New Brief: Community Colleges Failing America’s Students Most In Need; Crucial Reforms in Accountability, Incentives Show Promise

Only about one in four enrollees are finishing their programs within six years, but recent success stories are showing us how to build a better 2-year college.

NEW YORK, N.Y. -- With presidential candidates—and President Obama himself—making waves with broad agendas for education reform, the time is ripe for thinking about how to push American education into meeting contemporary needs.

A new issue brief from Manhattan Institute education policy expert Judah Bellin puts focus on the nation’s ailing community college system, identifying fundamental problems and providing specific reforms for policymakers, administrators, and students alike.

Community colleges occupy a critical space, offering low-cost education options for students to pursue higher learning in a way that fits their needs. Yet current institutions too often fail in their mission. Despite a doubling in federal spending on community college loans over the past decade, community colleges have the lowest completion rates and highest student loan default rates of any higher education sector.

Bellin offers an agenda for reform based on interviews with administrators at top-performing community colleges and his analysis of federal data:

1. For policymakers: Tie government funding to performance, with a particular eye toward suitable workforce participation, increases in program completion, and decreases in student loan defaults.
2. For administrators: adopt student engagement practices based on successful programs in New York and California.
3. For students: more disciplined federal loan and Pell Grant program eligibility windows that encourage timely course completion and efficient degree planning.