Community colleges aim for more respect

The next step is to reach out to area high schools. Teachers can prepare and advise students better if they're in close contact with college professors, Ms. Souza says. Nationally, there's a move toward improving high school curriculums and teaching, partly to cut down on the degree to which colleges have to provide developmental education (the new term for "remedial"). About 4 in 10 students at community colleges need to take at least one developmental course.

The Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas, Austin, has conducted an annual national survey of student engagement (called CCSSE) for the past four years. It measures everything from the amount of time students discuss ideas outside of class to the degree to which they can apply what they're learning to solve problems.

"Student engagement is very important to success," says CCSSE director Kay McClenney. "With students who have to work and have family obligations ... engagement doesn't happen by accident.... So the colleges have to make it inescapable that students interact with faculty [and experience] collaborative learning."

The 2006 survey found that 38 percent of full-time students spent less than five hours a week preparing for class (it included 250,000 students from 447 community colleges). It also found that 91 percent of faculty spend less than 20 percent of class time on student writing.

Colleges can view their own data – and compare it with publicly available national averages – to target improvements. "We're getting many, many stories back," says Ms. McClenney. Some schools are integrating study strategies into first-year classes. Others are training teachers to use methods that are more effective than lecturing.

Many community colleges are also "revamping their approach to academic advising and planning," McClenney says. For first-generation students and others from underserved populations, "the advising function is critically important," she adds. The survey found that nearly 30 percent of part-time students say they don't use the advising services at their school.

At Miami Dade College in Florida, each campus now hosts transfer workshops, some geared specifically toward certain majors.

The need for scrutiny doesn't take away from the important role these schools fulfill with modest resources. Compared with public and private four-year colleges, community colleges are the launching pad for more low-income students, first-generation college students, adults who have children, and people who start with low academic skills.

These colleges are more dependent on state funding, but "the long-term trend is that the share of state budgets going to higher education – and particularly community colleges – has been going down for the last 20 years," says Mr. Bailey of the Community College Research Center.

To better track the progress of college students as they move around the country, the Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education recently recommended creating a national database of student records, an idea that has stirred controversy because of privacy concerns.

In the meantime, tracking is left up to states or schools that have joined efforts like the Achieving the Dream network, supported by 14 organizations such as the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas. Currently it includes 58 community colleges that are committed to tracking students and taking certain steps to improve achievement.

As part of CONNECT, Eileen Shea, director of transfer affairs at Bristol Community College, is on a half-time sabbatical to develop a way to track more than 600 students a year who transfer within the partnership. She'll look at the students' achievement over five years.

So if Loughran reaches his goal, CONNECT administrators, in theory, will be able to send him a big card combining best wishes for his 40th birthday with congratulations for earning his master's degree.

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