Community college dropout rates are reaching staggering highs across the country. The graduation rate in the United States is about 50% and reaching even lower in our own neighborhoods. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Palm Beach State College, with over 28,500 students, has a graduation rate of only 34 percent.
While this schooling problem continues to grow, the world’s work force shows no signs of slowing down. The Community College Completion Corps says, by 2020, 65 percent of all new jobs will require a post-secondary degree from potential employees. Yet, the U.S. lands 16th out of 34 in industrialized economies in the world when measuring the percentage of citizens having earned a college degree. So, the question arises, what needs to happen to keep students in schools?
Earlier this year, President Obama proposed a plan for free community colleges saying, “I want to spread [this] idea all across America, so that two years of college becomes as free and universal in America as high school is today.”
Tennessee has made this concept reality with the Tennessee Promise Scholarship. Tennessee is the first state to offer two years of free college, covering everything that is not already covered by Pell grants or others.
As stated on its website, it does so in hopes of “increasing the number of students who will attend college.”
33 percent of Palm Beach State College’s students are 25 or older and 73 percent of students are enrolled part-time, according to the NCES. With this evidence in mind, it’s important to note community college students are non-traditional college students. Many may be the first of their families to go to college, work full-time, have children or simply be back in school to change their career. It’s because of these reasons the non-traditional student is more likely to drop out.
While this is the case for many, these colleges also serve as a stepping stone for transfer students who will further their education at a university. The Community College Research Center at Columbia University concluded that although 81 percent of community college students intended to earn a bachelor’s degree, only 25 percent actually achieve that goal.
As more talk of making community colleges free ensues, higher education institutions begin to worry. If, as Obama mentioned in his January speech, this concept does spread nationwide, transfer students will become much more important because universities will begin to have a decline in enrollment, like Carson-Newman University in Tennessee already has, says the Hechinger Report.
“It’s difficult to compete with free,” Claude Pressnell Jr., president of the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association, said to The Hechinger Report.
Although the financial situation in higher education is on its way to changing, the real issue might be on the other side of the classroom. Dr. Barbara Scheffer, a legal studies professor at Palm Beach State College, believes part of the issue in high dropout rates is adjunct faculty. If professors are teaching as a side job, they are lacking a full-time commitment to the students and lose the opportunity to form a relationship that can be vital to learning success. Research shows the negative correlation between increasing numbers of part-time educators and decreasing numbers of graduating students.
Scheffer suggests more effort in linking students to one another, introducing faculty to students, and soliciting ideas from the students themselves. Small measures like these would be painless for community colleges to do on their campuses and could allow these students who are dropping out to feel that getting a degree is attainable for them.
“It seems that little will be lost by attempting to create opportunity for greater participation by all persons involved,” Scheffer said.
The importance on education is something that will not fade as time goes on. In fact, Scheffer argued, its value increases.
“Education is about who you’re going to be as a person,” she said.