective ways to interest undergraduate students in
STEM fields and keep them engaged is to get them involved in research.
Several summit participants pointed to the special difficulties community
college students have in doing research. It takes “a huge amount of time
and effort to do that well,” said Steve Slater. Even 40-year-old dislocated
workers going back to school, said Oates, need an opportunity to whet
their appetite for STEM careers with a taste of research.
Innovative community college faculty are thinking about how to use
research to teach and inspire, noted Carter. She pointed to the Council on
Undergraduate Research as the source of several useful publications on
models that community college faculty can use to integrate undergradu -
ate research into community colleges (e.g., Council on Undergraduate
Research, 2009). Slater similarly pointed out that one way to expose stu -
dents to research is to integrate research into the classroom. For example,
the data being generated by DNA sequencing and other genomics appli-
cations offer endless opportunities to do original research, even at the
high school level.
A related problem is ensuring that transfer students have as many
opportunities to do undergraduate research as students who started in
four-year institutions. Transfer students may not know professors as well
or have social networks that can open the doors to research experiences.
Transfer students may also need help with transportation, child care, and
financial support to participate fully in research.
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45
GENERAL DISCUSSION
PARTNERSHIPS WITH HIGH SCHOOLS
Partnerships between high schools and community colleges also can
be extremely valuable for students, high schools and colleges, and busi -
nesses. In particular, dual-enrollment programs between high schools
and community colleges can pique student interest in college and help
prepare them for higher education. Dual-enrollment programs also can
encompass four-year institutions. For example, Dowd observed that Santa
Ana College in California has been developing relationships with the local
high school district and with the California State University system to
make pathways among the institutions clear and intentional, with schol -
arships for students as an incentive to graduate from high school and
follow a pathway through community college to a four-year institution.
Other promising approaches are early-college high schools that are
STEM specific, fast-tracked baccalaureate degrees, and greater flexibility
on the part of four-year institutions in accepting credits. In such partner-
ships, councils of high school, community college, and university faculty
can look at the curriculum and identify gaps. However, some summit
participants noted that more selective four-year institutions are less likely
to become involved in such collaborative efforts.
Jose Vicente observed that faculty-to-faculty exchanges are needed
not only between community colleges and universities but also between
the school system and community colleges. Such exchanges provide a
much better understanding for K-12 faculty and the school system of what
the community college curriculum entails. At the same time, community
college faculty can gain a much better understanding of the issues being
addressed in the school system.
Carter said careful thinking needs to be devoted to where dual enroll-
ment works and where it does not. Some students are intellectually and
emotionally mature enough to handle it, but others are not. In addition,
Linnea Fletcher pointed out that dual-enrollment programs are threatened
financially in many states. In Texas, for example, if a high school student
signs up for a dual-credit course and passes the community college exam,
the student does not have to pay tuition, but the state is now considering
ending that program because of funding problems.
Elaine Craft from Florence-Darlington Technical College in South
Carolina pointed out that dual-credit courses can run into resistance from
high school teachers who are defensive about AP courses. “You get a lot
of pushback for trying to put dual credit in anything that they have AP
credit for. They like those classes. They like those students, and they don’t
want any competition,” she said, noting this is especially a problem in
mathematics. Other participants countered that dual tracks in high school
can work if they serve different purposes.
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46 COMMUNITY COLLEGES IN THE EVOLVING STEM EDUCATION LANDSCAPE
SUGGESTED RESEARCH
Several suggestions were made regarding research that could improve
the contributions of community colleges in STEM education. Boggs said
that more research is needed on attracting students, retaining them, and
having them successfully complete programs at the certificate level, the
associate level, and beyond. Research also is needed in closing achieve-
ment gaps and breaking down barriers within and between institutions.
Policy makers are asking why public funds should go to public insti-
tutions, only to have students fail, Boggs noted. However, performance-
based funding mechanisms can be detrimental if they are not carefully
thought out and based on evidence of what works. What kinds of funding
can create the right incentives, he asked.
Deborah Boisvert from the Boston-Area Advanced Technological Edu-
cation Connections suggested doing research in conjunction with the new
tax grants being made available to promote stackable credentials (which
are sequenced credentials that can move an individual along a career
pathway or up a career ladder). She also pointed out that inquiry-oriented
introductory courses rather than traditional lecture-based courses may be
more effective at retaining STEM students early in their college years, and
these courses also could be the subject of research.
Catherine Didion emphasized the lack of data in certain critical fields,
which makes it difficult to determine how to improve success. “There are
some real gaps of knowledge,” she said. Dowd also pointed to the impor-
tance of data that would enable faculty and administrators to see exactly
where students are being lost. For example, a project in California called
the California Benchmarking project looked at cohorts of students starting
at the earliest levels of developmental or pre-college mathematics. It then
asked faculty to look at their syllabi and ask whether they are enabling
the needed learning outcomes. If a student leaves one classroom with a
passing grade and is unable to succeed at the next level, that is “a very
powerful data point,” Dowd said. That project led to a student equity and
success tool that enables colleges to look at cohorts in a fine-grain manner
along milestones and momentum points.
Packard said that community colleges need a capacity for institutional
research, which is often lacking today. Transfer is a shared issue, so they
should be able to partner with four-year institutions in this research. In
this way, institutions can leverage their resources and conduct much more
useful investigations than either institution could do on its own.
Rebecca Hartzler from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advance-
ment of Teaching said that community colleges engage in considerable
institutional innovation, but this work is rarely published. The Carnegie
Foundation is trying to harness the innovation occurring in mathematics
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47
GENERAL DISCUSSION
classrooms and create a community to come together around, in this case,
developmental mathematics.
Martha Kanter observed that much has been learned over the past
few decades, so one challenge is to systematize the things that work and
apply them elsewhere. The First in the World Program has a competitive
fund to get four-year and two-year schools to engage in research on what
works and to disseminate the results across the country. She asked, “How
can we corral [research results] into something bigger?”
FINAL REMARKS
The time is right for a bold and ambitious interagency initiative that
could break down silos, spur innovation, disseminate and implement best
practices and successful models, and cultivate experimentation, said Judy
Miner. And, as Monica Bruning from Iowa State University pointed out,
the responsiveness and adaptability of community colleges make them
ideal partners in such an initiative. “I can’t think of a better group than
the community college educational system in our country to handle [these
changes],” she said.
Boggs said that the summit’s success would hinge on what happened
after the participants left and went back to their day jobs. “I hope this is
not just a one-time event,” he said. Discussions need to continue with
the goal of developing a comprehensive and coordinated “agenda for
researchers, policy makers, educators, foundations, and business leaders
to help us move ahead.”
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48 COMMUNITY COLLEGES IN THE EVOLVING STEM EDUCATION LANDSCAPE
Responses to a Pre-Summit Survey:
“Big Ideas” to Increase the Potential of Community
Colleges for STEM Education and Careers
In the survey sent to registered participants before the National Academies’
Summit on Community Colleges in an Evolving STEM Education Landscape, re-
spondents were invited to contribute one big idea or insight they have about in-
creasing the potential contributions of community colleges to STEM education and
careers. Their contributions included the following:
1. Building and strengthening STEM pathways between two-year and four-year
institutions. Examples include creating a three-year curriculum focused on tran-
sitions to baccalaureate institutions for students lacking college readiness, de-
veloping degree completion models that build on two-year programs, providing
opportunities for two-year and four-year faculty collaboration, and exemplary
articulation policies and practices.
2. Promoting an inquiry-based model of STEM instruction across two-year and
four-year institutions. Examples include student coaching, hands-on labs, and
teaching methodologies that teach STEM content in the context of employability
skills.
3. Instituting specific curricular programs that have proved effective in retaining
students in STEM education and careers. Programs mentioned include work-
force education programs and biotechnology programs.
4. Requiring articulation agreements as a means for creating viable and affordable
pathways to STEM careers. One example is aligning occupational STEM cur-
ricula with academic curricula. Another is the articulation of complete technician
education programs.
5. Providing better support systems for students. Types of support mentioned in-
cluded grouping students into cohorts and addressing social, cultural, financial,
and personal issues.
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49
GENERAL DISCUSSION
6. Adopting, publicizing, and promoting STEM education as a community college
priority. STEM education at the community college level could play a major
role in teacher preparation and workforce development. It also can reach rural
and remote communities. Making STEM education a community college prior-
ity could encourage the development of two-year and four-year institutional
partnerships, emphasize the importance of community colleges in the evolving
STEM education landscape, and focus federal funding on this issue.
7. Initiating uninterrupted federal funding for two-year and four-year STEM educa-
tion programs. NSF and other funding agencies could help strengthen STEM
education by funding programs that start in two-year colleges and provide a
seamless transition into four-year institutions.
8. Strengthening K-12 STEM preparation and achievement. Efforts that could
be taken to improve the academic preparation of students in STEM include
strengthening the K-12 curriculum, having students take a test to determine
college or job readiness prior to leaving high school, having dual-enrollment
programs that allow for transfer of credits nationally, and recruiting students
from STEM academies.
9. Increasing the capacity and competitiveness of community colleges to receive
grants from NSF and other federal funding sources. Disadvantages for com-
munity colleges in applying for federal funds for program improvement include
a shortage of faculty time to develop proposals and manage grant projects,
inconsistent college administration support for grants, lack of grant-writing ex-
pertise, insufficient internal and external partnerships, and limited resources for
institutions to learn how to submit proposals and manage awards.
10. Establishing professional communities to work on specific STEM education
challenges. Particular challenges mentioned include developing curricula, lever-
aging technology, promoting faculty development, and recruiting more women
and minorities into STEM education and careers.
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