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September 7, 2006
I welcome this opportunity to share some of my thoughts
on a topic that has long been a very compelling one for me: the promise and importance
of our community colleges.
Although my affiliation with Smith College is what
brings me here today, my connection to this issue dates much further back, to my
career at the University of California Berkeley. As one of the country’s leading
universities, Berkeley has many claims to distinction, but the one that still makes
me proudest is its continuing commitment to enrolling fully a third of its upper-division
students from community colleges. That decision has its roots, of course, in the
broader public mission of the UC system but is nonetheless highly unusual and commendable,
particularly as we see other so-called elite colleges and universities wringing their
hands about the difficulties of recruiting and retaining a socio-economically diverse
student body.
Smith College enrolls about 100 students each year
who come to us from community colleges. While some of these students fall within
the traditional 18- to 22-year-old age bracket for college students, the majority
of them are older and they enter through our Ada Comstock Scholars program. Before
I address my broader points, I would like to share with you brief snapshots of three
local community college students who transferred to Smith and who personify the very
real benefits of cooperation among our institutions.
Heather Neal, who transferred from GCC, entered Smith
in the fall of 2002 and majored in psychology. She graduated in 2005. In her previous “lives” she
had worked in corporate America and earned a certificate in massage therapy. In her
junior year, she received support from Smith to purse an internship in Florida, working
with a leading expert on the study of human touch and depression in neonates, incorporating
her previous training in massage therapy with her growing research ability in physiological
biology. As a follow-up to her summer work, Heather designed and produced an independent
study that evaluated stress levels in various populations by measuring corticosteroids
in saliva cells. Along the way she worked as a personal assistant to former Smith
president Jill Ker Conway. Heather hopes to teach in GCC’s massage school and
to continue her research interests in physiological biology.
Christine Hebert, who came to Smith from Holyoke Community
College, graduated this spring after completing a major in studio art. Throughout
her time at Smith, Christine served in the Air Force Reserves, going to summer camp
and spending one weekend a month on base. Despite concern about a potential deployment
to Iraq, she focused on her studies and explored new areas of art and art history.
She became fascinated with a course on the history of the book and spent many hours
with renowned artist Barry Moser. Christine’s senior art show was stunning,
and she capped it off by winning a national art competition in New Mexico. She is
currently seeking to paint and draw full time, to market her work via the Web, and
to retire her student loans.
Kate Winans, a current Smith student, is majoring in
American studies, taking two courses a semester while her children are young. A fascination
with the history of her old house in Conway and an old schoolhouse in that town has
led Kate to a wider interest in the material culture of old New England. She hopes
to develop her knowledge of material culture with work at the Old Deerfield Museum
and Library, possibly through an independent project. She has served as a peer adviser
for other older students and can usually be found at lunchtime in the Campus Center
café, discussing her courses and professors with classmates. Kate has bloomed
as a confident and independent scholar while at Smith, but the groundwork for that
growth was laid at GCC.
For students like Heather, Christine, and Kate, the
attractions of a community college might initially have been pragmatic. They needed
to hold a job while going to school; they needed to live at home; they had family
responsibilities.
These are very real considerations, and ones that,
by and large, private colleges like Smith aren’t often well positioned to address.
But equally significant—and of deep interest to me—are the psychological
challenges to which the GCC Foundation refers, quite eloquently, in its mission statement:
the fact that, for many people, a college education is somehow “beyond the
borders of their personal geographies.”
That’s so well put, and in many ways it echoes
the very basis on which Smith College was established. The college’s founder,
Sophia Smith, sought to create a liberal arts college for women and offer an education
equal to the best available to men— something that was not only unavailable
in the 19th century but, for many, unimaginable. Today, women’s colleges, like
community colleges, embody one of the signal strengths of the American higher education
system: a recognition that one size does not fit all, and that true access to education
requires a multitude of pathways, a wide range of choices.
There is ample evidence that the community college
model is thriving. According to a provocative new book soon to be released by the
University of California Press, Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class
Divide in American Higher Education and Society by Peter Sacks, the number of
community colleges increased by 171 percent between 1965 and 2003. In 2002 community
colleges enrolled 43 percent of all undergraduates and housed 40 percent of Pell
Grant recipients. Community colleges have become more influential, farther-reaching,
and more esteemed. It’s not surprising, then, that they are also under greater
scrutiny. (It is perhaps a mark of distinction that the Chronicle
of Higher Education now publishes some community college presidents’ salaries.)
As calls for accountability have risen in all sectors
of higher education, they have become particularly pointed in regard to serving our
nation’s most vulnerable student populations, including first-generation and
low-income students. Lately, as I’m sure you know, some have argued that state
and community colleges need to take greater responsibility for ensuring that students
who seek a degree, principally a bachelor’s degree, complete their education.
According to Peter Sacks, 63 percent of students enrolling
in community colleges say they would like to earn a bachelor’s degree. Yet
of those who started at a community college in 1995 and who wanted to transfer to
a four-year college, only 23 percent had earned a bachelor’s degree six years
later. The distinctions sharpen when you control by income. Although community colleges
are rightly praised as providing opportunities for low-income students, only 21 percent
of students from the lowest income quartile actually transfer to a four-year college
or university (as opposed to 49 percent of community college students from the top
socio-economic quartile.)
I’m not convinced that six years represents a
magic number. Or four. Or two. How many years is the “right” amount of
time to complete an education? And, by extension, what is the right definition of
a college’s success? These are worthy questions but not simple ones.
Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity University,
a small women’s college in Washington, DC, argues compellingly that “time-to-completion
is often the least useful indicator of true academic success,” especially when
your students are nontraditional, have families, are older and/or financially challenged.
Do institutions have a responsibility for students’ success?
Absolutely. But defining success, in the context of a college’s particular
mission, calls for thoughtful conversations that balance the importance—and
the challenges—of access against the often arbitrary and artificial accountability
measures that policymakers increasingly seek to impose.
One of the privileges of working at both Berkeley and
Smith has been the opportunity to examine issues of accountability from two—at
least two—distinctly different lenses. And while neither public nor private
colleges can be said to universally embrace external scrutiny, I’ve come to
understand such initiatives as, well, a peculiar form of flattery. A sign that you’ve
arrived.
Let me explain.
Never before in history has a college education seemed
more important to the prospect of economic well-being. The lifetime income differential
attributed to college education has been rising. According to a Business–Higher
Education Forum paper on accountability, a male college graduate’s first job
in 1973 typically paid 33 percent more than that of a male high school graduate;
today, the difference has grown to more than 80 percent. When people see a good,
a product, that is critically important they become concerned about who has access
to it, how it is distributed, and (particularly in the case of private colleges)
why it costs what it does.
Perhaps more importantly, they also begin to see themselves,
in a sense, as investors or even part-owners. Indeed, in The
University: An Owner’s
Manual, author Henry Rosovsky agues that the definition of “my college” or “my
university” today is no longer akin to “my car” or “my house,” but
instead has come to occupy a much larger public sense of affiliation and investment,
as in “my country.”
If we are all owners, then, we owe it to ourselves
to take a harder look at the data we’re receiving. For while educational opportunities
have been widening for many sectors of the population, the gains have not been universal.
Students from upper-middle- class families saw their bachelor’s degree prospects
nearly double in this period, but the prospects of students from the lowest U.S.
income quartile have stayed stagnant, at just 6 percent. And it is significantly
more likely for low-income women than low-income men to attend and to graduate from
college. The median family income for a woman student attending college is now $10,000
less than it is for a man.
The most significant challenge facing higher education
today—for the institutions themselves and for the country—is the relationship
between cost, affordability, and access. Tuition, room, and board at a private college
is beyond the financial reach of the great majority of American families. The comprehensive
fee (tuition, room, and board) at Smith is $43,438 per year—only about $3,000
less than the 2005 United States median family income. We’ve done a rough calculation
at Smith; we estimate that students from families who pay the full comprehensive
fee—“full-pay” students in college lingo—come from the top
10 percent of American income distribution. To put that figure another way, 90 percent
of households in the United States cannot afford the cost of a private college.
Fortunately, many U.S. colleges, like Smith, have generous
financial aid programs—most of which commit to meeting the full financial need
of all admitted students, according to a set of federal guidelines. Sixty-one percent
of Smith students receive need-based financial aid; the average Smith grant is $21,000.
Twenty-seven percent receive Pell grants, the federal financial aid grants for the
lowest income students, a figure that places us second among private liberal arts
colleges in the United States (after Berea College, which only admits financially
needy students). Almost a quarter of our first-year students come from families in
which neither parent graduated from college.
This choice clearly has costs and is an easier one
(though by no means painless) to make with an endowment the size of Smith’s.
I believe that we can take steps, both as a country and as a higher education community,
that will address the opportunity gap in higher education, both by increasing equity
of access and containing costs:
- Greater federal investment in financial aid for needy students. Pell Grant amounts
have not changed in five years. We must increase the federal subsidy of college
costs for our neediest students.
- Greater state investment in state university and college systems. Although sticker
shock is greatest at private colleges and universities, prices have risen more
dramatically in the public sector, in large part through a growing conviction that
a college education is a private, not a public, benefit. Our state colleges and
universities do the lion’s share of the work of higher education in this
country. They are an efficient model and one of our greatest national resources.
In the past fifteen years, we have seen a significant replacement of public funding
by tuition costs. This hurts poor kids and diminishes the equity of opportunity
that these great systems were designed to create.
- Dial down the ratings game. As long as we have influential ratings systems that
reward wealth, we create an incentive to raise costs and prices.
- Place less emphasis on the SAT. Extensive studies at the University of California
in the late 1990s showed that the SAT alone, when controlled for academic high
school performance record, only had predictive value for first-semester freshman
grades. The strongest correlation with SAT scores is income. The SATs, far from
being a leveling tool, tend to reinforce the role income disparities play in determining
access.
- Create a public service loan forgiveness program—structured like ROTC,
imagined like the Peace Corps—that enables students to exchange work for
debt by engaging in public service projects here and abroad.
- Standardize and regulate financial aid packaging to put pressure on institutions
to reduce the use of merit aid. Since an anti-trust case was brought against MIT
and other institutions in the 1980s, colleges have been prohibited from discussing
their packaging strategies. This ruling, intended to protect the consumer, I believe
had the unintended effect of ratcheting up costs. Creating the circumstances in
which colleges and universities can have full and frank discussions of financial
aid policies and strategies would have a healthy effect.
- Work with community colleges to create more opportunities for students to transfer
to colleges in the private sector, increasing articulation agreements.
- Increase collaboration and sharing across the higher education sector. Smith
belongs to a five college consortium in the Pioneer Valley— including Mount
Holyoke College, Hampshire College, Amherst College, and the University of Massachusetts—that
enables us both to enrich programs at lower cost and to avoid costs by sharing
services. We could do even more, and so could higher education as a whole.
Higher education in the United States is the finest
in the world. The sheer number and variety of private colleges and the breadth and
extent of our public college and university systems provide the United States the
most extensive set of opportunities for higher education in the world. America’s
college and university system is one of the greatest achievements and most powerful
strategic advantages for our country. However, it is subject to increasing competition
as countries, particularly in Asia, have been investing heavily in higher education.
In closing, I want to focus on a special case—science
and mathematics. I am sure that many of you have read Tom Friedman’s recent
book, The World Is Flat. In it, Friedman describes an alarming numbers gap. In 2004,
the National Science Board reported that the number of American 18- to 24-year-olds
receiving science degrees has fallen to 17th in the world, down from third just three
decades ago. Of the 2.8 million bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering
granted worldwide in 2003, 1.2 million were earned by Asian students in Asian universities,
830,000 in Europe, and 400,000 in the United States. In engineering alone, Asian
countries are now producing eight times the number of bachelor’s degrees as
the United States. United States’ graduate enrollment in science and engineering
remains below where it was a decade ago.
This worrisome story has a disturbing gender dimension.
Women now make up almost 60 percent of the college population and almost 60 percent
of bachelor’s degree recipients. Yet they are severely underrepresented in
many fields in science. In engineering and physics, for example, women represent
only 20 percent of those earning bachelor’s degrees.
We cannot solve the national problem of degree production
in science and engineering until we address the gender gap—most importantly
in engineering.
Many of you know that in this arena, Smith has taken
a bold step. Seven years ago, the college established the first-ever engineering
program at a U.S. women’s college. This coming May we will graduate our fourth
class; this spring we will break ground on a new building for engineering and science,
a so-called “green-design” building that we plan as a model for environmentally
sustainable building systems. In a very short time, engineering has emerged as a
popular major at Smith, even attracting students from other disciplines who had never
considered the field before enrolling at the college. Many coed institutions are
looking to emulate a teaching model like ours that attracts, rather than weeds out,
talented female students.
Indeed, speaking more generally, data show that women’s
colleges have unusual success in motivating women to become scientists and engineers.
Women attending women’s colleges major in the sciences in larger percentages,
and they go on to graduate study in larger percentages.
But women’s colleges represent a relatively small
segment in American higher education. To increase the numbers of women, and men,
studying science and engineering, we must all play a role. The ultimate key lies
in K through 12 education and, particularly, in better training for our teachers
responsible for instruction in science and mathematics. The case is simple: if your
teacher is uncomfortable with mathematics and doesn’t understand it very well,
the chances are you won’t either.
However, that is a long-term objective, and, in the
meantime, community colleges can play an important role in creating multiple paths
of entry to college work in these disciplines, enabling students to make up work
they have missed or understood only marginally. Articulation agreements in these
fields make real the paths from two-year to four-year colleges in science and engineering
and reflect the importance of strong bonds among our multiple institutions.
I began my remarks this evening by introducing three
community college students and recounting, in a sense, what coming to Smith has done
for them. But that’s only half the equation. Equally resonant is what nontraditional
students like Heather, Christine, and Kate bring to a college like Smith.
Because you are closely involved with community college
students it won’t surprise you—though I find it does surprise many others—to
learn that our nontraditional students are among our strongest scholars. Having worked
hard to get to Smith, they take nothing for granted; they are goal-oriented, focused,
curious, and engaged, bringing a wealth of life experience into classroom discussions.
Faculty, including me, delight to have them in our classes because they are actively
engaged in their own educations and often serve as models to other students whose
paths might have had fewer obstacles. They earn Latin Honors at a higher rate than
our traditional undergraduates, even while performing astonishing feats of juggling
responsibilities and managing time. Without question, Smith would be a diminished
institution without their vibrant presence, and I look forward to our continued work
together on behalf of students from all walks of life.
Thank you. |
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