Higher Ed’s Bermuda Triangle

[Editor’s Note: In this month’s edition of the Washington Monthly, New America’s California Education Program Director Camille Esch looks at the struggles that community colleges are experiencing providing remediation to the waves of financially needy students who arrive on their campuses each year unprepared for college-level work. In her article, she argues that fixing remediation in community colleges is essential if we want these institutions to fulfill the role we’ve assigned them: providing a gateway to higher education for millions of low-income students. It’s a task, she writes, that can’t be done on the cheap and can’t be done without a fundamental rethinking of accountability in higher education. We’ve included an excerpt from the piece below. To read the full article, click here.]

By Camille Esch

America is losing its lead in higher ed: while other countries are turning out ever-increasing numbers of college graduates, the U.S. has stalled. But the problem isn’t just getting high school graduates into college — about 70 percent of them already enroll. It’s getting them to finish it. Only about half of American enrollees leave college with a degree, putting us behind at least ten other developed nations in educational attainment, according to a recent report by the Brookings Institution.

Where exactly we’re losing all these students is unclear. But the best place to start looking is community college, and specifically those schools’ remediation programs. Nearly half of all students seeking college degrees start at community colleges, and of those, a large percentage – estimates put it around 60 percent – must take remedial classes. Remedial students run a high risk of dropping out and not graduating; one robust study found that only 30 percent complete all of their remedial math coursework, and fewer than one in four remedial students makes it all the way to completing a completing a college degree. Students who need remediation drop out at worse rates than community college students who don’t, and the more remedial classes they need to take, the less likely they are to stay in school.

There’s a chicken-and-the-egg element to this, of course. Getting through two years of college is extremely hard for a student with fifth-grade skills – it may be too much to expect from many of them, even with the best help. So it’s difficult to tell what exactly the grim remedial statistics say: Is the gulf between the students’ abilities and the most basic requirements of college simply too wide? Or are the programs failing?

We don’t know, and therein lies the problem. Community college remediation is the Bermuda triangle of the higher education system – vast numbers of students enter, and for all intents and purposes disappear. We have almost no hard evidence about what works and what doesn’t in remediation and almost no one – policymakers, researchers, or administrators – has tried to figure it out in any systematic way. The reason for this is a combination of unjustly scant resources, huge gaps in data, and sometimes a sense of fatalism – or worse, denial – that keeps state and school leaders from making it a priority. Meanwhile, the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better. Jobs requiring a college education are on the rise, and the labor market continues to pay a premium for college-educated workers. Students who wouldn’t have gone past high school a few decades ago are now heading to college – especially community college – but they’re not remotely prepared.

But this trend also offers real opportunities. Even if community college remediation programs can simply go from terrible outcomes to mediocre ones – if, for instance, the programs were able to meet the needs of even just the top half of remedial students – the aggregate nationwide impact could be an additional 150,000 college graduates per year. The Obama administration is aware of this potential, and is looking to community colleges to help the U.S. out of the economic crisis, and meet our longer-term needs for more college graduates. In July, President Obama announced a new America Graduation Initiative that calls for an additional five million community college graduates by 2020.

Meeting this goal is a tall order. But too few policymakers are willing to take the first steps: stop trying to education the most academically challenged students on the cheap, and insist on community colleges having a stake in whether or not their students succeed. The colleges that have already started to take this kind of responsibility show that such an investment can pay off. If we don’t fix the pipeline where it’s leaking most, even the best-laid plans for revitalizing the workforce with college graduates will amount to little.