Editors’ Publication of the Month: Defending the Community College Equity Agenda

This month’s publication review was contributed by Willard Hom, Director of Research & Planning, Chancellor’s Office, California Community Colleges (whom@cccco.edu). Willard reviews Defending the Community College Equity Agenda, edited by Thomas Bailey and Vanessa Smith Morest, and published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 2006 (ISBN: 9780801884474).

Defending the Community College Equity Agenda is a valuable book for a variety of audiences. The editors of this volume, Thomas Bailey and Vanessa Smith Morest, have assembled an insightful piece with the help of a few noteworthy contributors. Much of the analysis results from a special qualitative study (the National Field Study) that involved fifteen community colleges in six states. The book totals 305 pages in ten chapters, along with a section for references and an index.

Although there is no preface to declare who is the intended audience, it would be safe to say that the authors have written content with a message that will inform and stimulate policy makers, college officials, and researchers. This book is very accessible to the three audiences. The authors have diligently avoided research vernacular that may put off many college officials and policy makers. There are amazingly few diagrams or graphs and no equations. But don’t get me wrong here; the chapters convey in-depth analyses of selected focal areas in a way that will stimulate reflection and reconsideration among readers from all three backgrounds. Researchers will learn a good deal from each chapter (even without the conventional use of statistical analyses) because the authors have nicely integrated many pieces of both quantitative and qualitative research. In fact, the detailed discussion in each chapter would serve as an excellent primer about focal policy issues for newcomers to community college policy and research. For more experienced staff (like me), each author stimulated renewed consideration of the diverse issues that we ought to weigh when we work on policy development (and the research to support it).

Bailey and Morest give an effective overview of the entire book in Chapter One (“Introduction”). If someone only has 15-30 minutes to spend on this book, then this chapter would deserve that precious bit of time.

In Chapter Two (“Double Vision”) Morest discusses the dynamics of how community colleges, especially the 15 community colleges involved in the National Field Study, have responded to the multiple missions that each institution has tried to manage. I liked her delineation of how long-term and broadly acting forces in the country affect community college missions and behaviors. Another “take-away” point in this chapter is the major need for research and data on the noncredit area of the community college curriculum.

In Chapter Three (“Performance Accountability as Imperfect Panacea”), Kevin J. Dougherty and Esther Hong lay out a much-needed review of the good, bad, and ugly aspects of accountability efforts. Importantly, they note how accountability efforts can impinge negatively on the equity mission. Overall, the following excerpt offers an important challenge for readers:

“It [performance accountability] has demonstrated some potential to realize important public goals. Nevertheless, we need to ponder carefully the evidence that its impact is uneven and at best moderately strong, in part because performance accountability programs are of fairly recent vintage, inadequately funded, and unsteadily implemented. Moreover, we need to think about how to guard against the distinct possibility that performance accountability produces some significant negative unintended outcomes. All this argues not for abandoning performance accountability, but certainly for carefully designing and redesigning it to maximize its benefits and minimize its costs…” [p. 83]

That message underscores a common misperception about institutional accountability—that it is simple to do and unequivocally beneficial. Performance accountability that produces net social benefits demands far more than basic accounting.

In Chapter Four (“Increasing Competition and Growth of the For-Profits”), Bailey discusses the subtle relationship between community colleges and for-profit institutions. He notes how the community colleges faced different situations in competition with for-profit institutions over credit instruction and noncredit instruction. He concludes the following:

“At this point, there is little evidence that the for-profits in particular are either threatening the enrollments of community colleges or pushing the colleges to actions that would weaken the equity agenda, but this may be because they have such a small share of the two-year market and because of the particular conjuncture of demographics and fiscal policy…” [p. 108]

Rebecca Cox analyzes the issue of online learning in Chapter Five (“Virtual Access”). Her analysis finds that community colleges have pursued online instruction but that the implementation of online instruction has had some problems, such as faculty support, quality of learning, benefits to disadvantaged students, and scarce research into effective implementation.

In Chapter Six (“The Limits of ‘Training for Now’), Jim Jacobs and W. Norton Grubb explore the issues related to IT certification in the community college environment. Among the salient developments in the colleges related to the IT certification movement were a clash between the need to provide general programs rather than specific programs (especially firm-specific certificates), the contracting out of instruction (in lieu of existing on-campus faculty), an emphasis on serving working adults (rather than the unemployed), the dilemma of noncredit certificates that do not qualify students for financial aid or scholarships, and minimal linkage, if any, between IT certificates and developmental coursework or other support services. A very noteworthy conclusion is the following:

“Unfortunately, colleges had very little idea about what happened to students enrolled in IT certification courses. No college collected data on whether credit or noncredit students performed better on the assessments or even maintained any form of records on passage rates in certification tests…Without this information, it is impossible to verify the claims of IT firms that such certificates provide ready access to employment or to ascertain employment experiences over the booms and busts of the IT sector itself or—of crucial importance to community colleges—whether broader approaches to education are more effective over the long run than narrowly firm-specific training…” [p.150]

In Chapter Seven (“Lights Just Click on Every Day”), Dolores Perin and Kerry Charron deal with the issues related to the many academically underprepared students who enroll in community colleges. After the authors review the widespread problem of under-preparedness, they describe remedial education course formats (conventional, stand-alone skills courses, and special programs). The chapter includes a nice review of published research on the effectiveness of remedial education in the community college setting. Based on their review, Perin and Charron note “A rigorous, well-reported, replicable, peer-reviewed national study of the effectiveness of community college remedial programs remains to be conducted…” [p. 186]. In their closing discussion, they add the following:

“Despite the centrality of the remedial mission, systematic evaluation studies are rare. The indications of low effectiveness found in this study make rigorous evaluation particularly urgent…Controlled research is needed to determine outcomes among three groups: remedial completers, remedial dropouts, and adequately prepared college entrants. Differential use of support services…should be folded into the research to determine their effects on academic outcomes...” [p. 193]

W. Norton Grubb next tackles guidance counseling in Chapter Eight (“Like, What Do I Do Now?”). He finds a deficit in “systematic effort to find out why students do not show up” for counseling although many students would benefit from counseling. In addition, he observes that the lack of personal counseling, career counseling, and comprehensive financial counseling means that the counseling that prevails is “academic in nature.” But academic counseling or advising may help little if students’ goals lack concreteness that the other three kinds of counseling would help students to solidify.

Grubb hits two other sensitive shortcomings. “Overall, the most distressing aspect of guidance and counseling is that most colleges did not have any coherent plan for what they provide.” The second shortcoming is as profound. “Finally, there appears to be no national consensus about what guidance and counseling should be.” [p. 208] Grubb argues “Remedying this situation requires that colleges recognize guidance and counseling as central rather than peripheral to several missions, especially to the equity agenda and to helping students complete coherent programs…” [p. 219]

Chapter Nine (“Twice the Credit, Half the Time?”) by Morest and Melinda Mechur Karp hits the last stand-alone topic of the book. Morest and Karp document how a popular initiative – “dual enrollment” – may fail to serve disadvantaged students in obtaining college degrees. Although insufficient data hinder evaluation of dual enrollment, they find that administrative motivations to adopt and operate dual enrollment tend to favor populations other than the disadvantaged ones that the equity agenda targets.

The final chapter—Chapter Ten—is a summary and comment by Bailey and Morest. If the time-constrained reader has only enough time to read two chapters of this book, then he/she should make Chapter Ten and Chapter One the must-read pieces. Chapter Ten certainly goes beyond a recap of prior subject chapters by adding context and information for interpretation. Significantly, Bailey and Morest tell policy makers and college administrators in unequivocal language that research capacity on campuses is a critical piece of the process in the following way:

“..the fundamental strategy for improving the use of data to advance the community college equity agenda involves improving the capacity of colleges to analyze and evaluate their own practice—that is, increasing and strengthening their institutional research capacity..Increasing institutional research capacity is not merely a matter of expanding the number of researchers at the colleges. In a sense, this type of change may not be realistic for community colleges, in light of their declining share of state resources and relatively small budgets. Instead, this means revising the role of institutional research and elevating its priority in contributing to institutional decision making...” [pp. 266-7]

In retrospect, some readers may experience a little disappointment with this book. The chapters don’t really “drill down” to the dilemmas of specific ethnic/racial groups or to regional contexts. The book does not offer one or two “magic bullets” that legislators and state officials could grasp and employ immediately through legislation or policy. The hard-core quantitative methodologist will yearn for the longitudinal, national random sample and the statistical models to support the many findings and recommendations in the book. The book was published in 2006, and it does miss the most recent studies that relate to the chapters. But despite these “disappointments,” I would still urge every administrator, policy maker, and researcher who has an interest in the community colleges to pick up a copy for what the book does deliver very well—an easily accessible, thoughtful, objective and strategic examination of community colleges in terms of the equity agenda and more.