SOURCE Scholars

On Repairing Community College Online Degree and Certificate Program Websites

by George Lorenzo

Last week The SOURCE published a relatively brief report titled “What Community Colleges Need to Know About Advertising & Marketing Online Programs.”  It generated hundreds of downloads and some very interesting comments.

For example, please see the email below I received from a community college director of online learning. The director’s sentiments are similar to many others in the same line of work.

”Thank you for sending the link to your report. I read through it and found it to be full of very helpful, practical tips. Unfortunately, I did not find that our college is doing many of those things at all. I have a lot of work to do!”

The director added that he would get back with me for possible assistance/advice related to fixing their website sometime in the unknown future.

Well, the time is really now. Having a website that provides meaningful information is a basic necessity. It does not have to be real sophisticated in the beginning – just enough to show your visitors in a clear and informative fashion what you are offering and how they can apply or obtain more information. Keep building on that in a continuous improvement cycle to include many of the other features noted in the aforementioned report, and you are on your way.  

Many postsecondary colleges that offer online associate degree and certificate programs face similar circumstances. Why?  I don’t know the answer.  Is it because funds are not allocated for, at the very least, making their web pages more comprehensible and easier to navigate? Is it because online learning departments don’t get the attention they might deserve from community college IT departments and/or high level administrators?

I have had some conversations with people who know a lot about how community colleges operate and have been told that they often have very poor practices related to accounting and money management. Plus, faculty members, as well as administrators, have told me that online education is still not fully accepted by the professionals who run some community colleges at the highest levels.  So, perhaps it is a combination of several things – poor fund allocation strategies, or no funds, and no real support – in which case we’ll continue to see some online learning department websites out there that are pretty dismal.

Other community college professionals have told me that their websites are under development (going on over nine months now with no significant improvement).

That’s all too bad, really. We are not talking about investing huge sums of money to fix a website in order to have a basic, first-phase presence that looks professional and has information that could be the right catalyst for getting student enrollments. I think, depending on how many web pages and features need to be revamped, you could be looking at anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 for a quick repair. Perhaps, however, getting this kind of minimal support is extremely hard to obtain or next to impossible for some community colleges? 

Comments, of course, are welcome.

Higher Education is at a Strategic Inflection Point

by President of Shoreline Community College
and SOURCE Editorial Board Member Lee Lambert
reprinted from President's Blog/Lee Lambert: Sustaining Shoreline for Student Success

In “Only The Paranoid Survive,” Andy Grove, co-founder and chairman of the board of Intel Corporation wrote, “a strategic inflection point is a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it can just as likely signal the beginning of the end.”

This is the case for public education as a whole and especially true for Washington state’s community and technical colleges. There are many factors driving the need for change in our system. Dramatic cost shifts to students in the form of tuition and fees, significant reductions in state support, globalization and technological advances are driving the need for envisioning a new future for our colleges.

This new vision must include a dramatic shift from the model of teaching and learning currently deployed in our system. The community and technical college system in its present form was enacted into law in 1967. Under past circumstances, the system served the residents and businesses quite well. With its emphasis on open access, the system paved the way for scores of individuals to receive a quality education at an affordable price. Many of these individuals have gone on to be business leaders, doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants, teachers and the list goes on. Legislators, past and present, should be proud of the system they helped form. The countless educators, staff, administrators and boards of trustees deserve our respect and appreciation for the outstanding work they have done to educate and train the residents of Washington state. Employers – large and small, past and present – should be thanked immeasurably for their commitment to partnerships with colleges and support for the students that often go on to become valued employees.

When they were established, community and technical colleges were an innovative response to serious needs. However, the law is nearly a half-century old and crafted for a different era. As they say on Wall Street, “Past performance does not guarantee or imply future success,” a warning well worth heeding. Colleges can once again be an innovative response to serious needs, but not without significant changes made as soon as possible. I believe the challenges are clear and the solutions available for a brighter future where the system can continue to be an innovative leader.

Forces driving change

It is tempting to attribute today’s challenges to the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression. This is akin to saying the problem is not of our doing, placing the blame at someone else’s doorstep and shunning responsibility and accountability. Undoubtedly, the recession is painful, but it obscures the truth that the winds of change have been gathering strength for decades. As Walt Kelly’s cartoon-strip character, Pogo so pointedly said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

As I reflect on my own schooling, I realize that I received a less-than optimal education in high school. And, that was from 1977-81. In 1983, the “A Nation at Risk” report was released, signaling the need for change or America’s standing would be compromised. Another important snapshot, published this past May by the independent Washington State Budget and Policy Center, reveals a slow-but-steady shift over the past two decades away from public support for higher education to placing a greater burden on students for the cost of their education. All the while, positive student learning outcomes at all levels are in serious doubt and U.S. students face increasing competition from abroad in a globalized economy.

For the first time in U.S. history, the current generation of college-age Americans will be less educated than their parents’ generation, according to the non-profit group, Achieving the Dream. If our state, and nation hope to attract and retain the best talent in order to maintain economic viability, we must raise the educational standard for all residents.

The 21st Century version of globalization – as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman likes to call it, Globalization 3.0 – has made human capital the No. 1 currency. According to the World Economic Forum report, “Human capital is replacing financial capital as the engine of economic prosperity.” The ability to attract and retain the best talent from wherever will define a nation’s, a state’s, a company’s success or failure. Therefore, a nation’s or a state’s success, will turn on its ability to train and educate its citizens. However, the skills needed are those that the current system is failing to deliver.

What are those skills? Tony Wagner, in “The Global Achievement Gap,” details the Seven Survival Skills our students must acquire to be globally competent. While much more is needed and expected for ongoing success, these skills are foundational to that success. In “That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back,” Friedman and his co-author, Michael Mandelbaum, argue that individuals need to think, act and perform like an immigrant, a waitress and an artisan. In other words, everyone is going to have to develop extra skills and abilities.

Another key consideration is the need to close the educational achievement gap, especially for our low income, disadvantaged populations. The recent report released by the American Council on Education, “Minorities in Higher Education – Twenty-Fourth Status Report: 2011 Supplement,” underscores the pressing challenge facing us as a nation. This challenge continues to persist with very little cost saving scalable solutions being piloted.

The clarion call has been sounded time and time again with little or no meaningful gains being made. The Educational Testing Service, in its 2007 report, “America’s Perfect Storm: Three Forces Changing Our Nation’s Future,” writes, “there is little chance that economic opportunities will improve among key segments of our population if we follow our current path. To date, educational reform has not been sufficient to solve the problem…we must raise our learning levels, increase our reading and math skills and narrow the existing achievement gaps…” This report utilized data and was released before the current economic crisis. If we thought it was difficult during good times to solve this national and state-wide challenge, it may seem near impossible giving the current set of circumstances. However, I don’t believe or accept the premise the challenge can’t be solved now. It will require a laser like focus, and a total restructure of how we approach teaching and learning to turn the tide.

Fortunately, there are positive solutions we can employ now. These innovative approaches will require all of us to collectively and dramatically shift our thinking, and create systems and processes that will welcome current innovations and allow for experimentation.

At Shoreline, we’re trying changes to meet students’ needs. For example, we are piloting a modularized developmental math program. Students move through the modules at their own pace, completing what they can during the quarter. What they pass, they keep, and pick up where they left off the next quarter. We’re building on our successes in the online environment, including fully online health informatics and supply-chain management degrees. We’re creating a virtual college that can serve students wherever they are in the world. Our automotive technician and CNC machinist programs are the blueprints for delivering employable skills with third-party verified, portable certifications. We’re expanding our international education program to benefit both domestic and foreign students. We’re actively courting private-side partnerships to offset the continuing loss of public funding.

These are all efforts within the existing regulatory framework, but systemic change will require systemic solutions. To that end, we’re also working with the decision-makers to look at how best to change outdated rules when they get in the way of our mission of helping students, our community and our state.

Are We on a Path Toward an Unprecedented Societal Crisis?

by George Lorenzo, Editor of the SOURCE on Community College Issues, Trends & Strategies

For a great story about how someone beat the odds and pulled himself up from poverty through higher education and sheer hard work and determination, beginning with community college attendance, see SOURCE Editorial Board member Terry O’Banion’s  “I Am a Community College Student” essay reprinted  in Community College Week. Terry’s longstanding upwardly mobile career as a leader in the community college sector spans 50 years, from living in a chicken coop as a boy to President Emeritus of the League for Innovation and currently Senior Advisor at Walden University.

I’m sure there are many stories of a similar nature  to Terry’s, including my own featured in the earlier three-part series of this blog,  in which hard-working community college students from poverty-stricken or low-income  families pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. However, I also believe that the higher education playing field has changed dramatically since my days as a college student as well as since Terry’s, making the likelihood of such successes much harder to achieve than in years past.

Consider the following information from an article published inside the recent October 31 issue of Time Magazine, appropriately headlined “I Owe U.”:

• “The cost of college has soared 538% over the past 30 years. That’s more than four times the growth of consumer prices and almost twice the increase in health care costs.”
• According to the Economic Policy Institute, “the wages of those with a college degree have been roughly flat for 10 years.”
• U.S. student-loan debt has exceeded credit-card debt for the first time and is on track to reach $1 trillion. College graduates in 2011 are labeled as the “Most Indebted Class Ever.”
• Increased college costs, more borrowing, and a lack of good-paying jobs could result in long-term stunted economic growth in the U.S. as “today’s grads end up being too poor to start a business or buy a house or send their own children to a university.”

What does this all mean for the future of our adult society in the U.S.? Are we producing a large population of stressed-out, overly debt-laden people who can’t see the light out of their lower economic status, regardless of the degrees they earned?  

In addition, how does this scenario play out for community colleges? You would think that enrollments would continue to be rising due to the simple fact that community colleges are more affordable, but that does not seem to be the case. A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, for instance, made note of enrollments slowing down at community colleges.  In another story from The Chicago Tribune, it was explained that a recent drop in enrollments at Illinois community colleges could partially be due to more financially strapped students choosing work over school.

I hate to sound like an alarmist, but the so-called “College Payoff” theme, whereby we are advising students that going into debt in order to ultimately earn a degree can be considered a wise pathway in the long term, looks like a bad idea.  Instead, shouldn’t we be advising students who do not have any financial support to avoid going into deep debt and to work at whatever job(s) they can find and enroll in only those courses they can pay for out of their pockets combined with any aid they may qualify for through federal and/or state grants?

All these challenges also point toward a growing gap between the haves and have-nots. Are we increasingly becoming a society in which only the wealthy can go to a decent college or university?  Many of the Occupy Wall Street protesters are students with lots of student-loan debt and no decent employment in sight.  Are such examples of discontent the beginning of an unprecedented societal crisis or am I being overly alarmist?

Comments welcome….