Learning Communities Demonstration Rationale, Sites, and Research Design. An NCPR Working Paper

摘要

Community colleges play a unique and indispensable role in higher education, each year offering millions a chance at a college education without regard to their level of academic preparation. Community colleges now serve close to half of all undergraduates and disproportionately high numbers of undergraduates of color. With their open admissions, low cost, and convenient locations, community colleges enroll a heterogeneous mix of older or dislocated workers returning to school for retraining, welfare clients seeking short-term job training, and younger students in pursuit of an associates degree or seeking to transfer to a four-year institution. Having taken great strides in recent decades in providing access to a postsecondary edu-cation for so many, community colleges must now tackle an even more formidable challenge: how to help large numbers of academically underprepared students succeed in college. As enroll-ment steadily grows, an alarmingly high and steadily increasing percentage of students score too low on diagnostic tests to enroll in credit-bearing, college-level classes. In most community col-leges, over half of entering students are directed to remedial education in reading, writing, and mathematics. To make matters worse, at most, only about 70 percent of these .developmental. students pass all their precollege reading and writing courses, and only about 30 percent pass all their developmental math courses, even after multiple attempts. Discouraged and unable to afford being students for long, the majority of developmental students end up dropping out without earning a certificate or a degree and without transferring to a four-year institution.