A reader defends community colleges:
I work full-time and teach part-time at one of the largest community colleges in the nation. The broad focus on completion annoys me and overlooks a key purpose of community colleges: for many students, we are the proving grounds of post-secondary education. We are open entry institutions. We take everyone whether they are ready for college or not; over two-thirds of entering students test into at least one developmental (sub-100 level) course in English, math or reading.
Students testing into these low-level courses are adding even more semesters on their path to college completion. We make huge effort to reach out and hand hold these students through their developmental climb, but the unfortunate truth is that many students just are not cut out for the rigors of college.
It may be a cynical way to look at this, but the community colleges offer a low cost college trial for many students to discover that college isn't their cup of tea; however, it is the community college "success rate" that suffers as a result.
Another reader adds:
The included comment from Kay Steiger echoes much of what is being said about public school at the k-12 level. They're failing the poor and minorities and they "need to figure out a better way to serve these communities". While this statement isn't untrue, it's not the whole truth either. The pool of students matters. A lot. When you're dealing with a group of students who are already academically weaker and then add poverty to the mix, of course they're going to drop out of community college more frequently. They have to work. They have to take care of families. They can't afford the opportunity costs or the actual costs of education. We don't need to fix the schools so much as we need to fix poverty.
The Dish 