A procession of 2012’s Long Beach City College graduates. Photo by The Viking Newspaper.
With unavoidable budget cuts already made to higher education (and even more to come if Proposition 30 fails this November), those in control of California’s 112 community colleges are passing laws and voting in new systems to help schools increase their student success rates despite fiscal setbacks.
Last Thursday, for example, Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law Senate Bill 1456, also known as the Student Success Act of 2012, which outlines several requirements for community colleges that aim to increase student graduation and transfer rates.
The bill, authored by State Senator Alan Lowenthal of Long Beach, includes provisions for communty colleges such as reporting academic progress for all students, requiring that students meeting minimum academic standards for fee waivers and ensuring all students receive academic support services.
This crucial state law, however, follows on the heels of a unanimous vote last month from the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges that called for system-wide enrollment prioritization, another method of increasing student success.
In early September, the board also voted in favor of several system-wide changes to the way California’s community colleges manage enrollment. SB1456 was just one part of a greater set of recommendations provided by the California Community Colleges Student Success Task Force. This task force prepared 22 initiatives for how the board could significantly improve rates of completion.
Many of the initiatives can be used within existing resources, says Audrey Dow, Community Affairs Director for The Campaign for College Opportunity, which endorsed the task force.
“We have some colleges on the ground doing innovative things. That are not just innovative for them, but can also be scaled up,” Dow says.
In the face of pervasive budget cuts system wide, the goal of the task force, the recommendations and SB1456 is to incentivize students to complete their educational goals, whether it be to transfer to a four-year institution, or receive an Associates degree or certificate. The main method of improving these goals, Dow says, is to re-organize enrollment prioritization.
Current enrollment prioritization works in a very simple matter, those with the most cumulative units are given priority registration. In theory this is to clear the path for students who are closest to transferring or graduating, however in practice this system completely ignores the fact that some students with large numbers of units might have them because they have no intention of going anywhere. The new system of priority enrollment now requires students to submit an education plan.
“[The plan] is a formal document prepared with a counselor or some sort of advisor,” says Dow. “There are a handful across the state already doing priority enrollment.” But now with the policy voted on by the board, every CC statewide will have to start doing it.
Other forms of incentivization for students revolve around the loss of financial aid for those who are not making satisfactory grades.
“If they do not make academic progress, you are in risk of losing financial aid. Students were able to access the fee waiver limitlessly, despite doing poorly in classes or withdrawing from many classes,” Dow says. “There are a number of protections put in there, [including] that they are notified adequately, and that there are appeal processes. The point is not to harm students, but to not encourage poor behavior.”
Though the state senate and the community college board have moved to improve the current nightmare situation that is community college, implementation is still a huge factor.
“How do we ensure all of these things are getting done? How do we get the word out? There are still a lot of pieces that are still left to get worked out,” Dow says. “The answer is, ‘Stay tuned’—that is the next big phase of work.”