Tar Pits? - Scholastic Remediation at the Community College

When considering Ms. Mossburg’s comments, Maryland’s uneducated graduates, in yesterday’s (5/11/11) The Baltimore Sun, one can only imagine what Mr. Millar (Cooling out poor minority kids in community college, 5/9/11) might desire of the community colleges, in supporting their incoming students, one-half of which are in need of remedial courses. Rather than persuading, as he and his resource, Professor Burton Clark suggests, “the majority of their entering students to give up their “unrealistic” baccalaureate aspirations and settle for some lesser fate: certificate, associate’s degree, or dropout” (bold added), community colleges support the intellectual and personal growth of these underprepared students through these redial courses. His view that the baccalaureate degree is the ultimate and initially desired goal for all ignores the various paths, steps, and number of years that may be involved in reaching that degree, if desired. Many of these paths involve the credentials offered by the community college. As for this remedial support being a “tar pit” role for the community college, one can only wonder about the term he cites and uses. 

Recognizing that, as Ms. Mossburg notes, student failure to succeed academically already costs Maryland taxpayers effectively $90 million a year in ineffective (wasted?) public education, would Mr. Millar rather that this remedial role be played entirely by the four-year, baccalaureate granting institutions at several times the tuition costs?  Such ill advised costs already overwhelm far too many students, their families, the institutions and potentially the taxpayers. This is especially true at for-profit institutions, which like community colleges, have many career oriented programs but certainly have less remedial support. One can only wonder if the remedial students attending four-year institutions are any more successful in achieving the baccalaureate goal than those who begin their journey toward that degree at the community college.

Mr. Millar should recognize that remedial support is one of the most important roles of the community college, where retaining students is a major, desired outcome. And, it is to that “exact outcome” that “Every program, every service, every academic policy”, is designed. Not, as suggested by Mr. Millar, to produce ‘“intelligent followers”, docile technicians, resigned to their economic fate and not dreaming of being well educated, politically active, powerful citizens.' Nor is that goal to “divert students, especially poor and minority students seeking the essential U.S. credential of baccalaureate degrees, away from the ever-more-selective four-year colleges.” The term “ever-more-selective” indicates just how valuable the community colleges are, with their ‘open door’ policies,  in supporting the populations described above.

It is that constantly evolving, supporting and often remedial role, that attempts to encourage, not discourage, students to continue their studies.  Such strives to provide appropriate support and instruction, one step at a time, through scholastic remediation, the certificate, the AA or AAS degree, and potentially the transfer to four-year institutions and the baccalaureate degree, and above, as desired.  This is why transfer and articulation programs exist between community and four-year colleges!

If the community college is not achieving the goals fast enough or with overwhelming success, one must consider the statistics noted by Ms. Mossburg.  The wave of underperforming high school graduates keeps getting larger and larger.  Something must change.  With that in mind, one might want to look the remediation rates based upon ethnicity, as presented by Ms. Mossburg. Noting that the average for All Groups is 61.1% and that White remediation is 56.3% and African-American is 74.6%, she also reports that Asian remediation is about half of the average, i.e. 31.9%.  One must ask the obvious, “What does this mean? Why the difference? Is there a model there that can be drawn upon to improve other groups?” 

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