The Post-High School Pathways We're Not Building

In 2013, the inaugural class graduated from San Francisco (SF) International High School, where every student is a recently arrived immigrant learning English as a new language. The auditorium on graduation day was saturated with the sounds of young people, and the folks who love them, rejoicing over having made the impossible—and in some cases the unfathomable—a reality.

And yet, as the celebrations faded into the beginning of a new school year, my former students came back to visit their old high school, and over and over again they reported having left college. They withdrew after having received intimidating notices about tuition payments, or after they were unable to register for the classes they were told they needed to take, or sometimes after nasty interactions with faculty who questioned if they had a right to be there in the first place.

It wasn’t even October.

Across the country, students—particularly immigrant students, students of color and English Language Learners—face college-retention challenges. You’ve probably read some version of how an elite college is attempting to extinguish this problem: the Undocumented Students Program at Berkeley, the First-Generation College and Low-Income Student Center at Brown, and the First-Generation Student Union at Harvard. But what’s largely missing from the narrative is discussion of the students attending community colleges.

It shouldn’t be.

Community colleges, in many ways, offer straightforward, equitable solutions to the challenge of retention. As open-enrollment institutions, they don’t close their doors to students still developing college-level reading, writing, and math skills. On top of that, as the lowest-cost option, they’re especially appealing to low-income students, some of whom may be working to support both themselves and their families. But here’s the cruel twist: Community colleges often have smaller budgets, making them less able to offer help—academic, social, emotional—to the students who need it most. As a result, it’s key to investigate the ways we might build pathways for community-college students to successfully prepare for life beyond the classroom.

But first, it’s important to add some context. According to the American Association of Community Colleges, nearly half of all undergraduates in the country, and the majority of black and Latinx undergraduates, study at a community college. In other words, when we talk about higher education for students of color, we’re largely talking about community colleges. However, nationally, less than 40 percent of students who enter community college earn an associate’s degree within six years. As you might suspect, the achievement gap is alive and well on these campuses. The American Institutes of Research and Optimity Advisors reports that the overall graduation rate at City College of San Francisco (CCSF) is 31.6 percent. For Latino students, the rate is 19.2 percent; for black students, 12.6 percent.

It’s hard to obtain solid data on English learners, but we know that they’re the fastest-growing population in U.S. schools. In California , they make up over 20 percent of students in the state’s public schools, and nearly one-quarter of students in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD).

In San Francisco, we—a group of  high-school teachers and community-college counselors—are attempting to address retention challenges through Span. Span is a pipeline-building program with the ambition of smoothing and supporting the transition between high school and community college, helping students build support networks, and teaching skills for college success. What does this look like in practice? Span Scholars, as the students are called, take a class together on their college campus; the course is co-taught by a teacher or counselor from their high school and a counselor from the community college. At its core, Span focuses on building a support network by connecting students with potential resources for academic, administrative, and socio-emotional support.

The program begins before high school graduation, when students meet in their Span cohorts to build and bolster community and learn about the program. In the summer, they reunite to share their excitement and trepidations, and to resolve potential registration and financial-aid errors before classes begin. Throughout the fall course, community-college faculty, staff, and students speak on panels, recruit students to attend meetings, and share resources.

My program, developed at SF International High School, focuses exclusively on students learning English. English learners are a relevant and prevalent subset of students. They’re diverse in race, class, and immigration status. Importantly, despite their differences, they often share a common set of instructional needs: intentional schema-building, explicit connections to their cultures and backgrounds, diverse means of delivering instruction, multiple modes of demonstrating mastery, opportunities to process at different speeds. These are the well-documented practices of high-quality education for all students, including students in advanced-placement classes and students with disabilities. (Put differently: When we serve English learners better, we serve all students better.)

Beginning this school year, SFUSD and CCSF are supporting the expansion of the Span program to new high schools across San Francisco. In planning for the expansion, I sat down with current and former Span Scholars—and with Leticia Silva, a CCSF counselor and the co-teacher of my Span course—to discuss the lessons we’ve learned so far. Here are three essential features of the program we believe can support college-retention efforts not only in California—but also across the country:

Cut some slack. There isn’t a single path or model that can lead marginalized students from high school through community college. In my experience, students will need to come and go from school. Sometimes, that means taking fewer units so that they can work two shifts, and other times it means taking a semester, or longer, off to welcome a new baby or to secure new housing. Attaching support to rigid attendance or unit requirements only pushed away students who most needed me to be there. I’ve found that providing multiple on- and off-ramps allows student to be honest with me about their plans, no matter how many times those plans might change.

Engage students’ resilience and resistance. The students I’m supporting—and, I believe, most marginalized students in the country—have managed unimaginable challenges in order to get to where they are. I’m thinking of, for instance, Lorenzo, who left his parents as a teenager, crossed borders alone, and navigated a new culture—all while mastering a third language. As immigrants, my students refused to have their lives determined by the accident of birth, and have physically moved elsewhere. In ways big and small, they’ve said “no” to the status quo. Or as Lorenzo put it: “I was trying to quit high school in 11th grade. I felt the same way in 12th grade. But now that I’m in college, I realize that after coming that far and not giving up after two years—more—that is what makes me want to be successful in college.” The capital students like Lorenzo bring to the classroom is immense—but often overlooked. Five years ago, I treated college success like another foreign language I hoped to teach my students because I felt pressure to ignore the larger challenges they faced. Now, I try to facilitate their own reflection so that they can identify the problem-solving tools they already have, and then apply those to the challenges of community college.

Connect with families. When I asked my students and CCSF partners what they think helps students succeed or fail in community college, they all said, “Support.” Lorenzo talked specifically about family support. “Even though my parents aren’t here, I have my brother who’s helping me pay rent and encouraging me to keep going to school.” I don’t think of the college students I support as kids, so it’s easy to forget about their families. All of my students are the first in their families to attend college, and I’ve have been guilty of assuming that their parents don’t know how to support them in college because they never attended themselves. Bringing families into the conversation, and coaching students on how to see the assets their parents can bring to the process regardless of their educational background, is a peerless form of support. Crucially, “family” is a fluid, flexible term. Silva, in particular, explained to me how students build family-like support networks. “Students who succeed have a support system on campus. They know they have someone they can go to whom they are comfortable sharing with, and they have a group of peers who are doing the same.”

I’m not suggesting that there are simple fixes to the challenges beleaguering community colleges. Many of the barriers students in community college face are structural, and can’t be remedied through individual dedication alone. However, coordinating the heavy lifting counselors like Silva, students like Lorenzo and Xiaoqing, and teachers like me do can amplify our impact—without straining our time. The most important step to begin addressing college retention is probably something many teachers are already doing: building strong relationships with their students. But the key difference between Span and other college-retention programs at CCSF, I’d argue, is the overlap between high school and college. The trust we build with our students while they’re in high school is the greatest way we can sustain support.

These days, nearly every semester I have former students, who’ve been out of high school for several years, show up at my school. Initially, when they graduated, they didn’t want anything to do with City College or the Span program. But as their minds and circumstances have changed, many of them have come back. It’s in those moments that I feel that the program is working. It’s in those moments that I embrace how my school is a pitstop for people to come for the tools they need to reach the futures they themselves have dreamed up. That’s the kind of school I want to teach in. And, I don’t think that it’s a stretch to say that that’s the kind of school any teacher—anywhere—wants to teach in.

Support for this article was provided by Rise Local, a project of the New America National Network, and by the W. Clement and Jessie V. Stone Foundation.