While community colleges have relatively low tuition, associated costs such as transportation, textbooks and housing add up quickly. Taken together, these expenses can act as a significant barrier to students juggling tight budgets, multiple jobs and outside responsibilities leading to higher dropout rates. Easing the overall financial burden that students face at community colleges will give students more breathing room for personal and family costs, allow them to work less hours and study more, and ultimately provide them with a better chance of reaching graduation.

In the short term, the federal government can respond to high dropout rates by taking immediate action to increase federal financial aid, and by reducing key burdensome costs like textbook prices.

Textbook prices have spiraled out of control. Students spend an average of $900 per year for books, and prices have been rising more than four times the rate of inflation. According to the GAO, textbooks are comparable to 72% of tuition for the average community college student. Skyrocketing prices are a consequence of a marketplace where only a few publishers exist and students have no purchasing power. Congress took an important first step with a provision in the Higher Education Opportunity Act requiring publishers to disclose their prices to faculty. Their next step should be to create a competitive grant program to fuel the growth of more affordable options like open-textbooks, which are high-quality college textbooks offered online under a license that allows free digital access and low-cost print options. Open textbooks can reduce costs by 80%, according to a recent PIRG study, which could save students hundreds per year while also creating competition and choice in the textbook market.

Stabilizing and increasing federal aid to students will help reduce dropout rates. The landmark student aid bill passed earlier this Fall made a $36 billion investment to the Pell grant program. However, the program is straining with increased demand from students turning to community colleges during the current economic climate. Congress should fill in the over $5.5 billion Pell grant shortfall before the next session.

Congress can also fix and extend the American Opportunity Tax Credit beyond 2010. The current tax credit covers up to $2,500 in textbooks, supplies, tuition and fees for over 8 million students and their families. However, Pell grants are first applied to these specific expenses, which can eliminate a student’s eligibility to the tax credit even if there is an additional unmet financial need. An estimated 1 million Pell grant recipients with additional financial need will not receive any benefit from this tax credit. The vast majority of students affected attend community college. Congress can enact legislation that will make grant aid first apply to expenses not covered under the tax credit when calculating eligibility. Both fixing and extending the American Opportunity Tax Credit beyond 2010 will provide needed resources to help students stay in school.

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What’s worth more, a degree or an education? While a diploma can decorate a wall, an education can change a life, feed a family, and send the next generation to get an education.

As we strive to confer more degrees, I believe we are beginning to lose site of what those degrees are intended to represent—or even if, as credentials, they are worth much at all in many domains of human experience. We also risk the proliferation of “diploma mills” or, as marketing-maven-turned-new-economy-thought-leader Seth Godin might call them, “diploma factories”.

Godin, the best-selling author of Linchpin, the provocative 21st century survival guide, speaks often of factories. His take is unusual and instructive, especially as it applies to education:

“Factories don’t have to make stuff. They’re any business that focuses on doing what it did yesterday, but cheaper and faster. It turns out that factory thinking is part of a race to the bottom, to be the cheapest, the easiest place to pollute, the workforce that will take what it can get.” (Blog post: "What does pro-business mean?")

This resonates with me because most of what I see being done in education today looks like an attempt to tweak the age-old factory model of schooling into something just a bit more efficient than it used to be—but not fundamentally different or, really, any better. The amazing explosion of hyper-speed college programs and super-fast certification systems is an attempt to increase the efficiency of traditional credentialing, primarily by reducing the amount of time one spends acquiring new knowledge and skills. But this focus on efficiency, as Godin suggests, may represent a false economy.

If there’s one lesson we’re learning from the charter sector, it’s that more time on learning is precisely what is necessary for success. Intellectual growth takes time. While it’s possible to compress the teaching side of the equation almost infinitely by creating ever-lighter curricula and ever-shorter programs, life on the learning side hits a “left wall” statistically where the time it takes to develop a given set of skills or internalize a given amount of knowledge cannot be reduced beyond a certain threshold without defeating the process of learning itself. As we make it easier for people to get credentials, we may ironically make it harder for them to acquire what those credentials represent.

Godin writes often about our schools and about the strong negative pull of the factory mentality. In the quote from his post above, I don’t think his use of the phrase “a race to the bottom” was accidental. He has kids, too, after all; he reads the papers, and watches the Web (thought not television), and he cares very deeply about the fate of young people emerging from an education system that hasn’t prepared them very well for the realities of life post 2008—a factory model Industrial Age education system that is kicking kids out into a networked Information Age world without the skills or the savvy they need to "jack in" as William Gibson might put it and reap the rewards they might expect.

The “get a degree to get a job” model of making one’s way through the world is quickly becoming a paradigm of the past . This isn’t to say we won’t continue to keep it’s ailing heart beating for as long as we can, or that there won’t always be some connection between certain degrees, certain certifications, and certain types of employment. But year after year, more of us will come to see that the person is worth much more than the paper their skill set is printed on.

What seems to matter nowadays—and Godin lays this out in great detail in his book—is knowledge, skill, and a certain emotional component people bring to their lives. When people rely on credentials, they often end up as just one more resume in the pile. But when they apply real-world knowledge and skill, catalyzed by internal motivation and what Godin calls “the performance of emotional labor”, doors open and opportunity abounds.

The notion that a credential is worth more than a skill, or that a few letters after your name is worth more than actual knowledge in your field, is already laughable in many sectors. Even in education itself we’re learning that having an education degree doesn’t really mean very much. And for decades now computer programmers, graphic designers, writers, entrepreneurs, and people in many other lines of work have been trading on their talent, and rightly so, not on where they went to school and what they got on their report card. We’re learning every day that people who know things can often do things— whether they have degrees in those things or not.

Knowledge is more important than college. To the extent that the two can be combined, so much the better. But as the former is clearly worth more than the latter, our planning and policies must bow to a new reality—the primacy of talent over transcript. This means that the role of post-secondary education cannot be defined merely in terms of degree granting; it must be defined in terms of educating and the post-educational achievements of the people it educates.

Many folks this week have called for better measures. Better measures are certainly better than worse measures or no measures at all, but only if we measure what counts to the customer not what counts to the politician or the policymaker.

Post-secondary education has three customer bases: (1) The student; (2) The employer; and (3) The citizenry.

For students, what matters is learning and what they can do with it. A degree without learning isn’t worth the proverbial paper it’s proverbially printed on. Students care about what they’ll know and be able to do after finishing another round of education. The data we track has to tell them this, not in terms of 6-year graduation rates but in terms of how many graduates are doing great work and living great lives as a direct result of their educational experience. This kind of thing can be tricky to spreadsheet; it's often a little too squishy for stats folks and policy analysts. But it's exactly the kind of "data" that matters to the people who has to pay for the educaiton they receive and so I think they are deserving of it.

For employers, knowledge and skill are what matter most; diplomas and certifications are meaningless in most cases, just an easy way for huge HR departments to sort people into groups so they can make statistically dubious decisions about who to kick over to the next step in the hiring process and who to kick out altogether. Once someone is on the job, and once everyone knows this person can do the job, academic credentials are irrelevant in many cases. And if this person can’t do the job, does have a degree or a certfication matter? Again, aren't we figuring this out right now in K-12 education? Aren't we finally getting around to saying we want effective teachers as opposed to just cerfitied teachers?

Finally, the general citizenry has a vested interest in people who can function effectively in a democracy that grows more complicated with each election cycle. We don’t seem to care very much about this anymore in terms of education policy, but I think people still care about it. At least I know I do. In any case, our country can’t function very well without a knowledgeable and engaged citizenry, so I think some consideration must be given to what has become the tired—or retired—notion of citizenship, especially in post-secondary education where it is all too easy to become narcissistically swaddled in self-centered pursuits related to career and individual lifestyle choices.

As we look at our community colleges, and indeed our entire system of post-secondary education, we should be counting new things and keeping better track of new data. But let’s make sure we count what matters most to the people who seek the learning, to an economy that benefits from a learned workforce, and to communities that need smart, engaged citizens to assure responsible stewardship.

Rather than revving up the factory for another century-long go-round, and engaging in what Seth Godin calls a “race to the bottom”, as we strive to issue new and better quarterly production reports, let’s look at the real needs of students, our economy, and our democracy. Instead of printing more course catalogs, establishing more online education programs, and coming up with new ways for people to get diplomas and certificates faster and easier, let’s fashion a system that privileges learning over teaching and talent over transcript—a new system architected to meet the challenges of the future as opposed to an old system patched and kludged to preserve the comfortable dysfunction of the past.

Instead of factory model education for an Industrial Age, let’s look toward network model education for the Information Age. Instead of linear curricula, let’s look at “hyper-linked” educational opportunities that more accurately match diverse learning experiences with the needs of diverse learners. Instead of creating more, better, and faster conveyor belts to put people on, and to deliver them into society tassles turned and diplomas in hand, let’s look at “branching” systems of “interactive discovery” that guide learners on more fruitful paths to growth and fulfillment.

The power of the network model lies in Metcalf’s Law, the notion that the value of the network is the square of the number of nodes. For a learner, a teacher is a node, a fellow student is a node, an information source is a node, a project is a node, and so on. More nodes means more power; more power means more learning. When schools are designed such that each learner is guided in designing and maintaining his or her own optimized educational network, we not only achieve the gains in speed that we’re trying to squeeze out of the factory, we gain improvements in quality as well because we’re getting learners closer to the learning they actually need—as opposed to merely guessing years ahead of time as we do in the factory model by designing new assembly line degree programs for what we think our learners might need.

Having more degreed Americans will make us feel proud, but having more prepared Americans will make us feel better. We need more people ready and able to capitalize on shifting opportunities in a rapidly changing world. The factory model simply wasn’t built for this kind of dynamism. So funding new factories and retooling existing ones isn’t going to get us what we want. At best, it will merely accelerate, as Seth Godin notes, a race to the bottom.

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In light of mounting evidence that poor degree attainment rates have a direct bearing on our nation’s economic recovery, the role of community colleges in successfully preparing “a large chunk of the population for the workforce” couldn’t be more urgent.

As former President Bill Clinton noted during a Sept. 19 interview on"Meet the Press," jobs are now opening up, but we lack qualified people to fill them: “There are 5 million people who could go to work tomorrow, if they were trained to do the jobs that are open, and the unemployment rate in America would immediately drop from 9.6 (percent) to about 7 percent,” he said. “We need a system to immediately train them to move into that job.”

Many available jobs actually don’t require four-year or even two-year degrees. In many cases, apprenticeships and certification do the trick. According to Manpower Inc, the hardest workers for employers to find right now are those in the skilled trades such as welders, plumbers and electricians. The healthcare and hospitality industries also have more openings than qualified employees.

In Ohio, KnowledgeWorks led a major effort to overhaul the state’s workforce development system so that its network of community and career technical colleges would develop sector-specific programming in areas where regional economies endured major skills gaps. In partnership with the schools, we piloted several career pathway programs in which students, in as little as six weeks, could become certified to fill jobs in demand.

During this time, KnowledgeWorks also became a state sponsor of Achieving the Dream, or AtD, whose focus was to prevent drop outs by introducing programming in state community colleges that address the whole needs of adult learners. AtD piloted several programs, for example, that addressed remedial education in writing and math, and incorporated evening office hours for academic advisement, counseling, and childcare services. Both AtD and career pathways, by design, specifically attacked barriers that prevented adult learners from completing certification or Associate Degree programs.

America’s economic recovery is intricately tied to our ability to train our workforce. This requires a new national commitment to equip our nation’s community colleges (and career technical institutes) to provide the training needed to close acute skills gaps. Customized programming must be specific to sectors containing jobs in demand, and include student support services that make it practical for adults to enroll and complete postsecondary education certification and degree programs.

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Here is a guest post from Dr. Jean Norris, Managing Partner of Norton Norris. She has served as a faculty member, dean and senior admissions and marketing administrator at for-profit and traditional higher education institutions.

"The Obama Administration is making a serious mistake by only looking to community colleges to help fill the gap in ensuring that more Americans have access to a college education. It is critical for students and employers that the administration include career colleges in its Skills for America’s Future outreach. These schools serve similar populations, although according to the Department of Education, the career college graduation rate is 2 ½ better than community colleges.

A new multi-part study by Norton│Norris, Inc., for the Coalition for Educational Success found community colleges engaging in unsavory recruitment practices and providing students with poorer-than-expected academic quality, course availability, class scheduling, job placement and personal attention. Undercover researchers for Nn visited community colleges in six states – Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa and Michigan – and found that none of the schools provided prospective students with information on graduation rates, even when explicitly asked. Despite an exhaustive review of school web sites and literature, researchers were unable to locate graduation rates for one-quarter of the community colleges examined (four out of 15). These community colleges were equally evasive about job placement rates and average earnings of graduates.

Our research found that career college students greatly benefit from the hands-on approach, flexible class schedules, focused coursework, career placement services and personal attention offered at career colleges. The Obama Administration needs to welcome community colleges and career colleges to the table to help solve problem as complex as preparing large numbers of the population for the work force."

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It's not up to the feds to improve community colleges, so I'll rephrase: How can community colleges improve their students' success rate?

First, every community college should ask counselors and teachers at its feeder high schools to explain to students what percentage of B, C and D students are placed in remedial classes and what percentage of these go on to complete a credential or AA degree. Students should be warned they're on the remedial track while they have time to do something about it. Colleges should collaborate with high schools on catch-up classes.

Second, community colleges should offer classes integrating reading and math skills with job skills. Low- and mid-level remedial students should be encouraged to take these classes, which will offer credit for vocational skills and lead to a credential, rather than launching on a long remedial sequence in the vain hope of earning an AA.

If a community college is unable to help a reasonable percentage of low-level remedial students pass classes and earn a credential, the college should send these students to adult ed programs.

I agree that looking only at full-time students is crazy. We need to track all students to determine whether students are meeting their goals -- which may not include completing a credential or degree.

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It will be difficult for the federal government to do anything meaningful to decrease the dropout rates at community colleges. Moreover, the federal government should not be rewarding underperforming schools—K-12 or postsecondary—with additional funding.

There’s no doubting that community colleges have difficult jobs to do. Far too many students arrive at these colleges ill-prepared and with a lack of time, money or both—thanks to a woefully inadequate K-12 education system.

This doesn’t mean, however, that film classes, SAT preparation, and cooking lessons should take resources away from the intended purpose of community colleges: to prepare students for gainful employment.

If colleges transform themselves, using new technology, and allow more flexible schedules, they’re likely to see an uptick in their graduation rates as students see that it’s not impossible to juggle work and school. Importantly, community colleges need to work diligently to keep their tuitions low, cut bureaucracy, and become more efficient and performance-based. That—not a federal takeover—will help community colleges succeed once again.

The White House Community College Summit got the main challenges right—how to improve degree completion; strengthen industry-college partnerships; use financial aid to incent not just access but success; and stop penalizing students for moving around and wanting to start in one school and complete in another. These are indeed among the most important targets for improvement in a pipeline that loses students from the day they first enroll—from those who never take a course to those who never finish their developmental requirements to those for whom life intervenes before they can earn their degree and those who never make the transition to the four-year program they hoped to enter.

Given all these challenges, where should the federal government start? I can think of a few places.

First, the federal government can keep the spotlight on these complicated institutions—underfunded yet critical to local economic development; a doorway to opportunity for many, yet a first and last stop for many students who are just not ready for college work. The federal government can remind the public over and over again that even though opinion leaders and policy makers generally graduated selective colleges and universities in four years, this is not the higher education experience that faces most Americans who are trying to hold a job, raise a family, and improve their life through college. The future of America depends upon the future of these institutions and the four-year nonselective publics. This can’t be said too many times.

Second, the federal government can promote and stimulate experimentation with new approaches to helping improve student outcomes, approaches that move people faster through community college programs; push institutions to be more responsive to and flexible in meeting students’ scheduling needs; and provide clearer signals to students about, and connections with, employers who are likely to hire them when they get out. We don’t know all that much about what strategies are most effective for which students and which are most cost effective. So the federal government should not only seed innovation but also make sure that the experiments are evaluated for what works when implemented on the ground —as the Department of Labor hopes to do with the upcoming $2 billion in Community College and Career Training grants.

Finally, the federal government can help make it much clearer what is happening to community college students—where they enroll, how long they persist, what credentials they earn, where they end up afterwards—so that states and institutions can allocate resources more effectively and the public can apply pressure for improvement where appropriate. The federal government can revise the data collection and reporting by community colleges through IPEDS, so that full- and part-time students’ progress is captured and a fuller picture of the trajectory of different groups of students is available, from their entry into college to their transfer across institutions and their ultimate labor market outcomes. More difficult for the feds, but critical nonetheless, is strengthening state and institutional capacity not just to collect data, but to use it effectively for continuous improvement. But federal funds and policies can be a big help: just ask the Data Quality Campaign.

If the federal government can put community colleges on the map and champion them while simultaneously pushing them to improve results, that will be a real accomplishment. To be a booster for these amazing institutions while simultaneously driving efforts to improve and withstanding the temptation to scapegoat will change the climate within which the battle for better results will ultimately be waged.

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While I don't agree with everything about AFT Higher Education's whatshouldcount.org site, Randi Weingarten's general assertion that we need better measures of success is right on the money. Without them, no amount of new federal investment in community colleges will pay dividends in the long run. The best community colleges are a terrific value for society, providing an affordable, flexible education with strong ties to the labor market. Those institutions are seriously under-appreciated and their professors underpaid. Better measures would provide evidence to support new investment in colleges that could put those funds to good use. They would also give other community colleges--many of which aren't nearly as good--something to shoot for. Because two-year institutions don't compete in a national market in the same way as many four-years, all the more reason to create benchmarks against which local leaders can gauge their progress.

Meanwhile, Steve Peha's suggestion that the laws of supply and demand dictate that a surge in demand for higher education naturally leads to higher prices and lower quality indicates that our nation's colleges and universities should add remedial economics to their list of pressing challenges...

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Community colleges are not immune from the economic recession, but the role they play in providing services to the wide ranging needs of its students is a big one. I won’t spend time on what needs to change, but I will suggest that a fresh look at their role in the K to University continuum could provide some provocative discussions about K – 12 reform efforts. Here are just a few observations.

Why do we draw the line between high school and community college? Imagine high school students taking community college classes either at the college or on their respective high school campuses - - - classes that might be considered the domain of “Advanced Placement.” But wait. Most community college classes are transferrable as college credit to most colleges and universities, while AP class students must pay to take the AP exam, score in the range of acceptable college credit, and then hope that the college or university that they matriculate to will recognize the credit. Which pathway do you think is more equitable to every student and makes more sense?

Why is adult education part of the K – 12 system? I think that this question has its solution embedded in the community colleges. But the solution takes much needed funding away from school districts. So that brings me around to the funding question. Does your state grant funding for concurrently enrolled students?

My last observation is that this year our local community college had to turn away thousands of students due to lack of adequate funding. Sure the numbers were inflated due to the high unemployment of adults seeking to re-tool their skill set for a new career, but all students were impacted by the economy and funding shortfalls statewide. This was an abhorrent situation, and our state should be ashamed that they could not fulfill the promises of our Higher Education Master Plan.

So money does matter! And if we want to reform the K to University system and keep the dream of a college education alive for every student who desires one, we must invest more in public education while at the same time looking at how our system serves its students in an efficient, logical, and educationally appropriate manner. Let’s tear down the bureaucracies and streamline what we do in this business called public education. Our system should be seamless to the consumer (our students). Mr. Duncan, would you care to add this to your “to do” list?

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I think the question of what the federal government can do to increase community college graduation rates is a bit of misdirection. The first thing we need to do, something we should have done much sooner, is to define what roles we need community colleges to play in our post-secondary education framework.

Community colleges are an important part of our higher education landscape, especially for low-income students in general and low-income minority students in particular. For students who cannot attend college full-time, community college serves as an affordable and accessible educational starting point that will allow them to attend while holding full or part-time employment. For students unsure of their ability or interest in higher education, a community college education serves as a less pressured confidence-building environment. This makes community college an important stepping-off point to higher education. Community college also serves as an important re-entry point for students who went to work right out of high school and now find that they need more education to compete the 21st century job market.

All too often, however, these students’ quest for postsecondary education not only starts in community college, but ends there. Sometimes the cause is financial, the inability to afford tuition at a four-year college or to give up the income from full-time employment. Many students also find it difficult to balance the demands of school, work, and family.

This inability to continue their education disadvantages all concerned. Students fail to achieve the four-year college degree that is all but indispensable for entry into and success in the professional work force. The state suffers the effects of the diminution of the well-educated and productive professional local work force that is the foundation of both a healthy economy and civil society.

As the NOVA Pathway to the Baccalaureate pro­gram referenced in the setup question illustrates, there are solutions out there, solutions that help community college students succeed at that level, transition to a four-year college or university, and receive their degrees. What has been lacking is the kind of national support for this critical educational intersection that the Obama administration, to its immense credit, has infused into the pre-college education system. It involves funds—but not just funds. There needs to be support for demonstration projects directed at a variety of the kinds of situations described above—students just out of high school, drop-outs and stop-outs, and older students returning to the classroom while continuing to shoulder their family and work responsibilities. These projects need to be deployed and their results evaluated. Those that work need to receive the support they need to be taken to scale.

All of this needs to happen in the context of a view of education, not as a collection of free-standing modules, but as part of a pipeline designed to move students—all students, not just some--from preschool to and through college, and to prepare them to assume their responsibilities as workers and as citizens.

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Last week’s White House Summit on Community Colleges was a significant milestone in bringing attention to these institutions that are critical to our higher education system, particularly at a time when more and more Americans are seeking a college education. The summit addressed important questions that require attention if we are going to unite collectively to help students succeed—whether they are seeking a certificate, an associate degree or transfer credits, or are simply taking a few classes to upgrade their skills and knowledge. Professor Sandra Schroeder, who is president of AFT Washington, an AFT vice president and a faculty member at Seattle Community College, participated in the summit on the AFT’s behalf.

The United States system of higher education is unique in its orientation toward full access for anyone who wishes to pursue a college or university experience. Community colleges have led the access agenda with open admissions for virtually all students, although this has been diminished in the last two years by state funding cutbacks that have resulted in raising the price of community college and, in some cases, have caused community colleges to turn away students for the first time in their history.

As many speakers at the White House summit noted, the 21st-century student body is extremely diverse, both in demographics and in educational background and preparation. This diversity presents a number of challenges for community colleges, but one of the most important is to raise the success rate—the extent to which students achieve degrees or certificates that further their educational goals.

We are pleased that the administration has exhibited such a positive attitude toward engaging with frontline faculty and staff in furthering the community college agenda. In response, AFT Higher Education has made it one of our top priorities to work intensively with federal and state officials, the higher education community, and students and their families to achieve the best possible results.

Along these lines, the AFT Higher Education program and policy council is well on its way to completing a set of educational guidelines on what constitutes student success and who should be held accountable for achieving it. We have also been working with student assessment experts in and outside of government to ensure that the voices of professional educators figure more prominently in the development of assessment and accountability policy. Further information about these activities, along with a wealth of data about accountability mechanisms, can be found on a new AFT website called whatshouldcount.org.

As policy discussions go forward, we will concentrate on two issues in particular. The first is the formula by which student success is currently measured by the federal government. To put it plainly, today’s federal graduation rate formula needs to be changed if we are going to accurately understand what is happening to students during their education and, therefore, how best to help them.

The current federal graduation rate formula counts only first-time, full-time students who remain enrolled at one institution and graduate in 150 percent of the expected time for a degree. This is simply not based in the real world of community college students. Many of these students start out attending college part time, or change institutions, or work toward a degree for multiple years while simultaneously holding down a job and raising a family. One immediate step the federal government could take would be to revisit the federal graduation rate and create a new, more dynamic measure that truly captures the many students that community colleges serve.

Second, policymaking around student success must focus more extensively than it has on the importance of investing in those most responsible for student success—the faculty and staff. Today at community colleges, only 18 percent of the faculty members are full-time, tenure-track faculty. More than 80 percent of community college faculty work off the tenure-track and nearly 70 percent are part time. The result is that over half of the classes are taught by part-time faculty who are underpaid and undersupported. Most have no professional support for maintaining contact with students outside the classroom, for curriculum development and planning, and so on, and they aren’t included in institutional discussions of assessment. These faculty members give their all, but as Schroeder noted:

The nearly 250,000 part-time/adjunct faculty members at our nation’s public community colleges are committed to their work, but we must confront the fact that we have built a system that relies on their goodwill to keep doing what they do because of that commitment and passion. That is neither good for faculty members nor the students they teach. It is also not good for community colleges in general, which now have a depleted full-time faculty corps to help carry out the mission of the college.

This must be moved higher on the policy agenda. Many other issues will command attention in the two- and four-year higher education orbits. Certainly, one will be the metrics of college student assessment, including the cost, validity and value of designing elaborate data systems that may or may not further student success. As the policymaking debate continues, the AFT will do everything we can to keep engaged on all fronts related to the educational success of our students.

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Some community colleges delivery cutting edge education focused on jobs in emerging industry clusters. Most just try to make up for lousy high schools but teach the same stuff the same way.

As blogged this morning, most community colleges will need to reinvent themselves to deliver better, cheaper, more engaging, just-in-time education. The Next Gen Learning Challenges announced yesterday will help a handful of colleges use new tools to develop new blended models.

The road to the October 5, 2010, White House Summit on Community Colleges began in July, 2009, when President Obama called on community colleges to increase the number of graduates and program completers by 5 million students over a 10-year period, a 50% increase over current numbers. In an earlier address to a joint session of Congress, President Obama asked every American to commit to at least one year of higher education or career training so that the United States would once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. The president made the point that, in an increasingly competitive world economy, America’s economic strength depends on the education and skills of its workers. Without the contributions of America’s community colleges, the institutions that enroll 43% of the nation’s undergraduates, the President’s goal clearly cannot be met.

Although Congress was not able to deliver federal funding support to the colleges through the American Graduation Initiative as President Obama proposed, the Administration has stated its continued commitment to increasing the educational attainment levels of Americans, challenging community colleges to bear a significant part of the burden. On March 30, 2010, at a ceremony at Northern Virginia Community College, President Obama announced that he had asked Dr. Jill Biden to convene a White House Summit on Community Colleges and signed H.R. 4872, the Health Care and Education Affordability Reconciliation Act, into law. The Act provides significant increases to federal student financial aid and $2 billion for the Community College and Career Training Grant Program, a new Trade Adjustment Assistance program focused on workforce preparation.

The Obama administration has pointed out that, in the coming years, jobs requiring at least an associate degree are projected to grow twice as fast as those requiring no college experience. In its 2009 report of the Springboard Project, the Business Roundtable echoed President Obama’s challenge to increase education attainment levels to build a competitive workforce. The report recommended unlocking the value of community colleges, stating that these institutions have the potential to play a dominant role in strengthening local economies.

While some of our more elitist higher education colleagues may harbor misperceptions about quality, students are voting with their feet. In the last two years, credit enrollment in community colleges increased by 17%. Half of all baccalaureate recipients and about one-third of science and engineering master’s degree recipients have taken community college courses. Forty percent of the nation’s teachers complete some of their mathematics or science courses at these institutions. Fifty percent of the nation’s registered nurses, over 80% of the first responders, and most of the nation’s technological workers are prepared in community colleges. Forty-seven percent of first-generation college students, 53% of Hispanic, 45% of Black, 52% of Native American, and 45% of Asian/Pacific Islander students attend community colleges.

Despite the significant contributions of community colleges, student completion and transfer rates must improve if we are to meet President Obama’s challenge. Too many students do not make it successfully through remedial programs into college-level courses, and too many do not complete their programs because of insufficient financial support or poor institutional or state policies and practices. The first significant effort to improve student completion in community colleges was set in motion by Lumina Foundation for Education in 2004, with the launch of the national Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count initiative (ATD). The goal of the initiative is to help more community college students succeed, especially students of color, working adults, and students from low-income families. The ATD initiative emphasizes the use of data and the creation of a “culture of evidence” at the colleges to inform decision-making and to measure progress against a specific set of student success metrics. Ultimately, Lumina’s “Big Goal” is to increase the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees and credentials to 60% by the year 2025. The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) rates the current educational attainment level for the Unites States at 40%.

Many community college students have significant obstacles to complete their education; many arrive unprepared for college-level work and must start in remedial courses; many are working at least part-time while going to college; and many have family responsibilities; some are single parents. They come to college wanting to succeed and to better their lives and to improve the well being of their families. Through what we are learning in initiatives such as ATD, we can help more of them to complete their studies.

Begun with a cohort of 26 colleges, ATD has now expanded to128 colleges in 24 states, including the District of Columbia. ATD efforts have focused on improving or expanding developmental education, gatekeeper courses, first-year experience, learning communities, academic and personal advising, student support services, and tutoring. A recent report indicated that the initiative is effectively increasing student persistence rates by as much as 13%. ATD colleges are also working to strengthen linkages to K–12 and to engage the community. The initiative also is focused on changing state and federal policies that create barriers for students.

We must also work to change state and institutional obstacles that block pathways to the baccalaureate degree because of poor transfer of credit policies. Organizations such as Complete College America and the National Governors Association appear ready to assist in improving these policies so more students can complete baccalaureate and higher level degrees. Phi Theta Kappa, the International Community College Honor Society has launched CollegeFish to connect community college students to transfer institutions. (See http://www.collegefish.org/).

In 2009, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced a major postsecondary success initiative. The foundation is focused on ensuring that postsecondary education results in a degree or a certificate with genuine economic value. The foundation has set an ambitious goal to double the number of young people who earn a postsecondary degree or certificate with value in the marketplace by the time they reach age 26. The foundation notes that the types of jobs fueling our economy continue to change rapidly. Success in the workplace demands advanced skills in critical thinking and problem-solving, as well as the ability to shift readily from one task or project to another. Workers with strong language and math skills, technological capabilities, and a capacity to work well in teams are most likely to succeed. Carnevale, Smith, and Strohl project that, through 2018, nearly two thirds (63%) of all new jobs will require more than a high school diploma; nearly half of those will require some college but less than a bachelor’s degree. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that, 21 of the 30 fastest-growing occupations require postsecondary education. Speaking at the White House Summit, Melinda Gates told the audience that the Foundation believes that the focus has to be on community colleges to meet the goals set by the Foundation.

In April 2010, six national community college organizations—representing trustees, administrators, faculty, and students—signed a call to action to commit member institutions to match President Obama’s 2020 goal. The organizations are currently seeking funding to develop cohesive and integrated strategies to move ahead, although challenges presented by the current economic climate could very well inhibit early progress. In the face of a surge of enrollment pressure, states have cut funding to public higher education, including community colleges. Hundreds of thousands of students were turned away from classes last fall, roughly 140,000 students in California alone, and the situation in the near term may be even worse due to continuing economic challenges in the states. Nonetheless, these major associations are determined to move ahead with the “completion agenda.”

In our recent report, Doing More With Less: The Inequitable Funding of Community Colleges (http://www.aacc.nche.edu/Publications/Briefs/Pages/rb09082010.aspx), Christopher Mullin points out that while community colleges serve 43% of all undergraduates (54% of all undergraduates in public higher education), they receive only 27% of total federal, state, and local higher education revenues. Community colleges are asked to educate the students who are most at-risk and with the least support by far of any other sector. If the United States is to meet the challenges of the future, policymakers must provide needed and more equitable support to colleges and universities and their students. Education, at all levels, must be seen as an important state and federal investment in our future, and policies must be put in place to ensure maximum return on that investment.

While the White House Summit raised the public image of the nation’s community colleges, I do not expect to see any significant additional federal investment in the colleges in the near term because of concerns about the mounting federal deficit and political uncertainty caused by lingering effects of the economic downturn. In the long term, the country needs to invest in the education and training of its people if it is to prosper. While government is constrained, foundations are stepping forward to provide funding to leverage improvements. Melinda Gates announced the Gates Foundation’s new “Completion by Design” initiative that will provide grants to groups of community colleges in nine selected states to address the needs of low-income students. The Aspen Institute announced a new prize for Community College Excellence, intended to honor excellence, stimulate innovation, and create benchmarks for measuring progress. Finally, the “Skills for America’s Future” was announced at the Summit. It is the result of the work of the Presidential Economic Recovery Advisory Board and will be managed by the Aspen Institute. “Skills for America’s Future will bring together community college leaders, employers, and union leaders to improve workforce development programs. Commitments for support have already been received from Accenture; Gap, inc.; McDonald’s; Pacific Gas and Electric; and United Technologies Corporation.

It seems “where to start” is not as much the question as “how can we build on a strong base and current work to meet a significant and very ambitious challenge.” American has met difficult challenges before. Like those we have met in the past, this one will require strong and committed leadership, nonpartisan political support, and partnerships between community colleges, business and industry, foundations, and other sectors of education.

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I think it was Mark Twain who said, “Never let your schooling get in the way of your education.” Perhaps we’ve forgotten this pithy wisdom. Or perhaps, in a Yogi Berra-like way, we've just turned it on its head.

For months in this forum we’ve talked of “college-readiness”. Recently, we talked about problems in the “for-profit” college sector. Now we’re talking about challenges facing community colleges.

Can anybody guess what the real problem is? That’s right, we’re not talking about the real problem at all. We keep thinking it’s one sector or another, this structure or that structure, some policy or program. Sorry technocrats. Like most other issues in our schools, this one’s about people: those who are trying to better themselves through a better education, and those who are happy to take their money regardless of whether they provide an education at all.

So many folks think they need a college degree. Many others want to give it to them. There is money to be made here; this is America, after all. Are we surprised, then, that dollarship is now more important than scholarship?

Much as I often malign classical economics as it is applied to education, this problem is so simple that ideas like the Law of Supply and Demand provide all the explanatory power required.

When more people want something, it tends to become more expensive whether its quality or actual post-purchase value increase at all. If the demand for something becomes so large relative to its supply, and markets lack transparency (as they surely do in education), unfortunate consequences occur as it becomes impossible to determine the value of an investment.

With regard to higher education, in particular, our obsession with raising the number of degreed citizens has catalyzed the following trends:

1. New institutions have popped up all over the place offering all kinds of degrees with little regard for quality.

2. Existing institutions now admit more students with little regard for quality.

3. Students now pay just about anything for college degrees with little regard for quality.

It doesn’t take an Econ 101 student to figure out the result: more people receiving higher-priced degrees of lower quality. Best of all, as the number of degree-holding Americans increases, we get to feel better about ourselves while our education system gets worse.

(Talk about a career politician’s dream, eh? We may have to add a new phrase to the political lexicon: "pork barrel education.")

I’m not sure if Donald Campbell is dead and turning over in his grave, or if he’s still alive and just wagging his finger at us, but just about every time an elected official says that the future of our country depends on some educational metric moving up or down, we end up embarrassing ourselves with our own naïveté. Like much of reform, this week's issue is déjà vu all over again.

So it is with higher education at virtually all levels. Community colleges face some unique challenges, particularly when it comes to predicting who will succeed and who will not, but all but the most selective institutions are wrestling these days with the ethics of taking money from students they have little intention of educating but every intention of graduating. At last count, money was winning the best two out of three falls.

If our nation didn’t have it’s educational foot so far down it’s educational throat, fixing this situation would be easy—bring a little sanity back into the college admissions process and reorient our financial aid system so as not to incentivize and reward bad actors. But even our President has hopped on the “America needs more college graduates” bandwagon. What I wish he—or anyone—would say is not that America needs from college grads but that America needs more educated Americans. Sadly, in this historic time of education reform, college is becoming less synonymous with knowledge every year. (Though I'm fairly certain the rhyme maintains its integrity even if our institutions do not.)

Obsessively focused on reforming our system to produce better educational statistics, we seem to have forgotten that the idea is to produce better educated people. In all the rush and excitement to school ourselves up from sea to shining sea, we’ve lost track of what schooling is. As Twain might have remarked were he alive today, “We’re letting our education get in the way of our schooling.”

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