March 29, 2007--Youth Week: Admissions Day--The Envelope Please

For many people April is the cruelest month, but not for the reasons cited by T.S Eliot. Some consider April cruel because it’s when we mix memory and desire or because on the 15th we have to pay our taxes. And although April Fools Day does provide some relief, then again there is no relief for those anxious high school seniors who are cringing right now by the mailbox in the hope that in a few days they will find in it a few fat envelopes from colleges upon which all of their and their parent’s hopes reside. This is why April is so cruel.

But though the mainstream press makes a big deal about this annual ritual, those waiting for letters of acceptance from Brown or Duke or other selective colleges represent maybe five percent of all applicants. Most of the rest, if they are going to college at all, already pretty much know where they are headed. In fact, the majority of next fall’s freshman will be enrolling in their local community colleges—about 55 percent of all first-year students. And an even greater percentage of the lowest-income students and minorities will attempt to complete enough credits at two-year colleges to transfer to four-year colleges and then earn bachelors degrees.

The sad reality is that though the lucky ones on route to the Yales of the world are almost certain to graduate on time and then get well launched toward graduate and professional schools, many who go to community colleges are likely never to complete even an undergraduate degree. There is a significant comparative disadvantage that affects academically-equivalent students who begin at two-year rather than four-year colleges. This community college deduction (April is after all still tax month) is variously estimated to result in about a 25 percent disadvantage. It is even worse for minorities, especially Hispanics.

One can of course make the case that though there is this downside, community colleges do not just serve transfer students. And that they do a pretty good job at their job-training and community-education functions. Granting this, they are still failing a significant percentage of students who have no choice but to go there to begin their college educations.

This cooling-out role at two-year colleges has been going on for decades and has been known about since at least the 1970s, but nothing effective has been done to correct this social injustice. Yes, some “liberal” foundations such as Ford have had programs for many years to strengthen the community college transfer function. And others, most recently and visibly the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, have seen part of their mission to be to encourage universities to be more accepting of transferring community college students. (See linked NY Times article.)

But these privately-funded programs have not worked at anything resembling scale--Cooke, for example is working with just eight universities. Thus, to get a few elite colleges to accept a handful of transfer students is more an illusion of progress than a solution to this daunting waste of talent. To bring fairness to the world of higher education requires states to step up and create truly integrated systems where credits are easily transferable, but very few have done so. Instead, they depend upon having more than half their high school seniors go to community college as a way of containing costs, while blithely ignoring the social costs.

So of course I wish all my friends’ children well as they wait for those bulky letters, but I hope that as they see their dreams fulfilled they’ll also think about and then later in life do something about all the others who are slipping further and further behind.