Despite a recent study giving California community colleges failing grades for completion and transfer rates, Allan Hancock College educators are optimistic their students are on the right track.
The study, released in October by Sacramento State’s Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy (IHELP), analyzed nearly 250,000 degree-seeking students in the California Community College system, tracking those who entered in 2003-2004.
Among the findings: 70 percent of the students hadn’t completed a degree and hadn’t transferred to a four-year university six years after enrolling. Only 52 percent of the transfers went to one of the state’s public universities, with a growing number heading to for-profit institutions.
Nancy Shulock, director of IHELP, said the study’s results indicate a need for a statewide strategic plan to improve completion rates and eliminate achievement gaps among socioeconomic groups.
“California has some huge challenges,” Shulock said. “We’ve got to get better outcomes, otherwise we’re not going to be able to have educated citizens and workers.”
However, Hancock officials called the study “skewed,” saying it misses the big picture of overall student success. According to Salvador Castillo, Hancock’s director of institutional research and planning, just 12.6 percent of the overall student body, tracked from 2004 to 2010, received an associate’s degree within six years.
Castillo said the results are actually more encouraging than they seem at face value, considering roughly 80 percent of first-time Hancock students don’t place at the college level in math, and about half don’t place in college-level English in freshman placement tests.
“We take students who could have dropped out in eighth grade, and yet 12 percent can graduate within six years,” Castillo said. “I think it should be cast as, ‘We’re doing great. How can we improve?’”
For the purposes of the study, IHELP counted only students the group determined to be “degree seeking”—those who took more than six credit hours each semester in their first year.
According to college spokeswoman Rebecca Alarcio, many Hancock students enroll just to take a few classes or earn a certificate, making it impossible to determine exactly how many students intend to earn a degree.
“The general population tries to define community colleges the way you define a university,” Alarcio said. “You could be all over the map on what you decide to do, so trying to define their success is pretty tough when there is no one single way to track them through the system.”
A more accurate picture, Alarcio said, comes from looking at students who become “transfer prepared,” meaning they obtain enough transferable units to attend a university or meet university-level English and math requirements.
According to Hancock’s accountability reporting data, 50 percent of all students who earned at least 12 credits in their first year eventually earned a degree or certificate, or became transfer ready within six years.
Not surprisingly, as the Sacramento report showed, students are much more likely to receive a degree or finish a certificate program if they take full-time class loads. The study found that 59 percent of students who earned at least 20 credits in their first year ended up completing a degree or transferring to a university. However, only 25 percent of “degree seeking” students actually hit the benchmark.
At Hancock, 70 percent of students are part-time, and many are parents, forced to work while going to school. For those Hancock students who took less than half-time schedules, only 2.7 percent successfully earned a degree or transferred.
Though educators might prefer it, according to Hancock’s Castillo, community colleges aren’t legally allowed to mandate students take a certain number of credits.
“That’s a hamstring,” he said. “We can encourage all we want, but in the end it’s the student’s choice.”
Among its recommendations, the IHELP study called on state legislators to require early alert systems to catch failing students at the first sign of trouble. In addition to better financial aid counseling and more online summer courses, Shulock said all 112 schools in the state’s community college system should be required to track every student, to find out how and why students get stuck.
“Across the country, colleges are starting to realize and students are voicing that they want structure,” Shulock said. “They want mandates. They want requirements. They want to be told.”
Hancock officials say the idea is a good one—in theory. School administrators currently perform tracking as a condition of participating in special programs like Math Engineering and Science Achievement (MESA), the “Bridges to Baccalaureate” science program, and Extended Learning Projects (ELPs) designed for low-income and disadvantaged students.
While educators backed the idea of tracking every student, they said implementation is unrealistic due to budget issues.
“That’s something we would love to do, but the state is going in the opposite direction,” Alarcio said. “We’ve been decimated in our counseling hours, so we have less accessibility, not more, for students to be able to get that done.”
According to the IHELP study, Latino and Hispanic students—many the first in their families to go to college—faced more bumps in the road on the way to earning a degree. Only 14 percent of Latinos transferred to university or received a degree in six years, compared with 23 percent of overall students.
Hancock bucked the trend in that department, according to Castillo. Latino students tended to do better overall on performance measures than did the overall student population.
While 25 percent of students overall who took full-time class loads in their first semester received a degree within six years, 27 percent of Latinos did the same. For Latino students overall, 14.4 percent received a degree in six years; that’s nearly two percent higher than the general population.
Castillo credited the success to the school’s existing support programs for low-income or first-generation students: “They’re struggling. Many of them have to work, but in general we don’t really have ethnic achievement gaps, not like they have at the state.”
Staff Writer Jeremy Thomas can be contacted at jthomas@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 25 – Dec 2, 2010.
