UCLA Report Calls for Overhaul of Community College Transfer Process & Master Plan

Inside Higher Ed today pointed me toward the UCLA Civil Rights Project and its series of three reports critical of the transfer process from community colleges to four-year colleges.  One of the reports was co-authored by former UC President Richard Atkinson.

The summary from Inside Higher Ed is at:
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/02/15/racial-transfer-gap-california-community-colleges

A press release from the Civil Rights Project is reproduced below:

CRP Calls for Fundamental Changes in California's Community Colleges

Date Published: February 14, 2012

Almost 75% of all Latino and two-thirds of all Black students who go on to higher education in California go to a community college, yet in 2010 only 20% of all transfers to four-year institutions were Latino or African American. Pathways to the baccalaureate are segregated; students attending low-performing high schools usually go directly into community colleges that transfer few students to 4-year colleges. Conversely, a handful of community colleges serving high percentages of white, Asian and middle class students are responsible for the majority of all transfers in the state. California ranks last among the states in the proportion of its college students who attend a 4-year institution, which is a key factor in the state’s abysmal record on BA attainment. In a state in which half of all high school graduates are Black and Latino, this situation spells economic disaster for the future of the state.

February 14, 2012                Contact:  310-267-5562; crp@ucla.edu
--For Immediate Release--
                   

Civil Rights Project Reports Call for Fundamental Changes in California’s Community Colleges

--Los Angeles--Almost 75% of all Latino and two-thirds of all Black students who go on to higher education in California go to a community college, yet in 2010 only 20% of all transfers to four-year institutions were Latino or African American. Pathways to the baccalaureate are segregated; students attending low-performing high schools usually go directly into community colleges that transfer few students to 4-year colleges. Conversely, a handful of community colleges serving high percentages of white, Asian and middle class students are responsible for the majority of all transfers in the state.  California ranks last among the states in the proportion of its college students who attend a 4-year institution, which is a key factor in the state’s abysmal record on BA attainment.  In a state in which half of all high school graduates are Black and Latino, this situation spells economic disaster for the future of the state.

The California Community College system is not oblivious to these problems, but the newest report by the Student Success Task Force, Advancing Student Success in the California Community Colleges, falls far short of making recommendations that can turn the situation around, and fails to address the most urgent problems. Three studies released today by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA shed light on the mechanisms underlying California’s poor record of transfer from community colleges to four-year campuses and suggest what can and must be done to improve the capacity of the community colleges to help students of color gain BA degrees.

“It is time to have an honest conversation with the people of California about making improvements in our higher education system,” stressed Civil Rights Project Co-Director, Patricia Gándara.  “Either we make bold changes in the system or we consign the majority of our students of color to a life with few prospects, and we condemn the state to a future in decline.”

The first report, Building Pathways to Transfer:  Community Colleges that Break the Chain of Failure for Students of Color, by Patricia Gándara, Elizabeth Alvarado, Anne Driscoll and Gary Orfield, examines practices in five colleges with disproportionately high rates of transfer for students of color from low-performing high schools.  The study finds that a core of personnel in these colleges have lived the experiences of these students and dedicated themselves to the goal of transferring them. To a great extent, these staff rely on the college’s outreach efforts to prepare the students even before they arrive on the campus. 

Nonetheless, the success of even these higher-transfer colleges is limited because, like most other colleges in the system, they have not fundamentally changed the structural impediments to transfer posed by years of requirements for developmental education or remedial coursework.  The Civil Rights Project report calls for increased emphasis on outreach to low-performing high schools to prepare students for success in the community colleges and a radical rethinking of developmental education, reducing the remedial coursework barriers significantly. 

Co-Director Gary Orfield notes, “We were shocked to find that in colleges where many students need intensive counseling, counselors have faculty status and less than half of their time is spent on one-to-one counseling. This arrangement makes no sense.”

The second report, Unrealized Promises: Unequal Access, Affordability, and Excellence at Community Colleges in Southern California, by Mary Martinez Wenzl and Rigoberto Marquez, provides a very detailed analysis of all the high schools and community colleges in Southern California and shows overwhelmingly that segregated high schools with weak records feed students into heavily minority community colleges where few students successfully transfer. 

The report clarifies that California high schools are extremely segregated by race, ethnicity, poverty, and language background, and those schools offer less adequate curricula, fewer experienced and qualified teachers and much lower graduation rates. If the promise of fair access to higher education is to be realized, the report makes clear, then it has to happen in the community colleges. 

“Unfortunately,” says Orfield, “the community colleges tend to repeat the patterns of the low performing high schools, resulting in few transfers—this makes a mockery of the promise of equal opportunity.”

The third report, Beyond the Master Plan: The Case for Restructuring Baccalaureate Education in California, finds that California is one of the nation’s least successful states in terms of college completion. Researchers Saul Geiser and Richard Atkinson, the state’s preeminent analysts of higher education statistics, demonstrate the very powerful relationship between BA completion rates and beginning college at four-year campuses. The Master Plan is a failure, the report concludes, and requires radical change. 

Geiser and Atkinson further stress that California remains critically short of four-year public colleges, continually failing to expand them as the population soars.  They recommend, among other remedies, that some of the excellent community colleges be given authority to grant B.A. degrees, an important expansion of capacity at a far lower price than building new four-year campuses.  

“No state has bet its future so heavily on community colleges,” Gándara notes, “but these schools need resources and major reforms. Unless we make the colleges work for all Californians, we gamble with our future.”

Click here to download Building Pathways to Transfer:  Community Colleges that Break the Chain of Failure for Students of Color

Click here to download Unrealized Promises: Unequal Access, Affordability, and Excellence at Community Colleges in Southern California

Click here to download Beyond the Master Plan: The Case for Restructuring Baccalaureate Education in California

Source of Press release:

http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/news/press-releases/crp-calls-for-fundamental-changes-in-californias-community-colleges

New Plan Could Affect Transfers to UCLA

You may have seen anarticle in the LA Times about apossible change in direction at California community colleges.  UCLA says about 40% of its graduates(undergrads) are transfer students.  Notall of these transfers come from California community colleges, however.  But poking around on the web suggests that around90% of them are from the state's community college system.

The original Master Planviewed community colleges as colleges of last resort.  Anyone with a high school degree could enroll. (Indeed, some enrollees may not havehigh school degrees.)  If an enrollee goton an academic track (some courses offered are vocational/2-year terminal orrecreational), he/she could transfer to a CSU or UC campus.  The reality is that many students don’t getthat far.  Some community colleges seem to be more effective than others at producing transfers.

What the Times articlerefers to is a report – cover shown at right above - that proposes that communitycolleges in effect prioritize and focus on students who are making tangible progresstoward transfer.  The Times story is at:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-community-colleges-20120110,0,5859282.story

The actual report whichwill go to the legislature is at:

http://californiacommunitycolleges.cccco.edu/Portals/0/StudentSuccessTaskForce/SSTF_FinalReport_Web_010312.pdf

Data on 2011 transfers to UCLA are at:

http://www.admissions.ucla.edu/prospect/adm_tr/Tr_Prof11.htm

(Note that there is a difference between applicants, accepted applicants,and actual enrollees in the UCLA report.)

A more detailed analysis of the issue than appeared in the LA Times is at:

http://toped.svefoundation.org/2012/01/10/sweeping-changes-okd-for-community-colleges/

Slow News Day on a Holiday Long Weekend...

...So we will continue yesterday's theme...

albeit with a little music:

Even on the Master Plan!

Out of the box on higher ed: Uh Oh

From the Sacramento Bee today (excerpt):

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom railed against tuition increases and said Wednesday that the state's master plan for higher education is outdated, promising "a different narrative" for higher education by the end of the year.

It was unclear what the plan might contain or how Newsom, a Democrat, might propose to fund it.

"We're going to come up with some out-

of-the-box recommendations, is our hope and expectation," he told The Bee's Capitol Bureau.

Fifty years after the production of the California Master Plan for Higher Education, Newsom said he and officials are preparing to "try to create a different narrative for higher education as a system, as opposed to UC as a system, CSU as a system and community colleges." ...

Full story at: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/10/27/4010012/gavin-newsom-wants-pattern-interrupt.html

Note that the Master Plan's basic purpose was in fact to have 3 well-defined systems.

Sometimes it's best not to open a box:

Cal State-Westwood?

Gov. Pat Brown signs the Donahoe Act in 1960 implementing the Master Plan for Higher Education.

The LA Times ran an editorial yesterday, lamenting rising tuition at UC and the lack of state support. It also threw out some suggestions. Among them:

…The university also should consider a temporary policy that favors admission to students in the immediate geographical area for a certain percentage of new undergraduates. That way, more students could live at home and avoid the hefty cost of a dorm. UC campuses are not usually commuter schools, but troubled times call for a willingness to make sensible changes…

Actually, many undergrads enter UC and UCLA as transfer students from local community colleges which are a) inexpensive and b) allow living at home. CSU campuses are also an option. Indeed, that was what the Master Plan was all about, i.e., differentiating the three higher ed segments. The LA Times’ suggestion above is essentially a kind of Cal State-Westwood, Cal State-Berkeley, etc., idea.

The real story here is that President Yudof came to the Regents in September with a proposal for a multi-year schedule of tuition increases in the light of failing state support and that the Regents did not go for it – or for any other solution. (The audio of that session was posted yesterday on this blogsite.) It appears that the old adage about not calling the question before counting the votes was ignored in that episode.

Is the Regents non-action on the Yudof proposal the result of a lack of confidence in the President of UC? Until now, the Regents pretty much endorsed presidential proposals for tuition hikes. In any event, what needs to happen is not implementation of some ad hoc suggestion such as that made by the LA Times. Rather there needs to be a process involving UC (not just UCOP but the faculty and Academic Senate), the Regents, the governor, key people in the legislature, various interest groups in the state, and others that is aimed at looking at the budget outlook and negotiating an accord. The Regents are evidently tired of being in a reactive mode in which the state cuts the budget and tuition is hiked in response – with the Regents then getting the blame.

The full LA Times editorial is at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-uc-20111009,0,5898256.story

Wrong Direction

In yesterday's LA Times, Patt Morrison interviewed former UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale. Most of the interview dealt with other matters. But below is an excerpt on UC:

What do you make of what's happening to the University of California?

We had this great public university, but you didn't have to insert the word "public." [It was] able to compete with the best of the privates. We're losing that. We may already have lost it, in large measure. Students now pay more in tuition fees than the state provides. The resource gap is too great. It's not as if all the fine professors suddenly will leave for private universities, [but] when you're trying to recruit new people, they're going to have this in mind. Graduate students will consider going where they can get a better financial package.

What can you do about this? You could have more state funding; a friend of mine said that's called faith-based funding. You could have less cuts. You could have a greater degree of what's called privatization. You might [accept] more out-of-state students -- there's a $22,000 premium for out-of-state students. You could have higher fees and higher aid. No one of these things would do it. It isn't as if there's nothing you could do, but they're all politically difficult.

[The education master plan] has served this state extraordinarily well -- the education level of the citizenry, the ability to maintain fine research universities, to have the kinds of jobs and economic growth California has had. If we want to maintain that excellence, it's going to cost more.

I'm not badmouthing the University of California, but all of the signs for the future are in the wrong direction if it's to continue to compete with the best of the privates. It will still be a leading public university, but that shouldn't be good enough for us…

Full article at http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-morrison-albert-carnesale-070211,0,6989366,full.column