Pre-Congress Summit Focuses on Completion

With the attention of the White House, governors, policymakers, and philanthropic foundations all focused on increasing the number of Americans who hold a college degree or credential, "suddenly it seems that higher education is really where the action is," Samuel Cargile, vice president of The Lumina Foundation, observed during ACCT's Summit on Completion. "With that, it's also an opportune time to ask some critical questions."

Community college leaders attending the one-day summit in Toronto -- immediately preceding and setting the tone for the 2010 ACCT Leadership Congress -- did just that, focusing a critical eye on the ways in which community colleges are working to shift their model from access to success. “It’s vitally important that trustees are involved in this conversation,” said ACCT Chair Thomas Bennett, trustee at Parkland College in Illinois.

The one-day summit followed the White House Summit on Community Colleges earlier in the month and the creation of the Skills for America's Future, a White House-led effort to build partnerships between industry and community colleges. Those moves mirror initiatives launched by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation, both of which have set ambitious goals for increasing the number of college graduates.

"The goals may be a little different, the language may be a little different, but everybody is getting on board and knowing we've got to do a better job," says Linda Baer, senior program officer of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

ACCT President and CEO J. Noah Brown discussed how the completion agenda has become embedded in a variety of initiatives that ACCT has become involved in, including the Voluntary Framework for Accountability, Democracy's Colleges Call to Action, and the Governance Institute for Student Success.

"We are very serious about creating the toolkit you need to advance this agenda," Brown said.

Baer described how the Gates Foundation's Completion by Design initiative focuses on "a pathway model" that creates connections for students from enrollment through completion. Under such a system, "[students] don't just come through the doors and wander around," she said.

Noting that one in six blue-collar workers lost his or her job during the current recession, Dr. Ronald Williams, vice president of The College Board, stressed the importance of improving completion rates in stark terms. "The middle holds America together," he said, warning that the declining middle class poses a threat to democracy. "The work you do is in closing the gap that I see expanding and accelerating."

From the business perspective, it's critical that community colleges prepare students for today's global -- and increasingly uncertain -- economy, stressed Philip Berry, president of Philip Berry Associates and vice-chair of the City University of New York. "We have to come up with methodologies that help students where they are, not where we want them to be," he said.

Data is the key to addressing completion issues, stressed Kay McClenney, director of the Center for Community College Student Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin's Community College Leadership Program. "Community colleges have lived long and pretty comfortably with the anecdote—students whose lives have changed. But...[anecdotes] do not tell the story of the typical student experience... what we have got to get ready to do is understand honestly what happens to students when they move through our system—or don't."

While students have many reasons for failing to receive a degree from community colleges, the reality is that poor students, older students and minorities face much higher odds of completing college, McClenney said. "Until the choice not to persist or graduate is equitably distributed across students by race, age, or income level, this is an argument we can no longer countenance," she said.

To tackle persistent completion issues, colleges will need not only systems and processes to track students, but to disaggregate that data to get the "full picture" of how all students are performing. "Once you have data, you have to be willing to use it," she added.

Based on visits to 1,200 colleges in more than 30 states, Dr. Byron McClenney, project director for Achieving the Dream and a senior lecturer and fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, pointed to a number of key practices that support the completion agenda, including:

• Leaders that are engaged and pay continuous attention to progress on student success issues.
  
• A shared an enacted vision around a student success agenda
  
• Planning and budgeting that are aligned with the agenda
  
• A culture of evidence
  
• Broad consensus among students, faculty, staff and the community
  
• Having the student success agenda impact policy, practices, and procedures. "Once you get serious, it starts to permeate how you make decisions," he said.
  
• Integration of other initiatives, including accreditation
  
• Focused professional development aligned with student completion objectives.

"None of these things come easily," McClenney said, pointing to ending late registration, embedding basic skills in career programs, study groups, and student success courses as potentially promising approaches that can come out of such practices.

As part of its Complete to Compete initiative, The National Governors Association is developing its own metrics to help state leaders track the performance of their higher education institutions. "You can't have a substantive policy conversation until and unless you have a clear picture of how something's performing," said Travis Reindl, program director, who echoed others' insistence that disaggregating data is critical. "To have goals that are lasting and powerful, you have to know if you're moving towards them."

NGA's proposed metrics are divided between measurements of student progress -- including remediation, entry, success in first year math and English courses, and credit accumulation -- and outcomes, including numbers of degrees, graduation rates, and measurements of the time and credits required to attain a degree.

While acknowledging that community colleges are facing unprecedented financial pressure as enrollments rise and funding falls, speakers agreed that these challenges would not impede the focus on completion. "There's no evidence that connects resources to results," McClenney said, "It's not how much money we have, but how we spend the money we have."

As proof, McClenney pointed to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's 100,000 Lives Campaign, which sought to reduce the number of preventable deaths in U.S. hospitals. By examining data and asking tough questions, the healthcare community was able to meet its own ambitious goal.

"They did it," McClenney said. "All of you can figure out your share of this goal... the 15 or 16 million college graduates our nation needs for our communities to thrive." Read more!

2009 ACCT Leadership Congress: Foundations Identify Developmental Education, Focus on Outcomes as Key Challenges

Members of two of the largest foundations involved in higher education and a regional provider entering the higher education realm for the first time shared their perceptions of the joint challenges community colleges and their philanthropic funders face during a Thursday town hall meeting at the 2009 ACCT Leadership Congress. Common themes quickly emerged, including the need to restructure developmental education and reshift thinking to a stronger focus on outcomes.

Earlier in the day, Jamie P. Merisotis, president and CEO of the Lumina Foundation for Education, outlined the group’s goal to have 60 percent of Americans hold high-quality college degrees or credentials by 2025. During the town hall, Dewane Matthews, Lumina’s vice president for policy and strategy, outlined some of the emerging issues the foundation is studying as it evaluates ways to meet that goal, chief among them the question of developmental education. “We’re not going to get to these higher attainment levels with an approach that writes off a large proportion of individuals because they are considered inadequate for some vague definition of college readiness,” Matthews said. “We have to reframe the entire issue and destigmatize developmental education... and create a system that takes people from wherever they are and takes them where they need to go. It’s not remediation -- it’s a completely different orientation.”

Matthews added that the Lumina foundation has also realized the “centrality of learning” involved in meeting attainment goals. “Attainment is tied to real skills... [that higher education] needs to better connect to curriculum,” he said. “Fortunately, campuses are willing to become part of that conversation.”

Diane Troyer, senior program officer of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, described how developmental education surfaced as the “number-one logjam” the foundation has encountered since launching its new post-secondary mission about a year ago. With the foundation’s goal “focused on the disparity between the completion rates of low-income students versus those who do not come out of a background of poverty,” Troyer urged college leaders to consider ways to “realign our institutions around completion.”

“Can we as [community] colleges shift our thinking from an enrollment system to a completion-driven system?” she asked. “Is access access if it doesn’t achieve success?”

As the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund studies way to enter the higher education realm in the San Francisco Bay area, officials are conducting research and networking with both other private and public funders, said Elizabeth Gutierrez, program director for education opportunities. “The federal stimulus has been the most recent wave that has brought us together as funders and grantees,” she said. The Fund’s key issues mirror those of Gutierrez’s national counterparts: scalability, leveraging its work, and outcomes.

While foundation representatives acknowledged that measuring outcomes remains a thorny issue for community colleges, “community colleges need to take the leadership on defining the measures,” Troyer said, pointing to such projects as the Voluntary Framework of Accountability. Matthews suggested that college leaders consider reframing their entire thinking around outcomes: “Our data, our structures, our funding, our policy discussions are all based around institutions,” he said. “What we’re really talking about is a fundamental shift away from an institutional frame to a student frame, with all their incredible backgrounds and diversity of needs and infinite variety of outcomes.” Read more!

2009 ACCT Leadership Congress: As Conversation Shifts to Accountability, New Frameworks Emerge

The $12 billion earmarked for community colleges by the Obama administration through its American Graduation Initiative represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity -- but only if institutions are willing to demonstrate progress towards specific goals, speakers at the 2009 ACCT Leadership Congress said Thursday.

“A new paradigm is emerging for community colleges,” ACCT President and CEO J. Noah Brown told Congress attendees. While “access has been the promise since the inception of the community college movement... now increasing emphasis is being placed on student success and achievement.” In short, community colleges are being called on to “balance access with success,” Brown said.

Keynote speaker Jamie P. Merisotis, President and CEO of the Lumina Foundation for Education, stressed that the AGI, which seeks to increase the number of Americans who earn degrees or certificates by 5 million over the next decade, represents both “a prize and a challenge, a reward and a down payment.”

The AGI closely mirrors the Lumina Foundation’s own goal of having 60 percent of Americans hold high-quality college degrees or credentials by 2025, and both initiatives reflect one simple fact, according to Merisotis: “There’s simply no way for the nation to return to a global position of leadership in attainment unless community colleges lead the way,” he said. “Because of your expertise in creating workforce development programs... and the decades you have spent perfecting cost-effective ways of providing higher education... you can show the way to reshaping higher education that benefits us all.”

Merisotis urged trustees to invest part of the billions in new funding from AGI and other initiatives in involving local stakeholders ranging from K-12 systems to businesses, bolstering developmental programs, and creating new structures “geared towards student success.” He also urged community college leaders to focus on developing measures that “clearly define high-quality outcomes and track student performance.”

One such program is the Voluntary Framework of Accountability. Developed by ACCT and the American Association of Community Colleges, the VFA has been awarded $1 million in grants from the Lumina Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, it was announced on Oct. 7. The grants will fund pilot projects at eight community colleges, with 20 additional institutions expected to join the project by 2011.

The VSA has the potential to address two common issues in developing a common framework allowing community colleges to collect data and benchmark their metrics against other institutions, Brown said. “We don’t have a common language, and we don’t have a vocabulary rich enough to express what we do in those communities across the country [with] our different missions and constituencies.”

Pointing to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s earlier comments about the importance of workforce education, Brown added that the greatest area of deficiency is on non-credit students. “We can’t describe accurately to policymakers the phenomenal things that go on [with vocational training and education] and how life-changing this is for many people.”

Ronald Williams, vice president of the College Board in Washington, D.C., stressed a key goal of developing such metrics. “Knowing more so you can change the institution is... precisely the point of getting the data.”

Accountability will become an increasingly large issue at the local, state, and federal levels, Congress speakers said. Acknowledging the growing federal role in accreditation issues, keynote speaker Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation in Washington, D.C., urged trustees to balance such external approaches by developing a complementary “approach to accountability that is community-led and reflective of our core academic values... of mission, independence, and academic freedom.” Read more!

ACCT's Exclusive Interview with Jamie P. Merisotis

Here is the beginning of my post.

Jamie P. Merisotis, President and CEO, Lumina Foundation for Education

The next in ACCT's series of exclusive summer 2009 interviews is with Jamie P. Merisotis, President and CEO of Lumina Foundation for Education. Merisotis is a featured keynote speaker at ACCT's upcoming 40th Annual Community College Leadership Congress in San Francisco, California.

The following interview is an extended-length version of the Q&A printed in the summer 2009 issue of ACCT's magazine, Trustee Quarterly.

Jamie P. Merisotis leads Lumina Foundation for Education, one of the nation’s 45 largest private foundations and arguably one of the greatest advocates for community colleges. Under his leadership, Lumina employs a strategic, outcomes-based approach in pursuing its mission of expanding college access and success, particularly among low-income, minority, and other historically underrepresented populations.

Before joining Lumina in January 2008, Merisotis founded and served for 15 years as president of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Higher Education Policy, one of the world’s premier education research and policy centers. He previously served as executive director of the National Commission on Responsibilities for Financing Postsecondary Education, a bipartisan commission appointed by the U.S. president and congressional leaders. Merisotis also helped create the Corporation for National and Community Service (AmeriCorps), and has served on numerous national and international boards of directors, including Scholarship America, the European Access Network in London, and Bates College in Maine.

Q. How much of Lumina’s efforts relate to community colleges?

A significant portion. Lumina Foundation was established in 2000 and has been a supporter of success in community colleges from the beginning. We’ve spent most of the last few years focusing on this big goal of dramatically increasing the number of Americans with high-quality college degrees and credentials. This big goal has effectively become the president’s Best in the World goal. We like to think that we had a contribution toward creating the conditions that made that proposal a possibility.

Q. What are your thoughts on President Obama’s initiative?

The initiative is consistent with the Achieving the Dream initiative because it focuses on student success, the need to create a paradigm shift, and focusing on creating incentives for institutions to improve their developmental education efforts to better the first-year experience and to help improve transfer and articulation rates. All of that is exciting and timely, and something the federal government can have a dramatic impact on moving the needle.

The biggest gap in the public conversation about higher education is that we haven’t really been able to make the clear linkage between workforce development and our postsecondary education system. We’ve been trying to say, particularly in this time of economic crisis, that we don’t need to develop a workforce development system — we already have one. It’s our colleges and universities. And the community colleges are a critical element of that because of the array of opportunities that they provide. So this initiative, this opportunity to have a measureable difference on the nation’s workforce development and having those 5 million more graduates in the pipeline able to contribute to our economic and social health in the country, is very, very encouraging.

Q. Do you think there will be any challenges in getting the initiative passed through Congress?

There will be a lot of conversation about the level of resources, about how to successfully measure, about ensuring that the resources are being applied toward creating the conditions for success. That’s the right conversation. I don’t think that the government can really treat this as stimulus funding for community colleges. It needs to be targeted in a different way around success, and that’s what the president has done.

The real challenge is going to be to ensure that once it’s passed, the regulations and the implementation stay true to that goal of ensuring student success. That’s going to be hard because we’re facing a long-term economic challenge in this country, and community colleges are really going to be hampered in this environment with a lot more pressure in terms of burgeoning enrollments and fewer local and state resources that they’ll need to do their job well.

Q. Has Lumina’s focus on community and technical colleges changed since the recession began?

Not in a specific sense. The switch—and it’s reflected in all of our work—is that as we’re working toward the implementation of our big-goal strategy, we’re seeing that part of what we can leverage is not just improvements in what institutions do, but also influencing the public’s will for change and ultimately supporting public policy advocacy that’s going to help community colleges do more and do better. So in that sense, there has been a shift because we’re emphasizing public will-building and public policy as pillars — or catalysts— toward meeting those outcomes and that big goal.

Q. What can trustees do to take advantage of new public goodwill and public awareness efforts and maintain the momentum?

Trustees have two very good opportunities to help. One is to take part in that public will-building. Trustees tend to be community leaders, and they need to be a part of that advocacy and awareness process in communities. Many colleges and universities in this country miss the opportunity for their boards to be effective advocates. And that means using them as spokespeople in the media, interacting with policy makers, getting out into the community and really making the case.

The other is to meet their fiduciary and other obligations — to ensure the focus of their colleges is the success of students. That may sound like an obvious idea, but as we all know, there is a lot of pressure on colleges to do a lot of different things, and community colleges are asked to play multiple roles in communities — everything from GED training sites to community training centers. Those roles are terribly important, but the focus of the institution needs to be on the academic and social success of students. That means that trustees need to make sure that resources are applied toward making students successful.

Q. Do you see an increased interest in the community college model elsewhere in the world?

Absolutely. I was in Paris recently for the World Conference on Higher Education, and the U.S. delegation was headed by Martha Kanter, the new U.S. Under Secretary of Education and several distinguished higher education leaders including Dr. Jill Biden. The messaging from them was overwhelmingly about the world’s lack of understanding of the U.S. community college model. This was a great opportunity to help bring this message to the world, saying that when we talk about higher education in the United States, this is a big part of that. And it is going to become even more important, given the economic situation.

Under secretary Kanter told me after the conference that she had two dozen bilateral meetings and the majority of them were about the community college model. And I thought that was tremendously interesting, the interest in understanding the differences between the community college model and, say, a technical or polytechnical model that you might see in other countries, as well as the transfer and articulation models that are not very common in most of the rest of the world. There is clearly a lot of interest.

Q. How does the Lumina Foundation define student success?

Our definition of student success is measurable, transparent learning outcomes for students. We’re interested in ensuring that students know, understand, and are able to do something with their postsecondary credential. That means being able to demonstrate proficiency both with content in whatever program the student is in, and being able to demonstrate generalizable skills, analyze problems and express oneself effectively. Both can be measured.It also means we should do a better job of measuring and evaluating the success of student outcomes.
Graduation rates are one tool in the toolbox, but the current way in which we measure graduation rates is quite ineffective for a variety of reasons. At the national level, we really only have the capacity to measure first-time, full-time students, which is the minority of students at community colleges. So if we can do a better job of creating graduation-rate calculations, graduation rates could be a better measure, but we have to focus less on that than on the question of what students are learning and what they are doing with that knowledge.

Q. Is that something Lumina is investigating?

We’re doing so in a couple of ways. We supported the National Survey of Student Engagement, the Collegiate Learning Assessment, and other tools. We are now experimenting with a derivative from international models — something the Europeans have done called the Bologna Process. This takes a discipline-based approach — graphic design, physics, for example — and develops models of what students need to know, understand, and be able to do with their credential in that area. It’s a faculty-driven process called “tuning” that includes the input of employers, recent graduates, institutional leaders, and students. The idea is to tune the academic program to what the students are actually doing with that specific credential. That’s a great example of how we’re trying to push the envelope in doing a better job of defining and ultimately measuring the learning outcomes for students. We’re also supporting some other experiments. For example, there’s an effort just getting under way supported by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that measures learning outcomes across countries, and we’re going to try to contribute to this experiment.

Q. What is the role of community colleges in learning preparedness?

Preparation is key to success in college. We believe there is a combination of key economic, financial, and social factors that make you prepared for college. And what we need not to treat them as stovepipes, but as interactive and interconnected elements of what ultimately becomes student success in college — not just making sure they’ve taken the right courses or have financial aid, or the right counseling. The reality is that they need all of those to be successful in college. One of the ways community colleges can play an important role is improving success rates for individuals in remedial courses and programs. And that’s one way that the American Graduation Initiative could be particularly helpful in helping community colleges do a better job of getting more students through developmental work and therefore ready for success in college.

Q. With all of the new pressures from increased enrollments and physical classroom capacity demands, what can community college trustees do to maintain the focus on student success and meeting the needs that were there before the recession was a factor?

Boards are the public conscience of these institutions, and in that role, they need to be the ones who [ask], “Are our programs relevant to the needs of this community or this region?” That’s easy to say and hard to do, because you’ve got the reality of employees and contracts, for example, that you’ve got to work through. But maintaining a focus on workforce relevance is something boards can do particularly well.

They can also use their own stature in their communities to elevate the profile of the college. I come across too many community colleges and too many community college leaders who use the line that “community colleges are one of America’s best-kept secrets.” We need to stop being modest about the important role of community colleges. There is some lingering stigma for some people associated with community colleges, which you can see reflected in popular culture, and boards can help de-stigmatize what community colleges do and help elevate the profile of community colleges within their communities. Read more!

Center for American Progress Hosts Thought Leaders from White House, Lumina, Gates, JFF & Boeing

This morning, the Center for American Progress hosted a panel of thought leaders to deliberate on "Getting to Work: The Tough Journey of Getting to More Postsecondary Degrees." Panelists (see below) explored opportunities and challenges of meeting President Obama's challenge to increase the number of Americans with postsecondary credentials. While not billed explicitly as a discussion on community college education, the discussion was almost exclusively about the importance of community colleges and ways in which to promote, improve and grow the community college system.

Opening remarks were given by James Kvall, senior director of the White House National Economic Council and Rick Stephens, senior vice president of human resources and administration for the Boeing Company. Featured panelists included:

• Jamie Merisotis, CEO, Lumina Foundation for Education
• Arthur M. Hauptman, independent policy consultant
• Nancy Hoffman, vice president, Jobs for the Future
• Nisha Patel, program officer for special initiatives, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

The discussion was moderated by Louis Soares, director of economic mobility, Center for American Progress.

Merisotis, a featured keynote speaker at ACCT's upcoming 40th Annual Community College Leadership Congress in San Francisco, said "for too long, we have focused on means, not goals." "I'm optimistic about the chance to improve community college with the support of the Obama Administration," Merisotis said, "but we still have a long way to go."

Findings of a Center for American Progress paper published in February, "The Other College: Retention and completion rates among two-year college students," were discussed. The study discusses later academic performance of community college students, as well as completion statistics and determines that "America’s future economic success may well depend on how we invest in two-year institutions. National leaders would be wise to move the 'other college' to the forefront of the postsecondary policymaking arena."

Hauptman read from a new study he co-authored with Young Kim entitled "Cost, Commitment and Completion in Higher Education: An International Comparison." Hauptman indicated three goals that he believes should be sought: 1) Focus more attention and resources on community colleges; 2) Develop strategies to improve completion rates and; 3) Consider higher enrollment as a means to moderate costs per student and improve productivity.

The overall message given by the panel suggested that improvements to America's community colleges are necessary, but that these colleges are of great, and increasing, importance to the nation's education system and economy.

Read more!