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My friend and erstwhile Massachusetts colleague Lane Glenn, president of Northern Essex Community College, published a really smart piece this week about college funding across sectors. It’s focused on Massachusetts, but the lessons translate across state lines. It’s a clear and accessible explanation of the ways in which, in our system, the students who need the most get the least, and vice versa.
For instance, he cites stats showing that the median family income of a student at Tufts University, outside Boston, is $224,800, but the median family income of a student at nearby Bunker Hill Community College is $36,600. Tufts spends about $70,000 per full-time-equivalent student per year; BHCC spends about $13,000. (And FTE is, itself, a flawed measure. Two part-time students might equate to one FTE in terms of credits, but they still require two sets of records, two financial aid packages, etc.)
The core of his piece, though, is about solutions. The marginal utility of increased investment at many community colleges would be far higher than at most elite places. As proof, he offers stats on successful programs at Northern Essex CC, Holyoke CC and the City University of New York. As he put it in a line I want framed on my wall, we “don’t need another study to tell us how to help our students succeed. We know. What we need is the resources to do it.”
Thank you, President Glenn.
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I’ll admit that my thinking has evolved on the question of community college bachelor’s degrees.
I used to be pretty skeptical of them. I argued that specialization in the first two years allowed for experimentation and rapid improvement. The ability to experiment is, after all, supposed to be the point of tenure. But after years of horror stories about transfer, I’m starting to reconsider.
I’ve just heard too many stories of four-year schools rejecting classes because they were taught online, or in the wrong building, or the course number wasn’t what they wanted, or the department chair there was too turf-y and nobody was willing to call them on it.
Arguments from quality and civic virtue only go so far. Sometimes you have to resort to something more drastic. If we aren’t going to create mandates with teeth -- no “free elective” status, no departmental veto -- then we should be able to offer the degrees ourselves.
A few states allow it, although Florida and Washington State are the only ones that allow it at scale. Washington Monthly just did a good piece on it.
We have plenty of students who tell us that they’d like to be able to complete their degrees here. We’d take our own credits seamlessly. They could live at home and save on dorms. We have faculty who can do it.
Wise and worldly readers, was my earlier self right, or am I bending toward the truth?
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So, does anybody else out there watch all three hours of a debate with their teenage daughter? It’s like a live-action MST3K episode. She and I have different favorites going in, which is nice; I’m glad to model civil disagreement. We watched all six hours (!) of debates in August, which some might consider questionable parenting, but she was right there with it. When your dad has a poli-sci degree, these things happen.
