The number of students at community colleges has fallen 37% since 2010, or by nearly 2.6 million, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
Those numbers would be even more grim if they didn’t include high school students taking dual-enrollment courses, whom the colleges count in their enrollment but on whom they’re losing money, according to the CCRC. High school students now make up nearly a fifth of community college enrollment.
Yet even as these colleges serve fewer students, their already low success rates have by at least one measure gotten worse.
More than a third of community college students have vanished | The Seattle Times
Of course, combine this with the demographic crash which is just now hitting the community college enrollments ….
Be sure to read the comments to the story – which also implicates students poorly prepared by K-12 education – and poorly prepared to understand college requirements. Many enrollees were caught up in the societal push to “just go to college”, when that may not have been their best option and choice.
I taught at a community college for almost 2 years. The college was dysfunctional. Each department had become its own fiefdom, with its own ideas about what they should be doing. Some programs were very good while others were near useless, turning out students with non-transferable credits who were not getting hired in their field of study. And that was because 25+% of the course work was out of date material.
The campus’s Nursing program and allied health subjects were excellent. Their culinary arts program was excellent. Their lineman training program, operated in conjunction with local power utilities, was excellent. But – there were other programs (which I will not name) that were failing to deliver results and students were not getting jobs in their fields of study; a majority of the students failed to complete certification options or the 2-year program.
Students were enrolled in courses only to find out near the end of their program that nearly none of their course work was transferable for credit to the state’s 4-year colleges. Basically, the college was running a scam. (Some colleges, including a sister campus to the one I worked at, had legitimate 2-year to 4-year transfer programs. But for a multi-thousand attendance college, just 5 students per year successfully transferred to a major local regional state university.)
When I first started, I overheard an administrator say the campus had among the highest rates of student financial assistance fraud in the nation. Students received direct payments – which included a living expense stipend – at the end of the first week of a course – and then never attended another class. They would then re-enroll in new classes the next quarter, attend a week, get paid, and vanish. And then repeat that again and again. Over 10% of students figured out how to milk the system. (A new administration revamped the financial aid system to stop this scam.)
The union contract said no faculty member could be told to do anything. Everyone was free to do what they wanted. If they had consistently hired high performers that would not be a problem – but they frequently hired poor performers who became permanent poor performers due to being unionized, tenured instructors. A tenured, unionized work force that cannot be managed is a recipe for dysfunction. The only person fired during my time there was a female instructor who had sex with a student – in a car in the parking lot. And even that was a difficult firing. No one was fired for non-performance.
I had colleagues who taught 3 classes per day, starting at 7:30 am. By 11 am, they were off campus doing a consulting job the rest of the day. The only reason they kept their campus job was it provided benefits, which they didn’t get as independent consultants.
Colleges say they need more money – but the first thing they need is effective organizational structures, which they lack. And hiring standards.
My sympathy was with the students who were being cheated by a dysfunctional and unmanageable organizational structure. Every suggestion I offered to improve anything was met with a variation of “But we’ve always done it this way” …. so why should we change? The resistance to fixing anything turned the organization into concrete – where it remained stuck and unfixable.
After I left, I did have a good meeting with the college President (who was excellent but put in an impossible situation) and the Chancellor. Six months after I left, significant changes were made to the program I had worked in, including replacing the Department Chair (who stayed on as tenured faculty even though he rarely did actual teaching – instead telling students their classes were mostly self-study….) Shortly after, the President left and the Chancellor retired (they were both great individuals trying to manage a structurally unmanageable entity).
To fix the enrollment decline, to fix the high dropout rates, requires programs and staff who are willing to embrace meaningful change. That requires an enormous culture shift – which is difficult when they’ve spent years building a staff of un-fire-able, unmanageable poor performers who are unwilling to make necessary changes. This is why everyone blames “lack of money” and other nebulous issues – because they can’t address the quiet part. They have literally poured concrete into some of these campuses and it has now set and firmed up.
The problem was past administrators that lacked standards or refused to enforce standards, who let programs fall into permanent disarray. Now they are stuck with them and there is no good fix.
I hate to have written the above – we need community colleges and many are doing excellent work. I have heard from others in the state where I taught that there were other campuses in the same mess – and some that were doing well. These failures occurred because of fundamental structural issues that had become entrenched and were not fixable due to the college culture, rules and union agreements.
