A Renewed Approach to Community College Persistence

1. A Renewed Approach to Community College
Persistence
sponsoringyoungpeople.org /a-renewed-approach-to-community-college-persistence/
What if I told you that only 50 percent of first-time
diners at a given restaurant found the experience
satisfying enough to want to come back?
With results like that, chances are you would have to
think twice about giving it a go, am I right?
Now, what if I informed you the establishment we are
referring to isn’t serving burgers, fries, and shakes but
is instead providing you with what is, ostensibly, a
quality education—along with some other 40,000 low-
income students each year?
Well that’s what’s been happening at the Community
College of Philadelphia, where, according to the
Chronicle of Higher Education, “half of full-time freshman don’t return for a second year.”
That’s both a staggering and profoundly troubling drop-off rate.
And the persistence rates of community college students across the country isn’t much better. On average,
the freshman-to-sophomore retention rate is about 53 percent nationally.
If students get to their second year, often the final hurdle on the traditionally two-year path to an
associate’s degree, they stand a good chance of transferring to a four-year college or university and
graduating.
But if systemic factors such as a lack of student support services like academic advising—which research
shows is integral to degree persistence—is making already challenged students more susceptible to
falling between the cracks, then it’s incumbent upon all colleges and universities—not only community
colleges—to rethink the way they approach building scaffolds to degree completion for the approximately
14 million students served by two-year institutions annually.
If the strapped budgets and entrenched staffing and resource shortages at our 1,600 community colleges
are now de rigueur, and unlikely to change at any point in the near term, then the mindsets of our
community college officials must.
Officials must increasingly research models like the City University of New York’s six-year-old
Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP), where the graduation rate for its original cohort of
1,132 students in 2007 was 55 percent, outpacing the national average of 18 percent, according to figures
from the U.S. Department of Education.
Even when you factor in the findings of an August Hechinger Report study pointing out that this 18
percent figure is somewhat misleading—given that the DOE inexplicably counts the 1 in 4 community
college students who transfer to four-year institutions as community college “drop outs”—that number rises
to a still underwhelming 40 percent.

2. Also, community colleges must consider new ways of tapping into the vast resources of their more affluent
four-year peer institutions to fill student support deficiencies on their own campuses.
Stronger “pipeline” partnerships between two-year and four-year institutions must be established. Also,
students who have already successfully navigated the community college gauntlet must routinely be
enlisted in assisting their peers who are following in their footsteps.
As the African proverb goes, “Each one teach one.”
But whatever the solutions that community colleges ultimately choose to implement, they must be enacted
swiftly and be equally proportional to the outsized needs and special challenges faced by the many
ambitious, enterprising students who call them home.
At present, the status quo that has apparently become par for the course at many of our nation’s
community colleges is underserving students who can ill afford to be underserved any longer.