Community Colleges: low-hanging fruit?

Last updated on: May 4, 2015 at 8:01 am by Jane the Actuary

Community Colleges: low-hanging fruit? 2015-05-04T08:01:43-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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I’m still mulling over Putnam’s book, especially in connection with the whole mess in Baltimore.

So the whole issue of daycare and universal free all-day preschool, which progressives offer as one of their first-line solutions to poverty, just strikes me as suspect: I’m just highly skeptical of claims that, if you don’t provide an “enriching” environment to infants, toddlers, and preschool children, with 1,000 books before kindergarten (the new initiative at my local library and, I imagine, elsewhere), a caregiver constantly babbling to the child, lots of one-on-one time, and learning their colors, numbers, and ABCs as soon as possible, the kid is going to be as dumb as a bag of rocks, and irreparably so. Yes, there are studies, for instance, announcing that middle-class infants or toddlers have twice as many words spoken to them as children of poor parents, but is there any real proof that this really boosts a kid’s IQ? After all, if we really believed this, then we’d be fighting tooth and nail to keep out all those foreigners who will never be able to amount to anything, due to their faulty upbringing, and all those Manhattanites would be aghast at the idea of allowing an uneducated Dominican to raise their child.

OK, fine, it’s an exaggeration to say that anyone is claiming that kids’ll be dumb as a bag of rocks without an Enriching Environment. But it’s nonetheless in dispute whether a home or home-like environment, or center care is the way to go, and at what age academic instruction is or isn’t appropriate, and how much an impact any of this has on a child’s IQ and future life chances.

And it’s also the case that you can take pretty much any anti-poverty, break-the-cycle-of-poverty initiative and find a dispute between Left and Right on its effectiveness. Does increasing welfare benefits alleviate acute suffering (lack of nutritious food, warm clothing, a properly heated or cooled home, etc.) or keep this and the next generation welfare-dependent by sapping any motivation to get a job? Are work requirements a common-sense means of moving individuals to work, or do they trap families in poverty by preventing people from accessing adequate job-training to get an above-minimum job? Is public housing a common-sense way to provide homes to those with low or no income, or is it just another opportunity for corruption and mismanagement? Is a restriction against criminals in public housing a common sense way to protect other residents or an injustice against the families of ex-cons? Heck, a while back I read a book that said that even after-school programs for high-risk kids have not been shown to have any effect, apparently because these high-risk kids are a bad influence on each other.

But there were two snippets in Putnam’s book that I’d share with you at length now, if I hadn’t already had to take the book back to the library, so I’ll have to instead give you the short version from memory.

As I said, he has a lot of stories that come out of interviews, often presented as a rich kid vs. a poor kid in a particular locality. In one case he pairs a rich and poor black kid, in another a rich and poor Latino kid, to make a point that within racial/ethnic groups the differences are growing, too. In one of his profiles, the Poor Latino Kid, a girl with the deck stacked against her graduated high school and started at the local community college, but due to funding shortages, she simply wasn’t able to enroll in the courses she needed, so, instead of attending full time, she was only able to enroll in one class. In another profile, the Poor Black Kid (well, OK, there were multiple such profiles; this was one of them, really more of an in-between case, as mom had worked her way to store manager, but still struggled to keep her kids on the straight and narrow) ended up $50,000 in debt after getting a vocational-type associates’ degree at a private for-profit college — the sort of course of study that should have been available for a fraction of the cost at the local community college.

This ought to be the low-hanging fruit: funding community colleges sufficiently that any motivated student can enroll in courses and get a degree or a certificate in a field which will allow them to get a job that, if it isn’t well-paying, is at least adequate-paying. No, I’m not talking about Free Community College — I’m taking it as a given that community college is, or should be, priced low enough that it’s not a burden for the middle-class, and lower-income folk should be able to fund it with grants. But these stories in the Putnam book are not the first time that I’ve read that, depending on the area, many students or prospective students are simply not able to enroll in their chosen course of study due to lack of seats, and either don’t complete their program, take longer than the two-year path, or choose a for-profit school at a substantially greater cost and, in some cases, with less benefit, when the credential they’ve earned isn’t accepted by prospective employers.

For a motivated student who wants to gain a skill, it seems like a common sense solution to ensure that community colleges provide appropriate course offerings, not just on paper — at my local community college you can learn welding, truck driving, HVAC training, nursing and related fields, paralegal skills, etc., in addition to transfer programs for 4-year colleges — but in reality. After all, a large part of the reason why, at the high school level, calls for increases in funding feel like throwing good money after bad, is that, in poor areas, the kids are unmotivated at best, disruptive or even violent at worst — which shouldn’t be an issue at the community college level, where students may be woefully unprepared but have, at any rate, presumably reached that level of maturity where they are in fact striving for self-improvement rather than just biding their time.

How big a problem are waitlists and access to community colleges in general? Here’s a 2010 article suggesting that in California this is a serious problem, and a more recent article indicating this is ongoing, but without any solid data. Irritatingly, I’ve clicked through several pages of search results and can’t find anything more, except a few further articles on California, from 2010, which either means that Putnam’s case studies aside, this is an issue for a small number of students, or that this is a problem that’s compounded by its invisibility.

But the further problem is this: I suggested that this should be low-hanging fruit, something which Dems and the GOP, conservatives and progressives ought to be able to agree upon; after all, unlike four-year schools, community colleges don’t have a reputation for frittering away their money.

But it’s often the case that, when something appears to be low-hanging fruit, there’s a good reason why it hasn’t been picked, even if it’s not readily apparent. And, while funding likely varies from state to state, in terms of how much comes from the local area vs. from the state, if it is indeed, for instance, the state of California making the decision to fund a bullet train to nowhere when it could be directing more money to community colleges, then it does little good to say “we should better-fund community college to eliminate the wait lists” if the “we” in question live elsewhere. The best we can do is say that “we” should individually determine whether waitlists (or lack of relevant vocational programs entirely) are an issue at our own local community or technical colleges (or statewide, if the funding comes from the state), and press for more appropriate funding at that level, or at any rate revisiting funding priorities. And, no, I’m not keen on the federal government making up the difference if that means inequities between states that chose to adequately fund their community colleges and states that didn’t.

(Also consider this article from US News and World Report (which apparently still exists) from 2012, which reports that Californian community colleges’ exceptionally-low tuition has compounded the problem, attracting more students while failing to collect tuition at what would be seen elsewhere as still reasonable rates, but still boosting revenues enough to relieve some of the funding pressure.)

So: bleh. Anyone know about the situation in their local area?

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