The Costs of Completion

The Costs of Completion PDF Author: Robin G. Isserles
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421442086
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
To improve community college success, we need to consider the lived realities of students. Our nation's community colleges are facing a completion crisis. The college-going experience of too many students is interrupted, lengthening their time to completing a degree—or worse, causing many to drop out altogether. In The Costs of Completion, Robin G. Isserles contextualizes this crisis by placing blame on the neoliberal policies that have shaped public community colleges over the past thirty years. The disinvestment of state funding, she explains, has created austerity conditions, leading to an overreliance on contingent labor, excessive investments in advisement technologies, and a push to performance outcomes like retention and graduation rates for measuring student and institutional success. The prevailing theory at the root of the community college completion crisis—academic momentum—suggests that students need to build momentum in their first year by becoming academically integrated, thereby increasing their chances of graduating in a timely fashion. A host of what Isserles terms "innovative disruptions" have been implemented as a way to improve on community college completion, but because disruptions are primarily driven by degree attainment, Isserles argues that they place learning and developing as afterthoughts while ignoring the complex lives that define so many community college students. Drawing on more than twenty years of teaching, advising, and researching largely first-generation community college students as well as an analysis of five years of student enrollment patterns, college experiences, and life narratives, Isserles takes pains to center students and their experiences. She proposes initiatives created in accordance with a care ethic, which strive to not only get students through college—quantifying credit accumulation and the like—but also enable our most precarious students to flourish in a college environment. Ultimately, The Costs of Completion offers a deeper, more complex understanding of who community college students are, why and how they enroll, and what higher education institutions can do to better support them.

The Costs of Completion

The Costs of Completion PDF Author: Robin G. Isserles
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421442086
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
To improve community college success, we need to consider the lived realities of students. Our nation's community colleges are facing a completion crisis. The college-going experience of too many students is interrupted, lengthening their time to completing a degree—or worse, causing many to drop out altogether. In The Costs of Completion, Robin G. Isserles contextualizes this crisis by placing blame on the neoliberal policies that have shaped public community colleges over the past thirty years. The disinvestment of state funding, she explains, has created austerity conditions, leading to an overreliance on contingent labor, excessive investments in advisement technologies, and a push to performance outcomes like retention and graduation rates for measuring student and institutional success. The prevailing theory at the root of the community college completion crisis—academic momentum—suggests that students need to build momentum in their first year by becoming academically integrated, thereby increasing their chances of graduating in a timely fashion. A host of what Isserles terms "innovative disruptions" have been implemented as a way to improve on community college completion, but because disruptions are primarily driven by degree attainment, Isserles argues that they place learning and developing as afterthoughts while ignoring the complex lives that define so many community college students. Drawing on more than twenty years of teaching, advising, and researching largely first-generation community college students as well as an analysis of five years of student enrollment patterns, college experiences, and life narratives, Isserles takes pains to center students and their experiences. She proposes initiatives created in accordance with a care ethic, which strive to not only get students through college—quantifying credit accumulation and the like—but also enable our most precarious students to flourish in a college environment. Ultimately, The Costs of Completion offers a deeper, more complex understanding of who community college students are, why and how they enroll, and what higher education institutions can do to better support them.

It's Time to Complete Community College

It's Time to Complete Community College PDF Author: S. deBoef
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1475840543
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
Earning a college degree improves health and economic wellbeing. Thus, American taxpayers subsidize a majority of the cost of public colleges. At least half of all college students in the U.S. today attend two-year colleges; yet, fewer than half of these students achieve their educational goals. This book, written by an experienced community college teacher summarizes specific evidence-based methods to improve student learning and completion. This book summarizes: student characteristics including socio-economic status, academic background, work/family commitments; instructional methods of work-pace, grading procedures, student practice opportunities, and feedback to students; institutional policies such as course scheduling, teaching loads, teacher training, availability of student services, commitment of administrators to using assessment to improve student learning outcomes. If you are a college student/parent of a college student, college teacher/administrator, or concerned taxpayer; you are invited to read this book and join this discussion. It is unlikely that college completion rates will significantly improve without informed communities demanding institutional action.

The American Community College

The American Community College PDF Author: Arthur M. Cohen
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
This monograph provides a comprehensive overview of community college education in the United States, emphasizing trends affecting two-year colleges within the past decade. Chapter 1 identifies the social forces that contributed to the development and expansion of community colleges and the continuing changes in institutional purposes. Chapter 2 examines the shifting patterns of student characteristics and goals, the reasons for the predominance of part-time attendance, participation and achievement among minority students, attrition issues, and recent moves toward student assessment. Chapter 3 draws on national data to illustrate the differences between full- and part-time faculty and discusses issues related to tenure, salary, workload, faculty evaluation, moonlighting, burnout, and job satisfaction. Chapter 4 reviews the changes that have taken place in college management as a result of changes in institutional size, the advent of collective bargaining, reductions in available funds, and changes in governance and control. Chapter 5 describes various funding patterns and their relationship to organizational shifts. Chapter 6 discusses the rise of learning resource centers and the maintenance of stability in instructional forms in spite of the introduction of a host of reproducible instructional media. Chapter 7 considers student personnel functions, including counseling, guidance, recruitment, retention, orientation, and extracurricular activities. Chapter 8 traces the rise of occupational education, as it has moved from a peripheral to a central position in the curriculum. Chapter 9 focuses on remedial and developmental programs and addresses the controversies surrounding student assessment and placement. Chapter 10 deals with adult and continuing education, lifelong learning, and community services. Chapters 11 and 12 examine curricular trends in the liberal arts and general education, highlighting problems and proposing solutions. Chapter 13 addresses the philosophical and practical questions that have been raised about the transfer function and the community college's role in enhancing student progress toward higher degrees. Finally, chapter 14 offers projections based on current trends in student and faculty demographics, college organization, curriculum, instruction, and student services. (JMC)

Defending the Community College Equity Agenda

Defending the Community College Equity Agenda PDF Author: Thomas W. Bailey
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801884470
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Publisher description.

Redesigning America’s Community Colleges

Redesigning America’s Community Colleges PDF Author: Thomas R. Bailey
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674368282
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
In the United States, 1,200 community colleges enroll over ten million students each year—nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates. Yet fewer than 40 percent of entrants complete an undergraduate degree within six years. This fact has put pressure on community colleges to improve academic outcomes for their students. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges is a concise, evidence-based guide for educational leaders whose institutions typically receive short shrift in academic and policy discussions. It makes a compelling case that two-year colleges can substantially increase their rates of student success, if they are willing to rethink the ways in which they organize programs of study, support services, and instruction. Community colleges were originally designed to expand college enrollments at low cost, not to maximize completion of high-quality programs of study. The result was a cafeteria-style model in which students pick courses from a bewildering array of choices, with little guidance. The authors urge administrators and faculty to reject this traditional model in favor of “guided pathways”—clearer, more educationally coherent programs of study that simplify students’ choices without limiting their options and that enable them to complete credentials and advance to further education and the labor market more quickly and at less cost. Distilling a wealth of data amassed from the Community College Research Center (Teachers College, Columbia University), Redesigning America’s Community Colleges offers a fundamental redesign of the way two-year colleges operate, stressing the integration of services and instruction into more clearly structured programs of study that support every student’s goals.

College Admission 101

College Admission 101 PDF Author: The Princeton Review
Publisher: Princeton Review
ISBN: 152475854X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
This friendly, helpful Q&A book from the editor-in-chief of The Princeton Review presents simple answers to your toughest questions about the college admissions process, figuring out financial aid, and getting into the university of your choice! As The Princeton Review’s chief expert on education, Robert Franek frequently appears on ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX to share his insider expertise on the college admissions process. Each year, he travels to high schools across the country, advising thousands of anxious students and parents on how to turn their college hopes into reality. Now, with College Admission 101, the best of Rob’s wisdom has finally been collected in one place! From standardized tests to financial aid, Rob provides straightforward answers to 60+ of the questions he hears most often, including: · Should I take the ACT or SAT? · When should I start my college research? · How many schools should I apply to? · Will applying Early Decision or Early Action give me a leg up? · Which extracurricular activities do colleges want to see? · How does the financial aid process work? · What’s more important: GPA or test scores?

Community College Success

Community College Success PDF Author: Isa Adney
Publisher: Norlightspress.com
ISBN: 9781935254621
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
While community colleges give first-generation students a chance to open the door to education, simply walking through that door is not enough. Once there, many students feel completely alone. As members of a rapidly growing population, these students are in desperate need of a practical, friendly, and useful resource.

Beer and Circus

Beer and Circus PDF Author: Murray Sperber
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 142993669X
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 538

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Book Description
Beer and Circus presents a no-holds-barred examination of the troubled relationship between college sports and higher education from a leading authority on the subject. Murray Sperber turns common perceptions about big-time college athletics inside out. He shows, for instance, that contrary to popular belief the money coming in to universities from sports programs never makes it to academic departments and rarely even covers the expense of maintaining athletic programs. The bigger and more prominent the sports program, the more money it siphons away from academics. Sperber chronicles the growth of the university system, the development of undergraduate subcultures, and the rising importance of sports. He reveals television's ever more blatant corporate sponsorship conflicts and describes a peculiar phenomenon he calls the "Flutie Factor"--the surge in enrollments that always follows a school's appearance on national television, a response that has little to do with academic concerns. Sperber's profound re-evaluation of college sports comes straight out of today's headlines and opens our eyes to a generation of students caught in a web of greed and corruption, deprived of the education they deserve. Sperber presents a devastating critique, not only of higher education but of national culture and values. Beer and Circus is a must-read for all students and parents, educators and policy makers.

The Community College Advantage

The Community College Advantage PDF Author: Diane Melville
Publisher: Sourcebooks Incorporated
ISBN: 9781402279829
Category : Study Aids
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Discusses how students can maximize their community college education whether they are planning to transfer to a four-year school or are looking for an edge in the job market.

White Awareness

White Awareness PDF Author: Judy H. Katz
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806114668
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Stage 1.