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If you haven’t yet seen the video of the TV reporter in a shopping mall explaining wealth distribution in the U.S. to passersby with pumpkin pie, it’s well worth checking out. It takes a few minutes, but they’re minutes well spent.
The genius of the video is that it takes something that seems abstract or difficult and makes it obvious. Going from pie charts to actual pie makes the math much more accessible. (The sitcom The Office did something similar in its last season. In the course of a complicated bus trip to a pie stand, they discovered that Kevin, their incompetent accountant, could do complicated math in his head if it referred to pies. There’s just something about pies …) You can actually see from the participants’ facial expressions that they’re unhappy with what they’ve learned. The information itself isn’t new, but their understanding of it is.
Community colleges need the equivalent of the pie demo.
Last week I was in a professional development workshop with some employees on campus. These are folks who have worked at the college for anywhere from a few months to a few years. Some of them want to move up the food chain; others just want to see the college from a different perspective. In other words, these are attentive people with goals, working in the industry. And most of them had never heard of our 3 + 1 agreements, or have any sense of what they mean.
When they heard and got the general outline of it, the reaction was strongly positive. But they didn’t know, and they work here.
For the record, 3 + 1 agreements allow students to take up to 90 credits at the community college (at community college tuition and fee levels), transferring all of them to a four-year school that will only require the student to take the remaining 30 credits there. That way, the student can get a four-year degree while paying community college tuition for the first three years (or equivalent). It’s a dramatic cost saver. And when agreements are formalized, students can be guaranteed that credits will transfer.
And, apparently, it’s a well-kept secret.
Transfer agreements only work if students and prospective students know about them. In my perfect world, they would change the decision process that many students make. Instead of “community college or a four-year school” it would be “community college and a four-year school.” It wouldn’t appeal to everybody, for various reasons, but I could see it appealing to a lot of people. But if they don’t know, it doesn’t work.
The transfer message is a tricky one to sell. Many people think of community college as entirely vocational; others see it as some sort of consolation prize. The idea of it as a springboard is well-known within the industry but still a little fuzzy outside. The 3 + 1 plan takes an already fuzzy idea and builds on it with something that takes more than a few seconds to explain. Concretely, it’s a terrific idea, but getting past the initial “huh?” is the challenge.
Wise and worldly readers, what’s our equivalent of pumpkin pies? How do we make the concept of 3 + 1 as obvious as it actually is?
