Category: Community Colleges

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HPEG: Leading Transformative Change in Higher Education

I contributed a post to Voices in Education, the blog of Harvard Education Publishing, which earlier this month released my book. Building on themes in Reinvention: The Promise and Challenge of Transforming a Community College System, I make the case for why all of us in higher education must move our institutions more quickly to adapt to the disruptive changes around us:

Though it’s encouraging to see institutions implement initiatives that are more responsive to the needs of students, employers, and communities, their leaders must reconsider outmoded ways of thinking and acting, as utilizing old frameworks will only deliver limited impact. We must recognize that our current students continue to struggle with confusing systems and structures that make it difficult for them to navigate our institutions. Their lives depend on our ability to help them navigate the system and gain the relevant skills they need to improve their own futures.

Among the principles that drive a systemic and systematic approach to change which I discuss in my book and the blog post are insistence on full relevance, strategic use of data, personalized information and planning, best practice operations and training, and cultural shifts.

Read more at Voices in Education, the Harvard Education Publishing blog, here.

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Reinvention Now Available

I’m excited to share with you that the time has finally come—my book, Reinvention: The Promise and Challenge of Transforming a Community College System, officially hits bookshelves today, Tuesday, June 5th. Writing and sharing the news about this book has been a life-changing experience and I have many of you to thank for it.

Your support and feedback has been instrumental in helping me on my journey as I continue to champion change in higher education—for our students and our communities.

For more information about the book and ordering options, click here.

Cheryl

(Click here to enlarge image.)

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Why Fundamental Change in Higher Ed is Necessary (Guest Post)

The following is the second in a three-part series of guest posts by Rasmus Lynnerup, former executive vice chancellor of the City Colleges of Chicago. See the first post here.

Today, the United States has two parallel structures of public postsecondary education: universities (four-year schools) focused primarily on the pursuit of bachelor’s degrees and above, and community colleges (two-year schools) focused on teaching high school curriculum, providing industry certificates and associate degrees, and helping students gain admission to four-year schools.

Both of these structures are in turn governed by the overall frame conditions of higher education, which include the bodies that ensure accreditation of institutions and programs, federal and state regulations, and the implicit and unspoken rules of the sector.

All parts of the postsecondary education system are in need of dramatic improvement. In my opinion, both the structure of the sector and the purpose of the individual institutions must be fundamentally transformed towards a solitary focus on student learning and outcomes.

Many of the specific changes required are well-known to most in higher ed, but the sector as a whole is embracing the required, large changes exceedingly slowly – while millions of students discontinue their studies and the United States keeps decreasing its relative standing in the world.

First, focusing on the frame of conditions for the industry as a whole, there are four large, interlocking sets of problems that collectively ensure the inertia that has allowed the educational levels of the American populace to deteriorate so dramatically in comparison with international standards:

  • Accreditation: The quality assurance process of institutions is largely organized by volunteers that come from within the industry. In many cases, this establishes mindsets and requirements that are insular and self-referencing. Moreover, the penalties for non-compliance are very limited – or exceptionally overreaching in the cases where an institution is disallowed from allowing students to pay tuition with federal financial aid.
  • Governance: In general, the sector is governed in a decentralized manner, with public policy considerations largely divorced from decision-making and with highly diffuse accountability structures. As an example, employees routinely form parallel institutional governance structures outside the appointed or elected institutional board members, which represent a mechanism to maintain the status quo of power structures.
  • Funding: State legislatures are increasingly defunding public tertiary education institutions throughout our nation. Such decisions are often rooted in the sector’s lack of responsiveness to societal and student requirements, combined with perceptions that higher ed’s cost and pricing structure has gotten out of control.
  • Leadership: Recruitment of executive leadership within the industry puts a unique premium on having grown up in the system. Hiring processes are often institutionally focused with large groups of people making hiring decisions. As a result, the sector’s inability to recruit the best and the brightest from across all sectors of society sustains the status quo – and continuously declining outcomes.

Second, reshaping the institutional focus on improving student outcomes, and especially the equity of those outcomes, will require tackling similar sets of large problems that directly challenge the existing power bases in the sector:

  • Relevance: Program and curriculum development is in most cases not connected with other institutions or the labor market. As a result, the transferability of credits across institutions and the eventual usefulness of those skills in the labor market is often limited.
  • Structure: In general, the industry does not provide good structures that allow for students to understand their goal, the path to reach that goal, and the implications of going off course. These structures must be deeply embedded within the fabric of each institution. One simple example would be to insist that classes are offered to students when they need them, instead of when institutions want to offer them.
  • Student Supports: Higher education officials maintain mountains of individual student data and could be leading the way in the use of analytics and proactive interventions. However, most institutions have not aligned their systems to proactively identify and support students showing signs of being in trouble.
  • Operational Excellence: Despite being organizations with massive balance sheets, billions of dollars of revenue and costs, and serving millions of students, postsecondary institutions often place little emphasis on truly implementing principles of operational excellence. These institutions have all the characteristics of billion-dollar businesses—but are not managed as such.

In short, there are very large issues, both within the sector as a whole and within each institution, that must be fundamentally changed—and this change will take years or even decades to take effect. However, the sooner we start, the sooner we will put our nation on track to a future of world-class, equitable educational outcomes for all.

About Rasmus Lynnerup

Rasmus is a first-generation college student who immigrated to the U.S. in his 20s. He now resides in Chicago, where he served as executive vice chancellor for the City Colleges of Chicago. He has a passion for helping his adopted home country’s residents fulfill their highest potential and rebuild a system of higher education that his twin boy and girl can grow up to view with pride.

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Interview With US Partnership on Mobility from Poverty (Video)

As a member of the Urban Institute’s US Partnership on Mobility from Poverty, I recently participated in a series of video interviews in which those involved in the partnership reflected on their work. A collaboration between the Urban Institute and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Partnership sought answers to “one big question” — what would it take to dramatically increase mobility from poverty?

In my reflection, I discussed how community colleges can work to reduce poverty and the steps we undertook at the City Colleges of Chicago to help low-income students succeed.

Watch the video below or on the Partnership’s website.

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Encourage Full-Time Courseloads—But Make Sure They Count For Every Student

It wasn’t until I returned to City Colleges of Chicago (CCC) as chancellor, many years after attending one of its campuses as a student, that I learned I had taken a full year of credits that weren’t transferable to the four-year institution I ultimately attended. Like me, that’s because too many students enroll at community colleges across the country without being given the information they need to be successful in reaching their goals.

One important bit of information that community colleges must address and share with their students is an unfortunate reality: students who are enrolled part-time are far less likely to reach their goals. Numerous research studies have underscored the importance of community college students hitting key momentum points early on in order to graduate successfully. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, full-time students who entered two-year public institutions in 2015 were nearly 15 percent more likely to return for their second year than part-time students. And research from Complete College America’s 15 to Finish initiative shows that part-time students also are three times more likely to withdraw from their studies; more one in three do so in their first year.

Yes, it’s true that community college students often face significant obstacles that make it difficult for them to attend school full-time. I know firsthand the burden of balancing difficult circumstances in life and school. Community colleges always will have part-time students, and our institutions must support them. But research has shown that even moving closer to full-time status makes a big difference: students who earned between 24 and 29.9 credits—just shy of full-time status—were more than twice as likely to ultimately earn a degree than those who took fewer courses, according to Complete College America. We also must resist the allure of allowing the struggles of our students to become excuses for our shortcomings and complacency. They have more grit and determination than we often give them credit for, and their struggles should serve as motivation for us to work harder to transform our institutions to ensure they succeed.

When we draw distinctions between full-time and part-time students, I worry we’re having the wrong debate. Community colleges must transform how they operate to provide greater support, planning and advising for working students and those with families, and based on research and real-world experiences, a major part of these efforts should involve restructuring our programs and incentives to ensure that all students take more courses.

The reality today is that too many students—whether they take classes full-time or part-time—languish in programs that take too long to complete or accumulate excess credits that are discarded when they transfer.

This is why it’s so important for community colleges to restructure programs to provide students with clear pathways to achieving their goals, while eliminating unnecessary or duplicative courses. Students should graduate with relevant skills that employers and transfer institutions are seeking.

It’s not just about completing the coursework on time, but also ensuring on-time completion with relevant credentials and skills. If we’re going to ask our students to shoulder a larger course load—and we should—we need to make sure they’re not wasting time in classes that won’t help them reach their goals.

Many in the community college sector are doing great work to address these issues, including pathways, predictive scheduling, whole program enrollment, and national campaigns such as 15 to Finish. In my book, I provide details on specific programs that we implemented to not only encourage more students to attend full-time, but also to ensure the programs they were attending were more focused and relevant—during my tenure at CCC. In my experience, students thrive when institutions are structured to support both a focus on on-time completion of coursework and the development of skills that are either transferable to a four-year institution or valuable to an employer.

To help students succeed, community colleges must move beyond using student challenges as excuses and instead embrace systematic transformation. Yes, it’s true that funding for education continues to trend downward nationally, even as concern about the cost of education continues to grow. But when we find ways to move them through our system faster and equip them with skills that can translate into future employment, that helps shift the conversation from the cost of education to the cost of a credential with value in the workplace. That’s a conversation I believe community colleges are well-equipped to have, as long as they create systems that ensure that students have clear academic plans, connected to relevant curriculum that maps to their career aspirations, and then guide them through those pathways with adequate support to ensure they stay on plan.

As a former community college student, I understand the importance of education in creating a bright future. And as a former community college student who was allowed to accumulate far too many credits, I also understand the importance of helping students make informed decisions within systems that are designed to help them not just enroll, but also reach their goals in as timely a fashion as possible. This is why I implore institutions to embrace systematic change that accommodates working students, adult learners, and those with families.

 

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Q&A with Inside Higher Ed

Inside Higher Ed published an interview looking back at my tenure at City Colleges. As with my book, the Q&A doesn’t shy away from the controversy that leaders like me often face when challenging long-established systems and structures. But to me, controversy can overshadow an important fact — that things simply have to change, and they have to change more quickly, to meet the needs of our students and our communities. As I said in the Q&A:

My biggest concern with the whole community college movement is not that people are not doing good things. People are doing good things and a lot of states are making progress, but my concern is that we’re not moving quickly enough … We see so much disruption taking place in so many industries, and higher education is not exempt. Somehow our traditional institutions have some level of complacency where there is a belief that this disruption won’t impact them as much, but I can tell you employers are not going to wait for institutions to get it right. There are people who every day are trying to figure out how to grab their piece of the American dream. They come to these institutions to figure out how to make that happen. We have to move out of our comfort zone and stop fighting things that challenge the status quo for our sake and understand we’re working on behalf of others.

Read the full interview here.

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Bridging the Divide Between Education and Employment (Video)

I recently had the opportunity to participate in an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) panel discussion on improving connections between higher education and employment. I was honored to participate in this panel with Davidson College President Carol Quillen, Monty E. Sullivan, president of the The Louisiana Community and Technical College System, and moderator Jeffrey J. Selingo.  Watch the video below or on AEI’s YouTube channel.

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Transform Higher Education… Now (Guest Post)

The following is a guest post by Rasmus Lynnerup, former executive vice chancellor of the City Colleges of Chicago.

The United States of America has a proud history of excellence in postsecondary education. International rankings routinely show higher education in America as the pinnacle of global academia. As an example, the latest rankings by US News and World Report (2018 Best Global Universities Rankings) place 8 of the best universities in the world in America, with two British universities (Oxford and Cambridge at 5 and 7, respectively) rounding out the top 10.

As a result of this perceived level of excellence, the names of undergraduate colleges and top business schools are household names—global brands that serve as the yardstick that global competitors emulate.

However, more granular data about America’s ability to provide postsecondary education for its population tells a very different story than the one suggested by the global Top 10 lists. In short, I believe we have lulled ourselves into the belief that, while the system of higher education can be improved – especially when it comes to affordability – it is generally providing the path to the American Dream for most. In reality, I will argue that the house is on fire and that we as a society are standing by or working on small-scale initiatives when we all should be moving with the urgency of first responders.

In the latest OECD analysis of the educational attainment levels for 25-34 year olds (2016 OECD Education in a Glance), the United States has dropped out of the top 10 in terms of the share of the populace that has completed higher education:

  • #12 for at least a 2-year degree (associate’s degree level)
  • #18 for at least a 4-year degree (bachelor’s degree level)
  • #26 for at least a 6-year degree (master’s degree level)

Similarly, in the 2014 analysis of educational attainment across working age adults (25-64), the U.S. ranks #7—so more respectable? No. The average ranking hides that the USA is #4 for adults 55-64 and again out of the top 10 for 25-34 year olds, coming in at #12. We are simply getting worse, while others are getting better.

An integral part of inclusive economic development is for a country or region to have a highly educated population. In that context, the steadily declining share of the population with postsecondary credentials in the United States is an alarming problem of national proportions. Despite once leading the world, our nation is now in the middle of the pack—and dropping in the rankings.

Furthermore, these numbers do not even begin to reveal the ways in which the current system creates a gulf in educational attainment outcomes between the population as a whole and African-Americans and Hispanics. In the latest report on educational attainment by the U.S. Census Bureau, the share of African-Americans with an associate degree is almost 25 percent less than the population than as a whole. For Hispanics, the share is almost 50 percent less than the population as a whole.

I believe these patterns constitute one of the most important issues of our times—both from a perspective of maintaining American leadership on a global scale and from a civil rights perspective. Except for the very elite schools that populate the global top 10 lists, the current system of higher education in America is simply failing the American population. The house is on fire.

I will write more in upcoming blog posts about how to collectively address these patterns, but I believe that transformation of the entire system of higher education, as well as most of its institutions, is needed. Everyone in higher education is always looking for the next ‘program’. What is needed instead is fundamental, comprehensive change.

About Rasmus Lynnerup

Rasmus is a first-generation college student who immigrated to the U.S. in his 20s. He now resides in Chicago, where he served as executive vice chancellor for the City Colleges of Chicago. He has a passion for helping his adopted home country’s residents fulfill their highest potential and rebuild a system of higher education that his twin boy and girl can grow up to view with pride.