The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
A plan for vulnerable students at the state’s community colleges
By unifying our 12 community colleges into a single institution, we can better deploy scarce resources.
Last Saturday, the Connecticut State Conference of NAACP Branches passed a resolution officially endorsing the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities’ Students First proposal, which aims to improve student outcomes and put the community college system on stable financial footing. The resolution notes that Students First takes important steps toward closing the equity gap at the state’s community colleges while maintaining access for students to pursue their education statewide.
Connecticut is fortunate to have a community college system that offers highquality education at an affordable price, with locations in communities across the state. The core mission of our community colleges is to give people of all backgrounds the opportunity to expand their horizons and improve their lives. This is a worthy goal, and when the system works, it works very well. The unfortunate reality, however, is that all too often we fail to give students — particularly those from underprivileged backgrounds — the tools to succeed in college.
Connecticut’s community colleges serve more than 8,000 black students and more than 12,000 Latinx students, accounting for twothirds of the state’s minority undergraduates. Our diversity is central to what makes us strong. At the same time, the graduation rate for black students is more than 60 percent lower than that of white students. The community college system simply does not work for everyone, and far too many vulnerable students encounter challenges along the educational pipeline that prevent them from graduating. This is unacceptable. It hurts individuals, families, communities and our economy at a time when our state desperately needs a more educated workforce and citizenry.
I want to emphasize that this is no one’s “fault.” Faculty, staff and administrators have made heroic efforts to offer increased supports on a shoestring budget. Rather it is a product of how Connecticut’s community colleges have been structured for decades. But we cannot afford to maintain the status quo as a generation of minority and lowincome students continue to fall behind. That’s why, since April 2017, we have been working on implementing Students First, using evidencebased methods to improve student success while at the same time putting the colleges on a path toward fiscal sustainability.
On the financial side, the hard truth is that our reliance on a state block grant that algorithmically distributes a declining legislative appropriation to 12 independent institutions is not sustainable. Given current economic projections for the state of Connecticut and the difficult choices legislators and the ad
ministration must make about investments, there is little reason to believe the downward trend in state higher education funding will rebound anytime soon. Without making significant structural changes and pooling rather than stretching our resources so thinly, our college system is unmaintainable.
In order to marshal scarce resources to maximize student success, the centerpiece of Students First is to create a single accredited institution that maintains access and opportunity at all current college locations throughout Connecticut. By unifying our 12 community colleges into a single institution, we can better deploy scarce resources where needed and respond nimbly to workforce needs, build better and stronger connections with the communities we serve, and prioritize student success over administrative functions.
To prioritize student outcomes, a main component of Students First is the implementation of an approach called Guided Pathways, which has been proven nationally to be effective in increasing degree and certificate completions along with positioning students to take advantage of burgeoning workforce opportunities. In essence, Guided Pathways ensures that every student upon entering the community college system has a plan, provides the guidance and supports necessary to achieve that plan, and makes sure the student can utilize the skills they gained within our community colleges to find a job in their chosen field or transfer to a fouryear institution. It is an established approach that has a long record of improving student success across the board. And it is only possible if we move away from spending money to prop up redundant bureaucratic functions and refocus our finite resources on supports that help students succeed.
The NAACP recognized that continuing to allow students of color to fall behind hurts our communities, our economy and our state. To make real improvements, we must change the way we do business. The steps we are taking are far from easy, but we have an obligation to give every student who enters our institutions the opportunity to succeed. Students First aims to do just that.