Abstract
How would we design the open-access community college to maximize the probability of student completion? Certainly not in the way most community colleges are organized today, according to Thomas R. Bailey, Shanna Smith Jaggars, and Davis Jenkins in Redesigning America’s Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success. Drawing on a thorough review of research, including many studies from Columbia University’s Community College Research Center, they argue that the colleges are highly efficient at providing access to courses in a self-service or “cafeteria” style that increased opportunity for postsecondary study after World War II, but that thwarts the ambitions of students today and leaves the colleges ill prepared to meet contemporary demands for increased degree completion. And although many well-intended initiatives, notably those undertaken through Achieving the Dream, have attempted to increase completion rates, the authors point to evidence that these projects have not substantially enhanced outcomes or—more significantly—altered the colleges’ underlying organizational structures or cultures.
Thus, the book’s intent: to provide a framework for the wholesale redesign of the community college, freeing it from structures and practices of the “cafeteria college” that fix the institution’s gaze on enrollment and divert institutional attention from the goal of student development and success over the long term. At the heart of this redesign is a revised curriculum, structured as a parsimonious and easily understood set of “guided pathways,” rather than an overwhelming array of course offerings from which students, with minimal help from overworked advisers, must construct a route to the achievement of their educational goals. These guided pathways, described in Chapter 1, are not merely plans of study detailing course requirements for transfer or a degree. They are coherent, prescribed curricula developed by teams of faculty members and student affairs professionals. For students with definite career or transfer goals, these pathways consist of “a default sequence of courses, each with clear learning outcomes that build across the curriculum into a coherent set of skills, which in turn are aligned with requirements for successful transfer or career advancement” (p. 22). For undecided students, the pathways are equally prescribed and rigorously thought out, but they are exploratory in nature, exposing students “to educational and career options within broad fields” or “meta-majors” (p. 22). Asking students to select a pathway puts them immediately on a well-defined curricular sequence without overwhelming them with numerous course options.
The authors also focus on “complementary changes to other college practices” (p. 50) in student guidance, instruction, and remediation (detailed in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively). Here, Bailey and his colleagues show how each of these critical functions has been shaped by the self-service cafeteria framework in ways that impede completion. Student “intake” services such as orientation, in-person and online advising, and student success courses are “well-meaning” but “disconnected from students’ academic programs of study” (p. 67), offered in many cases on an optional, self-service basis, and focused primarily on providing information without teaching students to self-advise over time. Instruction is undertaken by faculty members who work in isolation from others and simply transmit knowledge with the occasional support of professional development programs that emphasize instructional techniques rather than the instructor’s growth as an educator. And remediation has, in most cases, served as an “off ramp” from college programs (p. 51), at best delaying entry into college-level programs and, in many cases, simply diverting “them from those programs entirely” (p. 129)—a phenomenon the authors call “the developmental diversion” (p. 120).
What is needed, the authors argue, is an alignment of institutional practices with the guided pathways approach. Bailey and his colleagues emphasize that with clear curricular paths in place, student intake and support systems can become more effective, focusing less on the task of selecting courses and more on helping students clarify their goals, honing student capacity to “self-advise” as they encounter problems that might impede progress, and monitoring student progress along the way. In terms of instruction, the authors urge movement toward a collective enterprise driven by the “collaborative inquiry” of faculty colleagues (p. 105) who facilitate learning rather than transmit knowledge, attend to “meta-cognitive skills and student motivation” as well as disciplinary content, and rely on ongoing “peer collaboration” (p. 117) as a means of professional development. Remediation can be transformed as well, designed as “on ramps” to college programs by embedding basic skills instruction and support in college-level courses, rethinking instructional practices that isolate those skills from vocational or disciplinary contexts, and working to improve the college readiness of high school and adult basic education students. Throughout, the authors provide concrete examples of steps taken by community colleges and universities alike to move toward these ambitious goals.
A major strength of the book lies in its recognition that none of these reforms will be possible without leadership efforts to bring faculty and staff on board and without a rethinking of funding and policy. Chapters 5 and 6 address these issues, respectively. In Chapter 5, the authors discuss the ways leaders can engage the talents and energy of faculty and staff in moving toward the guided pathways approach. These include, but are not limited to, strategies for focusing governance meetings (e.g., faculty department meetings, academic senate meetings) on improved practice rather than “administrative or political topics” (p. 151); reorganizing professional development programs around “team facilitation, advising, and assessment and inquiry” (p. 159); and rethinking “hiring, promotion, and other forms of [faculty or staff] recognition” (p. 165) in ways that encourage collaborative work rather than individual effort or advancement.
In Chapter 6, the authors turn to the “economics of college redesign.” Here, they discuss potential supporting policy incentives, including performance funding, which they see as playing, up to this point anyway, “an important symbolic role in communicating state priorities” (p. 188). In addition, they consider the alternative “unbundled” approach to instruction that relies primarily on massive open online courses, concluding that this primarily online vision of education would not work well for “the typical underprepared and unfocused community college student” (p. 197).
But the main message of Chapter 6 deals with cost and deserves special attention in light of the continued prospects for attenuated state funding. Although the cafeteria college focuses on cost per credit hour, a legacy of the long-established practice of tying government funding to enrollment, the guided pathways approach demands a focus on cost per completion. Importantly, the authors define cost per completion for a given cohort of entering students not simply in terms of the costs borne by the college in educating graduates only but also in terms of the costs incurred through work with fellow cohort members who fall by the wayside, those “students [who] absorbed institutional resources but provided no payoff in terms of completion” (p. 178). This leads to the perverse reality that efforts to cut per-credit costs by hiring more part-time faculty members or increasing class size may increase attrition and, therefore, the cost per completion. As the authors put it, “the drive to reduce the cost of an immediate outcome—enrollment—has paradoxically led to an increase in the cost of the desired longer-term outcome—completing a high-quality credential” (p. 172). It would be fiscally prudent, they conclude, for states to provide colleges with “a modest level of additional resources to cover the costs necessary to implement guided pathways and thereby substantially improve the completion of high-quality credentials” (p. 198). This investment would yield “high dividends for both individuals and society” (p. 198).
The attention to leadership and economics bespeaks the rare character of this book. It offers a “whole-institution” reform agenda (p. 215) and thus stands in stark contrast to most reform proposals, which focus on isolated aspects of the community college enterprise—a particular instructional innovation here, a proposed change in state funding there, and so on. Having shown the deep roots of the cafeteria model in the community college culture and offered a vision of what an alternative culture based on the “guided pathways” model might look like, Bailey and his colleagues make a convincing case for across-the-board change in what community colleges do. In addition, their well-considered conclusion to the book shows how the guided pathways model offers a unifying framework for the isolated reforms that have been proposed over the years for curriculum, the work of faculty members, and funding. This in itself is a major contribution to the literature. Not since the 1969 publication of Dateline ’79, in which Arthur Cohen asked, “What form would a community junior college take if it were organized deliberately to cause learning?” (p. x), has such an all-encompassing program of institutional transformation been proposed.
Redesigning America’s Community Colleges also marks a significant milestone in the scholarship of community colleges. Readers with long memories will see shades of the “cafeteria college” in the writings of earlier scholars who pointed to the inchoate curricula of the open-access college (e.g., Cohen & Brawer, 1982; McCabe, 1981; Richardson, Fisk, & Okun, 1983).Yet these authors were writing at a time when public attention to student outcomes in higher education—or to the community college generally—was relatively low. As Bailey and his colleagues note, “With all of the controversy and debate surrounding higher education, it is easy to forget that the focused attention on improving college outcomes is a relatively recent phenomenon” (p. 219). They acknowledge that community college educators worked “for decades to improve instruction and student services” (p. 8) long before the emergence of the contemporary completion agenda. But they correctly make the case that we are in a new era that acknowledges the high-stakes—both to individuals and society at large—of curricular reform at the community college. The growing body of rigorous research on which this book draws, a body of work that earlier scholars simply could not, in the light of overall public indifference, generate or draw on, is both a contributor to and the product of today’s increased attention to the community college enterprise. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges will inform policy decisions on community colleges for some time to come and perhaps have an unprecedented impact on efforts to achieve the long elusive goals of curricular cohesiveness and increased degree completion in the open-access college.