Community Colleges

The Shadow Scholar is a Chronicle of Higher Ed article purportedly written by a ghostwriter for hire who has created theses and dissertations, as well as hundreds of run-of-the-mill term papers.

I may write about that in some other post, or not, but comment 195 caught my attention and I thought it was worth writing about here. (Perhaps a later commenter mentions it. I don’t know. I stopped at 195 to write this post.)

Here is the pertinent section of comment 195:

On another matter: the unedited student emails in “Dante’s” article, with their egregious problems with idiom and verb management, strongly suggest that a lot of these ghostwriting requests come from ESL/ESOL students, for whom writing fluent, near-native English is a problem, and for whom plagiarism and other forms of cheating are less of an issue in their home countries than here. This possibiliity suggests a need to administer on-grounds language proficiency examinations for all international and domestic students for whom English is not the first language and get those who need it into English remediation courses as a first order of business.

I am struggling with how to address this comment, though I have a lot of points.

Purdue University, where I received my PhD, had just this kind of writing exam. They only administered it to foreign students.

Local SLAC used to have an English entrance requirement for all their students who did not take freshman composition there. However, there was no mechanism to force the students to take it immediately and so sometimes graduating seniors were taking–and failing–it. This forced/encouraged the administration to drop it, even though it showed that the likelihood of those students having graduated without someone like Dante’s (see article mentioned above) creative connivance. Now there is no requirement for English ability.

FinalCC, the college I teach at now, could really benefit from a writing component or writing test like this one. However, I would suggest/petition that it be a placement exam for all entrants rather than just ESL. I think many of our students, coming in from area high schools, are singularly unprepared for writing.

Students Need to Know What College Demands is an interesting article.

It ends with this:

Middle school and high school students need to know about the academic rigor of community colleges.

I explained this to my sons, but I am not sure I was successful. How could I have been (or how can we be) more successful?

Community College Spotlight has a post called “CCs are Pathways Out of Poverty.”

Small-scale community college programs are preparing students for well-paid jobs in energy, water systems, solar power installation, diesel engine retrofitting, construction skills and other infrastructure fields.

It’s an interesting niche market which has been what CCs were about before. Now many/most CCs appear to be funnels for four-year colleges. Should we reconsider our missions?

Part of my job at my new ft position is to come up with a digital presentation of the department’s monthly newsletter. I don’t know what it the official name for the type of publication it was. However, now it is CentralThoughts.net.

While it isn’t perfected yet, I have gotten it up and looking legitimate. I would appreciate you going and letting me know what you think.

The National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD) is pleased to announce the third annual Community College Week-NISOD Student Essay Contest in honor of Scott Wright. The winning essay is awarded a total of $3,000+ in prizes to be shared with the student author, the outstanding faculty/staff/administrator featured in the essay, and the student’s community college.

Knowing you may want to promote this on your campus, you can download a PDF of the contest flyer and find the essay contest guidelines, entry information, a detailed list of prizes, and the online submission form on our website.

We hope that you will forward the information to other faculty, staff, administrators, and students. We also invite you to post the flyer on your campus. The deadline for the essay submission is November 8, 2010.

This might be a rewarding (in multiple senses of the word) essay to assign for class. If you have an opening in your schedule or can create one, it might be fun to do.

My students are always interested in doing something which will get them more money.

And brings no one from higher education.

If we had a national summit on the military, would we invite, say, the president of the NEA and leave out active duty soldiers? I’m guessing the answer is “of course not.”

See CC Dean for his take on the topic.

The smartest students don’t go to Harvard, MIT or Yale, writes Zac Bissonnette in Daily Finance. The smartest people go to community colleges.

What’s smarter than saving $100,000 and managing to get an education that is just as good, and perhaps even better, than you can get at many top universities?

Clearly, the student who lives at home and pays community college fees is spending many thousands of dollars less than the student who’s paying tuition, room and board at a four-year college.

Educational quality is the same.

From Community College Spotlight.

I wonder a couple of things, though.

Is the education at a community college the same as a student would receive at a four-year school? I think that depends, always, on the professors. I would have to say, though, that I doubt seriously that an education at Harvard or UPenn or California: Berkeley is the same level of education that a student at Local CC gets.

To some extent, the general education courses will be very similar. When non-majors are taking an introductory class there’s not a lot of difference, usually, in what those courses look like from school to school.

In the majors courses there may be some difference, but at a four-year college the students are getting two extra years of classes. Those should be difference.

What do you think about the relative quality of CCs? Obviously it’s a slam dunk on the cost.

Colleges in and around Philadelphia are offering GPA-forgiveness programs to help raise graduation rates, according to Philly’s Inquirer.

Students who dropped out at least two years ago may resume classes without the worry that their poor past performance will blemish their degrees. Students who had “difficulty adapting to college” due to excessive partying or some other problem when they were 18 may have matured and may be ready to succeed, Newell said.

But like many colleges, Rowan won’t offer a third chance.

Christine Hagedorn, assistant dean of student services at Bucks County Community College, said students leave for many reasons – financial problems, pregnancy, or they “just weren’t sure what college was supposed to be doing for them.”

“Life can get in the way,” she said, “and students can get derailed.”

About 70 students return each year and take advantage of Bucks County College’s “academic-restart” policy. A few years ago, Hagedorn said, the college also sent a letter inviting back dropouts.

That seems like it might be a good idea for the community colleges around here as well. However, I can also see some people using it as an excuse to drop out. “Oh well, I can start again in two years…”

But I still like the idea. Maybe the QEP (or whatever we are doing) should be Finish What You Start and we could focus on bringing back folks who didn’t finish as well as helping those who are here now graduate. I like the idea, but it seems very ambitious and, unfortunately, some people are not capable of doing college level work.

Inside Higher Ed has an article on e-books. It’s relevant to me for two reasons.
1. I am on the committee to find e-books usable for the English department at my CC.
2. I have been offered as a resource person to the class which was given iPads.

However, the e-book market has seen some auspicious developments in recent months. In July, Blackboard announced changes to its popular learning-management platform that would allow professors to assign electronic texts more easily — a potential coup for e-books, since Blackboard boasts by far the most popular learning-management platform in the industry and is well-positioned to influence how professors provide course materials to students.

But the most buzzed-about development with implications for e-books has been the unveiling of the iPad, which, among many other functions, is popular as a reading device. The last version of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader was ill-suited for academic reading, according to a handful of institutions that tried it out. But the iPad is touted as a more hip, versatile breed of e-reader — one that college kids are apt to buy for general purposes. And once they own e-readers, they will be more likely to buy e-books, suggested Eric Weil, managing director of Student Monitor, in a July interview with Inside Higher Ed.

Picture from Wired.com