Arguments from The Costs of Completion: Student Success in Community College

(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021)
Robin G. Isserles, Social Science

Introduction: The Inspiration

I was inspired to write this book by a deepening frustration with the ways in which “student success” was becoming so narrowly framed.  The growing fixation with “data-driven” metrics was leaving out a huge and necessary part of the equation—an understanding and appreciation of community college students’ lives inside and outside the classroom.  It seemed that all around me decisions being made in the name of equity and student success actually made college-going even more fraught for my first-generation, economically fragile community college students.

I was also inspired by the creeping corporatization of the public community college—the seamless absorption of thinking of ourselves as content providers following “best practices” reporting to administrators concerned with “enrollment management” and ROIs, only to have our classrooms and the learning we were hoping to stimulate challenged by students who too have begun to think of themselves as consumers of their education.

Wendy Brown (2015) has coined this “neo-liberal ascendancy” and I discuss this and its many manifestations that move us further away from student learning and wider notion of success. In each chapter of the book, I demonstrate a different yet interrelated piece of the college completion crisis as an artifact of neoliberal thinking. The neoliberal thread running through the fabric of our public goods has made it almost impossible to imagine any alternative possibilities.  In the current climate of concern over the very real and disquieting college disruption rates—the stop outs, the dropping out, the swirling between four-year and two-year schools, and the length of time it takes to complete a degree—the ways in which we are redesigning our community colleges has become merely “getting them through.” This could be considered the corporatized version of the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and the end game of the educational reforms that both political parties have been comfortable supporting over the past two decades.

Part of how I seek to make sense of the “completion crisis” is to shed some light on the contradictions that emerge but are readily shoved to the margins.  Perhaps the most important of these contradictions is that as higher education has become more accessible to more and more “non-traditional” students, public funding for higher education has waned, becoming more restrictive and unleashing a host of casualties that have not only contributed to the slower progression toward degree completion, but more importantly demeaning how we think about student success.

Of course, we all know and see the consequences when states abandon their commitments to higher public education—larger class size, more reliance on underpaid and insecure contingent faculty, higher tuition and far fewer resources – counseling services, labs, library services, computer and creative arts equipment, etc.—all of which help students attend and stay in college.  We also know that it is precisely low-income students who suffer those consequences more starkly.

And yet, for the higher education institutions not marred by low retention and completion rates, those often private and largely inaccessible institutions that serve an exceedingly small slice of college students, college is viewed as a self-explorative experience, full of opportunities to grow intellectually and socially. For the rest, including the academically and economically precarious students attending public colleges, their experience is reduced to getting through on hyperspeed to the finish line. This is the (il)logic of neoliberalism that is both revealed and rejected in my book. I suppose completion is easier to measure than the seeds we are planting. Those of us in the trenches of the community college classroom want more for our students. So should everyone dedicated to students’ wellbeing.

The Completion Regime and the Barriers It Creates for Students

Currently, the prevailing theory at the root of addressing the community college completion crisis—academic momentum—rests on individualist, market-driven assumptions and prescriptions. The theory suggests that students need to build momentum in their first year to increase their chances of graduating in a timely fashion. Of course, the original study from which academic momentum emerged, included only Bachelor degree-granting institutions (Adelman, 1999).  This becomes quite clear when one examines the host of innovative disruptions that have been implemented as a way to foster momentum, many of these implemented here at BMCC:  compressed courses and semesters; creating corequisite classes combining remediation and first-level, credit-bearing composition and math courses; eliminating or transforming remediation; round-the-year coursework; and pushing students to take on additional classes each semester, often through online coursework.

For some students, some of these initiatives may be beneficial, and may help them to graduate on time.  However, celebrating improvement of graduation rates while ignoring simultaneous increases in numbers of students on academic probation is quite problematic and arguably irresponsible. True too, when we start passing laws eliminating all remediation (as has been done in Connecticut and soon in California), based upon a few randomized controlled trials without much in the way of replication or validation, not to mention the prioritization of completion over learning, we move further away from the social justice mission of community colleges.

I argue that there are three complementary and interrelated regimes—austerity, accountability, and completion—fused together to promote a very specific reform agenda for public higher education. The door for this was first opened when we shifted from enrollment-driven funding to performance-driven funding of public higher education, the trend over the last decade or so. The Completion regime, as I detail, has the imprimatur of a new set of edu-philanthropists (i.e., The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Lumina Foundation, etc.)  who have picked up the funding slack, so that they are largely in control of what is researched and how and what is ultimately implemented. Throughout the country, community colleges have adopted “Guided Pathways” brought to you by the Gates Foundation, through the partially Gates-funded Community College Research Center, evaluated by the partially Gates-funded MDRC. This circularity is the echo-chamber at work.

The Student Sensibility: How Can Institutions Become “Student Ready”?

In the second part of the book, I introduce a concept I call the “Student Sensibility.”  This concept has its roots in Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus,” but it is a more reflexive concept that gives weight to how first-generation students think about themselves in the unfamiliar terrain of higher ed. The concept also draws on the work of Arlie Hochschild, the sociologist who coined the term “the second shift” to identify the unpaid labor that most women do in the home. For Hochschild, this unpaid labor required a great deal of thinking about the needs of the household members, an attunement that she calls the “second shift sensibility.” I think “attunement” is a fitting way to think about how students—especially those without much family socialization and knowledge around college-going—approach these unchartered waters of higher ed.

But of course, the ‘student sensibility’ isn’t just an attunement to the norms and expectations of college but also a sense that students could and should advocate for themselves.  For this aspect of the analysis, I draw on the work of Annette Lareau, in her study identifying some class-based norms of childrearing.  One of the main differences Lareau found between wealthy and working-class students showed that

wealthier children grew up with a comfort and sense that they were entitled to ask questions to those in authority, to advocate for themselves, and not to take an institution nor its agents at its word.  Working class students are not often reared in the same way—and so they can be more accepting of what they are told. This is particularly true of students whose parents did not attend or complete college.

To further build out this concept, I incorporate the importance of validation, meaning making, sense of belonging, identity, and fears and insecurities, but am carefully to avoid the deficit-lens through which community college students are so often seen.  The idea of ‘student sensibility’ also draws on the works of Estella Bensimon, Rebecca Cox, Regina Deil-Amen, bell hooks, Bettina Love, Laura Rendón, Victor Rios, Mike Rose, Terrell Strayhorn, and Angela Valenzuela.

I was struck by reading Anthony Jack’s brilliant book The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students (2019), his study of two different groups of economically fragile first-generation college students at a highly selective college. Here he showed how elite colleges, despite how much they claim to want to diversify their student population, structure and organize school policies (i.e., closing dining halls during spring break, work-study assignments that reproduce class-based segregation, etc.) that create the conditions where low-income first-generation students feel structurally excluded.

I found that a similar set of conditions occurs at the community college.  Pushing students to take more classes in order to complete may get some across the finish line faster (the narrow definition of success) but for many it makes their lives more difficult, school more punishing, and so many drop out, drop a course or get little out of their classes.  Rather than helping students find their way, develop their intellectual capacities, inspire new ways of thinking, community college – already not defined as real college by so many of its students, not to mention the academic world—becomes a set of formalized hurdles and hoops to get beyond and across.  At the same time, students often experience this school on hyperspeed with feeling of deep ambivalence as the other priorities in their lives—in particular, family and work obligations—are de-prioritized in this way of going to school. These are the community college versions of structural exclusion that Jack demonstrates in his work.

Our community colleges often assume that the students know more than they do about going to college and that they will advocate for themselves when needed. Neither of these can be assumed, and so rather than trying to figure out how students can become “college ready,” perhaps it could be instructive to think about how community colleges could become “student ready.”

One of the consequences of these “momentum-style initiatives” is that students themselves have internalized this idea that they have to “get it done.”  So they enroll in many more classes than they have time to do the work for, often adding online classes to reach the 15-credit threshold that they are so often advised to reach. Sometimes, this is in response to pop-up menus that appear while they are registering reminding them that their FAFSA will cover an additional class.  Or as I’ve heard from far too many students, especially in our “student success programs,” they have been advised they “have to” take 15 credits.  Unfortunately, neither their FAFSA, nor this guidance, asks about the multitude of responsibilities students often have outside of school to determine if taking an additional class is actually a good idea. But when the measure of success is enrollment intensity to completion, not much else gets considered.

The book also outlines some of the pre-conditions that community colleges do not fully grasp about their students. The recent attempts to create better pathways and more appropriately “onboard” our students—the new language we all traffic in—do not often adequately address some of these pre-conditions that has a lot of influence on their enrollment and completion patterns.

For example, with little in the way of family socialization, first-generation community college students are often in the dark about a lot of what college is about and how to navigate. In fact, there is a great deal about going to college that is mysterious to them—the purpose of office hours, an appreciation of how much work is required outside of class time, how to choose classes, even the meaning of a liberal arts education.  So they take too many classes, more than they have the time for, squeezing classes in between family and work obligations. At the same time, they don’t think of themselves first and foremost as college students, yet this is what the completion agenda requires.

Additionally, because of the societal shame around “dependency” that has also been internalized, it is often much more difficult for working class and socially marginalized students to ask for help and depend upon others. Of course, it doesn’t help when they go to the woefully understaffed and oversubscribed offices (registrar, financial aid, etc.) and have to wait on extremely long lines, resulting often in being made to feel as if they don’t belong.  This combination produces what I call a “DIY” orientation to schooling—making major decisions around course selection, scheduling classes, even changing majors, etc. without complete knowledge of or consideration for the implications.  This is enabled too, by online software enrollment programs like DegreeWorks. I continue to have students who say they changed their majors because DegreeWorks showed that they would complete faster.  They may not completely understand the major they choose or what it prepares them for.  They often do this without any institutional guidance.  As a result, these decisions thwart not only their progress, but make the entire college-going experience often more burdensome, in yet another version of the structural exclusion they experience.

As we know, our students’ lives are deeply intertwined with that of their families. Unfortunately, we have not given sufficient attention to the conflicts that arise for our students who feel pulled between their school lives and their family lives/work lives.  While there are quantitative accounts of how many hours they work while going to school (Goldrick-Rab, 2016), there is much less understanding around the qualitative experiences around all this juggling, and how they construct their school identities along with their other important identities. Not to mention how they manage the semester with the constantly changing weekly schedules of the service-sector jobs upon which so many rely. They attend school with these competing identities, roles and expectations. Pushing them to do more doesn’t seem a good way to keep them and encouraging them to return.

So what would it mean if we took this concept of the student sensibility seriously? The following could provide a good road map (dare I say pathway) for thinking about how community colleges can be “student ready.”

How do we better enculturate students into college life when there is an absence of family history and socialization around college-going? It has to be more than orientations where students are told where the bursar or registrar offices are located. We need to re-think the pre-college process—open houses, tours, class visits, etc.  We need much more outreach to develop important relationships with area high schools to help prospective students think of themselves/picture themselves in college. More than just “debt-free” college, how do we encourage a student identity, broadening their definition of real college beyond “dorming”?

Once they are here, how do we make the community college a welcoming, hospitable, and meaningful place for them? How do we work to support them coming back? How do we allow them to remain involved in their family lives and attend school? How do we create a positive experience, so they want to make friends here—an important aspect the of college-going experience? How do we make community college more familiar, less intimidating, and empower them to advocate for themselves? An investment in a college-wide credit bearing first-year first-semester course that is engaging and meaningful could be a good place to start, but there is so much more to be done.

In the neo-liberal re-shaping of community colleges (and public higher ed in general), “care” has seeped into the way in which we are selling momentum.  We have seen and heard a great deal about a “culture of care” here at BMCC over the last several years.

Unfortunately, this language is quite divorced from its feminist theoretical traditions. In fact, the care rhetoric seems more about putting lipstick on a pig—it sounds great, but it really doesn’t amount to much. In the last chapter of the book, I discuss the empty rhetoric around “care” that’s akin to the emotional branding that corporations make good use of to sell a product—an experience, without much in substance.

I’m not saying we can’t do more to make students feel as if they are cared about—and frankly that is what community college students repeat over and over again—a desire to feel cared for, validated, respected and challenged. But a lot needs to happen institutionally to put our caring words into action.

First and foremost, if we are not going to address the contingent labor force—which is a stain throughout higher ed, then we cannot call ourselves a caring community. We need to hire more full-time faculty and advisors with some basic security and contractual protections full-stop.

If we’re going to use the language of care, we need to understand more fully what feminists have been writing about—sociologists, philosophers, political theorists, anthropologists, economists, educators—especially, so that these words have meaning.  And this can’t be about idealizing and demanding the unpaid emotional labor of the caring educator or advisor. There are countless examples of how the “virtue script” of feminized professions like nurses, teachers, flight attendants, etc. undermines people’s ability to advocate for better working conditions, and in this case, students’ learning conditions.

Here are some practical things we could do as a college community:

• Foster the importance of establishing meaningful connections with others – classmates, mentors, advisors, etc; How many of our students tell us “they are not here to make friends”?  We need more human connections, less reliance on technological interventions.

• Expand our work study program and other ways to create employment opportunities/paid internships on and through our community college campuses.

• Invest much more in mental/emotional health services on community college campuses. We need much more than a food pantry, though that is important. And we need these services around the clock. Evening and weekend students should have the array of student services available to them as well.

Our students would also benefit from first-generation academies that value the part-time student—who are the majority of students in community colleges across the nation (CUNY is an exception to this).  We need to come up with ways of making students—full/part/ and most especially those who combine these, which is how students enroll—to feel as if they belong, that they matter, that their lives inside the classroom are valued and respected.

We need to be re-thinking our pedagogies and ensuring that faculty are involved in this process from the beginning.  I do think we have the brain power and expertise to do this work, though we need more full-time faculty and staff to do this—and we need to adequately compensate those—rather than subcontracting this work out to ed tech firms who are largely removed from community college students and the classroom.

Some concluding thoughts:

While there is lip service to how our first-time-in-college community college students are different than traditional college student, the momentum-style initiatives of pushing students to take more classes, all year long, requires the material realities and conditions of traditional college students.  At the same time, the fact that their lives outside the classroom are so invisible really undermines the assertion that the completion agenda is about social justice and equity.

As I was witnessing how these “innovations” around improving completion were being introduced at the community college—often without nearly as much critical conversations as should be happening in institutions where ideas should matter and be debated—I wanted to bring more attention to what so many of my colleagues from around the country were whispering in the hallways and at academic conferences.   I wanted to illuminate what the students in our classrooms and offices shared with us about their lives and how they thought of themselves as students.  And that policies and initiatives designed to merely get them through without this understanding was insufficient at best, destructive at worst.  We have to ask ourselves is this what we want to uphold? This school on hyperspeed, this idea of success as completion, the goal being just getting it done, would not be acceptable to our wealthier, continuing generation students. So why should we accept it for community college students? With the current changes in enrollment patterns, creating a student-ready college that offers a more meaningful, dare I say joyful experience, has even greater urgency.

I was inspired by my years in the classroom and observing the very damaging experiences the students I taught and advised were having, in large part because their full lives were disregarded by those who were defining much too narrowly not only their success, but how they were expected to achieve this success.  These trends in higher education, especially at the community college, were the furthest things from what bell hooks calls creating sacred spaces of “education as freedom” that would allow for their intellectual and spiritual growth. And so, I wanted to write a book that would honor these students and their stories, and the work that so many of us do here, so that we could re-direct the ship of public higher education and steer it toward a different path.

My gratitude to the BMCC library staff for making my book available to the entire BMCC community: The Costs of Completion : Student Success in Community College

Robin’s website

A Selection of Relevant Sources

• Adelman, Clifford. 1999. Answers in the Toolbox: Academic Intensity, Attendance Patterns, and Bachelor’s Degree Attainment. Washington, DC: US Department of Education.
•  Bensimon, Estela Mara. 2007. “The Underestimated Significance of Practitioner Knowledge in the Scholarship on Student Success.” The Review of Higher Education 30, no. 4: 441–69. https:// doi . org / 10 . 1353 / rhe . 2007 . 0032.
• Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. California: Stanford University Press.
• Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Cox, Rebecca. 2009. The College Fear Factor: How Students and Professors Misunder- stand One Another. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Deil-Amen, Regina. 2011. “Socio-Academic Integrative Moments: Rethinking Academic and Social Integration among Two-Year College Students in Career- related Program.” Journal of Higher Education 82, no. 1: 54–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2011.11779085.
• Goldrick-Rab, Sara. 2016. Paying the Price: College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American Dream. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Hochschild, Arlie. 1989. The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home.  New York: Viking Penguin.
• hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress. Education as the Practice of Freedom. London: Routledge.
• Jack, Anthony Abraham. 2019. The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Lareau, Annette. 2003. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Love, Bettina. 2019. We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Boston: Beacon Press.
• Rendón, Laura I. 2002. “Community College Puente: A Validating Model of Educa- tion.” Educational Policy 16, no. 4: 642–67. https://doi.org/10.1177 /0895904802016004010.
• Rios, Victor. 2017. Human Targets: Schools, Police and the Criminalization of Latino Youth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Rose, Mike. 1989. Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America’s Underprepared. New York: The Free Press.
• Strayhorn, Terrell L. 2012. College Students’ Sense of Belonging: A Key to Educational Success for All Students. Abingdon, UK: Routledge Press.
• Tronto, Joan. 2013. Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality and Justice. New York: New York University Press.
• Valenzuela, Angela. 1999. Subtractive Schooling: US-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. New York: SUNY Albany Press.

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