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It’s good to start the new year with a posting on NOVA, the Community College of Northern Virginia. NOVA is a multi-campus community college, with seventy-five thousand full- and part-time students. It is the largest institution of higher education in Virginia, and the second largest community college in the country. Located on campuses and sites from Alexandria to Woodbridge in the greater Washington, DC, area of northern Virginia, NOVA faces many of the leadership challenges confronting large multi-campus colleges: How to keep faculty and staff on the several campuses and sites connected? How to manage communication when campuses and sites have different programs and serve different populations, including large numbers of international students? How to bring about shared work on student learning outcomes and student success? Among many things to admire about NOVA is their success in keeping the curriculum united. By that I mean uniting the liberal arts transfer and the career and technical education (CTE) programs—certificates and associates’ (AA and AS) and applied associates’ (AAA and AAS) degrees, all together.
Not to say it isn’t hard work. NOVA has made an investment in learning across the curriculum, in liberal education across the curriculum. They’ve made it a priority to “look both ways,” to work with local schools and with George Mason University through an innovative program called Pathway to the Baccalaureate. They see the AAA/AAS not as “terminal” because NOVA and the Virginia Community College System have partnered with a number of universities to create transfer pathways for students in CTE programs. They’ve been working for years with student learning outcomes for all programs. To keep things together, they’ve put responsibility and authority for the curriculum in one office, led by Sharon (Sheri) Robertson, associate vice president for academic services.
Take a look at the college-going population and this is what you see: the future of postsecondary education is in the hands of community college educators. Almost half of all undergraduates are enrolled in community colleges, and that percentage appears unlikely to change in the wake of the Great Recession. The largest numbers of students historically underserved who make it to higher education attend community colleges. If you think in terms of population—the overall numbers of students and the evolving demographics of the United States—it’s clear that community colleges are crucial to the future of higher education. National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data show that the largest numbers of Latinos in higher education attend community colleges. The same is true of African American students, Asian/Pacific Islanders, and American Indian students. This is the emerging majority of people who will move democracy forward. The future of liberal education is in their hands, heads, and hearts as well.
Community colleges are an increasingly important sector of institutions committed to liberal education, and they will be key to how liberal education evolves in the future. Many would argue—I hear this all the time on community college campuses—that they already are the foundation and center of liberal education, especially for all those students who transfer from community colleges into four-year institutions. Community colleges are positioned to educate the majority of students, and they are likely providing most of general education—certainly most of lower-division general education—now and as far ahead as we can see. We may already be there. If you think of common patterns of transfer, as Cliff Adelman has been arguing for years, you’ll realize that many students enrolled in four-year institutions simultaneously take courses, often in general education, at community colleges. Students, and in some state systems like the California State University, the majority of students, begin their studies elsewhere, primarily in community colleges. In the CSU system, 60 percent of graduates transferred into their institutions from community colleges (see here, here, and here).
We want people to get jobs. No doubt about it. To get jobs these days, people need both broad learning and practical skills. In this series of posts, I have been presenting exemplars among community colleges of programs that accomplish these goals and connect K-12 and college learning, all with the intention of increasing people’s success in getting jobs. These civically minded colleges are taking their place as centers for learning aligned along the continuum from school to college to university in their communities. From these highly responsible and resilient institutions, I am learning a thing or two about a blended model of liberal education as practical education—a robust model of what sustainable learning for employment ought to be in the twenty-first century.
A recent visit to Oxnard College, a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) in Ventura County, California, has helped me articulate what it means for a college to invest deeply in the vitality of its community. Oxnard fosters applied learning in the arts and sciences, and liberal education in career and technical education (CTE). It is a thing of beauty. Driving to Oxnard, you traverse vast strawberry fields; you’re near the Pacific coast and the Channel Islands National Park. The massive agricultural enterprise abutting the coastal sanctuary reminds me how challenging it is to negotiate across different worlds within higher education, but also how urgently we need future generations of students to be ready for stewardship and civic responsibility as well as for workforce success.
My last posting in my series on school-college alignment described how the Maricopa Colleges have been using the Significant Discussions Guide to help them align learning from school to college to university. The Significant Discussions project, as I’ve written in previous posts, aims to improve student success by promoting collaboration on curriculum alignment among secondary schools, community colleges, universities, and employers. Anne Arundel Community College (AACC), in Maryland, has been using the Guide in their own way with high schools in their county. This local work is part of a larger career and technology education (CTE) program for high schools throughout the state.
Maryland, I discover, is a national leader in CTE. The state has merged secondary vocational and college preparatory programs. Instead of the two traditional tracks, Maryland has embedded CTE within the overall high school program. If you choose a career cluster, what you get is an infusion of applied learning, for example, in arts, media, and communication, starting in tenth grade. The goal is to develop and reinforce the more traditionally academic knowledge, skills, and abilities through application and hands-on activity in real-world settings. CTE is particularly attractive to students who are not thriving in the high-stakes testing regimen of No Child Left Behind. This approach clearly aligns with the emerging blended model of liberal education advanced in the LEAP initiative.
How do community colleges serve as centers advancing the education and wellbeing of a region? Insights garnered from Significant Discussions in practice have much to tell. The Significant Discussions project, as I’ve written in previous posts, aims to improve student success by promoting collaboration on curriculum alignment among secondary schools, community colleges, universities, and employers. Let’s start with the Maricopa Community College District (MCCD)—ten community colleges and two skills centers in the Phoenix, Arizona, area. Leaders at Maricopa have launched a project using the Significant Discussions guide, and they report promising results.
Maricopa got into Significant Discussions through a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant program. The program intends to strengthen connections between higher education and schools, and to accomplish that objective by giving priority to emerging knowledge in technology education in a region. In the greater Phoenix region, the economy will increasingly depend on technology, including emerging high tech fields such as bioscience, sustainability, and solar energy. It’s easy to see that outreach to future students in STEM is critical to the wellbeing of Phoenix, and that a diverse community of workers there is eager for employment. Many more applied fields are likely to emerge; the workforce needs to be ready to move and adapt. Attention now to secondary, community college, university, and industry connections will pay off in regional development well into the future. This concept is elegant and seemingly obvious. But it is difficult to enact on the ground.
A few weeks ago, I began exploring school-to-college alignment in a new series of blog postings. What does purposeful work on school-to-college alignment mean and what can it do for student learning? How can work in the Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) campaign also advance alignment efforts? What does it mean to invoke alignment and focus attention on students’ own work? Educators in both the secondary and postsecondary sectors now have the means to work together on learning-centered alignment—K-16, P-16, P-20—beyond any opportunity we have had before. The urgency that we do so has never been greater.
Why is it important that community colleges are innovatively engaged in alignment? They represent a crucial sector in the current national debate about education, the sector of higher education most critical in my view to the future well-being of our democracy. Centering attention on community colleges, we can see the achievement and promise of alignment that reaches from community colleges back to schools and onward to four-year institutions. To learn about a community college-centered approach to alignment, I strongly recommend Significant Discussions: A Guide for Secondary and Postsecondary Curriculum Alignment, www.league.org/significantdiscussions.
By Susan Albertine, with Terry Rhodes, AAC&U vice president for Curriculum, Quality, and Assessment, and Nevin C. Brown, senior fellow, Siena Italian Studies and former senior fellow for post-secondary initiatives, Achieve Inc.
Spring is nearly here—and as we near this transition from one season to the next, it seems like a good time to address another key transition point in many people’s lives along the educational pathway from school to college—the transition between grades 12 and 13.
The current development of a set of Common Core Standards for K-12 education (adopted by 43 states and territories) presents those of us in higher education with an opportunity not to be missed. The Common Core is a step forward. It is aspirational, detailed, complex, and explicit. Its expectations for student performance extend beyond one-dimensional approaches to skills or content. It may not do all that many of us in post-secondary education would like to see (e.g. covering a fuller scope of outcomes in the sciences, humanities, or the arts). Yet it reaches for higher levels of proficiency than before for all students in English, language arts, communication, and quantitative reasoning. Unfortunately, the Common Core has yet to prompt widespread post-secondary minding and engagement. Can we change that pattern and bring about more connected work with schools on the ground?
