Students

Getting students into college is only the first step. Then we have to get them into programs. Getting them into programs (degree plans?) makes it more likely that they will complete. And really, aren’t we all wasting time and money if they don’t?

Many new students arrive at community colleges without clear goals for college and careers. Community colleges offer a wide array of programs but typically provide little guidance to help students choose and successfully enter a program of study. Community college departments often do not closely monitor the progress of students who do enter their programs to ensure that they complete.

from Get With the Program, a working paper by the Community College Research Center

An award-winning study of nine adult students who persisted at a Western community college finds that connecting with an instructor – not with campus activities — made the difference, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education. Rosemary Capps followed older students who started in remedial reading, a high-risk group, for her 2010 University of Utah dissertation.

Now an academic developer at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of California at Davis, Capps said colleges need to reach adult students ”in their classrooms.”

says Community College Spotlight’s “Why Adult Students Persist”

Capps said in an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education:

if colleges want to reach adult students with their retention efforts, they’re going to need to reach them in their classrooms, and not through the traditional kinds of advising centers and activities.
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One of the strong patterns in my data is that knowing students personally and validating them can make a huge difference. I also believe strongly in faculty advising. You see that at elite colleges, and you see that in graduate study, but I think it should happen more at community colleges. Sometimes adult students don’t have time to go to an advising center—they have to rush out of class to get to some other obligation. But they might take three minutes at the end of class to talk to a faculty member they trust. “Do you have any ideas about what classes I should take next?” So I think it’s important for faculty to get familiar with general-education requirements and the major requirements in their fields, because students who feel comfortable with them are going to come to them first with those questions.
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Colleges could do more to highlight the stories of their successful adult students. They could set up mentoring programs in which persistent adult students could reach out to adult students who are just starting out. I think that could be very heartening for everyone involved.

I think this last would be great. I think that maybe we could get the students involved with this by touting their success and how this mentoring/encouragement role, even just in speaking to a class for ten minutes later on, can be helpful in getting a job. If students have experience mentoring those who are coming behind them, they are going to be more successful in training and management.

One thing I am trying to emphasize in my developmental classroom is how far the students in it have already come, how far they’ve already gotten ahead, just by making it into the college classroom. I am not sure how successful I am with that, but I hope that hearing it helps.

What ways do you validate your students?

And on a totally different, but completely related, topic:

My data suggest that developmental classes have benefits that go beyond their academic content. Making sure that students have experience in a small class with a caring teacher before they get into the harder content and higher expectations of credit courses—for the nine students in my study, that process seemed to make a difference. Their developmental-reading instructors were champions for them.

SCORE!

That’s what I am trying to do in my developmental classes and I think I need to concentrate on doing it earlier, too, even before I’ve managed to get down pat all 75 students’ names.

Okay, I know the title is a bit simplistic, but that is, in fact, what researchers discovered. I think we as teachers (and long time students) know that. But it is interesting to have it confirmed.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Ed‘s article by Peter Schmidt, New Studies Show How Life’s Tough Turns Can Derail Students:

The subset of students that Mr. Cox and Mr. Reason examined included about 700 identified as white, 700 as Asian, 600 as black, and 600 as Hispanic. The two researchers focused on data from the students’ sophomore year of college, basing their assessment of stressful life events on how many students had responded yes when asked if they had experienced any of 14 family setbacks, such as a parent dying or losing a job, a brother or sister dropping out of school, an unwed sister becoming pregnant, or a member of the immediate family going on public assistance or becoming homeless.

The analysis found that, for each racial or ethnic group examined, graduation rates dropped off sharply with each additional stressful life event outside college. For example, among Hispanic males, those who had not experienced any of the specified life events had a predicted graduation rate of 69 percent. But the rate dropped to just under 64 percent for those who had experienced one life event, 58 percent for those who had experienced two, and just over 46 percent for those who had experienced four. Women and black and white respondents of both genders followed a similar pattern.

What they also found out, and what was not highlighted as much in the article, is that life does not have to get in the way of school.

[I]t appeared that students identified as Asian experienced less-precipitous declines in their graduation rates as the number of life events they reported increased. The two scholars did not offer any explanation as to why Asian students might be more academically resilient.

Based on the many discussions and studies of the importance of education in Asian and Asian-American culture, I would guess that students overcome the stressors in their lives because they see education as more important.

It took me a long time to get my PhD. I was actually granted a one-semester extension on the twelve year limitation. But I got it. Because it was important to me. So, a marriage, three moves, two children, three emergency surgeries, and countless other real and perceived stressors later, I graduated. I even went back to school and walked! (The boys, who were seven and eight, were slightly bored, but very good.)

I am NOT saying that life does not get in the way. It does. But sometimes life becomes the reason not to finish, instead of the reason you took so long.

The two researchers’ paper suggests that colleges take steps to encourage students to report life events, and train faculty members to be more alert to signs that students are in distress.

This can be a significant issue, especially among populations such as the ones my school serves. The students always have significant life events.

One of my students went to take care of her grandparents’ business, because they were killed in a car wreck and her father was already dead. Dang! Who can deal with that and school? This student missed a week and a half of school, but came back working hard and got the paper done that we worked through while she was gone.

It can be done. But many students do not have the cultural background to commit to education no matter what. Everyone has hard things in their lives. We still go to work, though perhaps not, as Mary Kay envisioned, giving make-overs immediately upon learning that our child was killed in an accident or our husband is leaving us for his significantly younger secretary. I taught the day I found out my mother was dying. I taught the day she died. It was my job. It sucked. But I did it.

Perhaps our students need help to see their educations as their jobs.

Is there academic engagement, in the teaching and learning process, from professors? That appears to be a question.

In a discussion of why students are failing to engage in their undergraduate education, Thomas H. Benton wrote about a college junior who

recalled that she “really thought college would be an incredible experience. … I expected a series of heated debates in class, and meeting for coffee to discuss classroom topics. But all I hear is ‘I’m bored’ and ‘I just don’t care.’” A lot of students have worked extraordinarily hard to get into the “right” kind of college, only to wonder what all the hype was about. The common experience is that getting admitted is the most exhausting part. After that, the struggle mainly is financial. But at the major universities, most professors are too busy to care about individual students, and it is easy to become lost amid a sea of equally disenchanted undergraduates looking for some kind of purpose—and not finding it.

Perhaps it is because I am not now, and have never been as anything except a graduate student where I taught undergraduate classes, at a research university, but I have not found that professors are “too busy to care about individual students.”

My undergraduate professors wrote long and glowing references for me to pursue graduate school. My dissertation director (ten years after the fact and five after her retirement) just wrote a foreword for my next book, immediately after her return from a six-month long honeymoon cruise. I have gotten input and feedback on presentations from professors at other colleges, some of whom I had worked with and others whom I never had… So I think that, at least at the levels where I work, the too-busy, unengaged professor is not an actuality.

Certainly there have been times when I have been too busy. Last week I told my son I couldn’t talk because I was writing the QEP proposal for my school’s SACS accreditation. But even then, I stopped what I was doing for students.

Am I really that rare a bird in academia? Am I the lone surviving dodo? I don’t think so.

Picture is John Tenniel’s illustration from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

The CHE article Reassurance About College Transition Could Raise Black Students’ GPA’s says:

When black students reflected on the idea that everybody, regardless of race or ethnicity, initially struggles to adjust to college, their academic performance and longer-term well-being benefited, according to a paper published on Thursday in the journal Science.
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The intervention reduced the GPA gap between black and white students by 52 percent, the researchers found.
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The researchers suggested that their discussion of belonging may have shifted students’ perceptions such that their early successes reinforced their confidence. “Brief interventions that shore up belonging can thus promote performance and well-being,” they wrote, “even long after their delivery.”

According to this study by Princeton on “The Effects of Student Coaching in College,” students who are contacted regularly are more likely to stay in school.

Students who were randomly assigned to a coach were more likely to persist during the treatment period, and were more likely to be attending the university one year after the coaching had ended. Coaching also proved a more cost-effective method of achieving retention and completion gains when compared to previously studied interventions such as increased financial aid.

I don’t have $$$ for coaching, but I wonder if I took the time to email my students once a week if that would help them.

JDs Rising has a post on English majors and their engagement with literature and how that effects/impacts their possible success as attorneys.

The article supports the move, saying English literature is good preparation for a JD.

I would think that a rhetoric degree would be even more effective, but that could be my own prejudices showing.

However, just like there are too many PhDs in English, there are also a lot of surplus JDs in the US. Unless a student goes to a good school (UT in Texas; Harvard in the NE) and has good grades, they are just as unlikely to find work in the legal field as they are to find it in academics.

It’s not just me who thinks this either.

Casting Out Nines, the blog of a college math professor, asks:

I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on the following statement about responsibilities in college:

In college, it’s the student’s responsibility to initiate requests for help on assignments, and it’s the instructor’s responsibility to respond to those requests in a helpful and timely way.

Do you think this statement is true or false? If false, could you modify it so that it’s true?

There are at least eight comments on the post answering the question.

What do you think?

I think that it is the student’s job to ask for help and the professor’s job to give it, if the help is not, “Do the paper for me” and the crisis isn’t because the student didn’t allot any time to getting the work done.

One of the reasons I give out grades three or four times a semester is to spark an awareness in the students that they may need more help than they are asking for.

Apparently all my reading is going in the same direction, although it is from very different sources.

Do We Really Need More College Graduates? gives a list of twenty must-read analyses on this question.

After a short intro piece to each of the twenty articles, the author wrote:

It is entirely up to you to decide whose arguments are the more persuasive. If you want to make six or more figures, or you want to know the ins and outs of existentialism, college may be for you. But policymakers could pay attention too, and the availability of a college education could be affected as a result.

The articles in this piece range from a Chronicle of Higher Ed piece to Salon, from Corporate Voices to The College Board.

I think they offer an interesting perspective about a topic that may be more timely than we know.