Redesigning America's Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success - Hardcover

Thomas R. Bailey; Shanna Smith Jaggars; Davis Jenkins

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674368282 ISBN 13: 9780674368286

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2015

Synopsis

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."

About this title

Review

In this analysis, grounded both in research and practice, I found both the best diagnosis of our challenge and the most promising prescription for change I have encountered in more than two decades of work on student success in community colleges. The authors make a compelling case that significant and lasting improvements in student success will only be achieved by redesigning the deep architecture of our colleges from a culture of chaos, uninformed choice, and diffuse responsibility the cafeteria model to one of clearly designed and supported program models with more limited choice and more secure outcomes the guided pathways model. --Sandy Shugart, President, Valencia College"

About the Author

Thomas Bailey is the George and Abby O'Neill Professor of Economics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Director of the Community College Research Center. Shanna Smith Jaggars is Assistant Director of the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. Davis Jenkins is Senior Research Associate at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0674368282
• ISBN 13: 9780674368286
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304