Where Are We After a Decade of Community College Reforms? Vanessa Smith Morest Dean of Institutional Effectiveness and Interim Academic Dean Norwalk Community College, Norwalk, CT Presentation for the New England Association of Schools and Colleges Annual Meeting December 10, 2015

Guiding questions: Why do reform efforts seem to be falling short? What can community colleges do to meet the expectations set forth by policy makers, students, and other stakeholders?

Challenge #1: Volume Community colleges enroll over 6.6 million students nationwide and policymakers are calling for more.

According to the Delta Cost Project, over the past decade: Declines in instruction and declines in support for instruction: academic support fell 8 percent or $80 per FTE and student services fell approximately 7 percent or $86 per FTE. Institutional support, which includes general administrative services, declined by about 9 percent or $173 per FTE student. On the revenue side, state subsidies for community colleges declined an average of 5.2% per year from while tuition increased 2.9% annually during this time period. Source: Delta Cost ProjectDelta Cost Project Challenge #2: Funding Expenditures per FTE are decreasing at community colleges even as they increase in other higher education sectors

All organizations are paradoxes. They are powerfully pulled toward stability by the forces of integration, maintenance controls, human desires for security and certainty, and adaptation to the environment on the one hand. They are also powerfully pulled to the opposite extreme of unstable equilibrium by the forces of diversion and decentralization, human desires for excitement and innovation, and isolation from the environment. (Michael Fullan in The New Meaning of Educational Change (2007), p. 116) Challenge #3: Culture Organizations are built for stability not change.

Student academic problems Student personal problems Student financial problems Challenge #4: Students possess multiple risk factors Our interventions fall into three buckets: those that are academic; social; and financial. Interventions in one area may be undermined by ongoing difficulties for students in another.

Much of the research focuses on course completion, retention and graduation rates as outcomes rather than student learning. Internal program evaluation is costly and relatively rare. More needs to be known about the psychology of community college students. Many complex multi-dimensional characteristics are not well understood for the community college population--for example, motivation, self confidence, stereotype threat. Community college students are non-traditional learners but supports for non- lecture approaches to teaching are is limited. Challenge #5: Limited research on community college student learning Issue of curriculum, instruction and student learning remain largely at the periphery of policy discussions.

Student have wide ranging and sometimes uncertain goals We have to wait years to find out if an intervention had an impact Many colleges struggle with insufficient access to data or resources to analyze and report The more data colleges are mandated to college, the fewer resources they have available to research their own questions Challenge #6: Measurement Finding the right methodologies to assess improvement is difficult.

Based on these challenges, what strategies should community colleges focus on to increase student success?

Scalability and efficiency Achieving the Dream and partner organizations have recognized through their work that scaling up is challenging but essential to make results meaningful at community colleges : “significant organizational disruption is likely as colleges reprioritize financial and human resources and discontinue programs and practices that are not serving the aims of the institutions and its students” Achieving the Dream.Achieving the Dream Electronic resources may make a huge difference. Products like Starfish and Insight are making it easier to track and report on student progress. Electronic college catalogs are streamlining academic information student students can better understand the curriculum.

Quick and efficient sources of customized information make the task of keeping up with 1000s possible. This contributes to solving the problem of short-term monitoring, too.

Top down versus bottom up? Since we know that change is going to involve significant disruption, a mandate is often needed to get the ball rolling. Change will require an investment of financial and human resources. Institutional change, or cultural change, requires adoption. Adoption takes time, professional development, and distributed leadership

Reforms have begun to focus on curricular and pedagogical change, but there’s still much to be learned about the impacts. Flipped classrooms, accelerated learning, Active and collaborative learning techniques Guided or structured pathways

CUNY’s Accelerated Study in Associate Program (ASAP)Accelerated Study in Associate Program (ASAP) Achieving the Dream Interventions Showcase Community College Research Center Where to look for examples of programs that incorporate these elements?