Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
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Study: Many College Students are Part-Timers, Less Likely to Graduate
04 months ago
Will today’s generation of young people be the first in history to be less educated than their parents? New findings from a study conducted by Complete College America, a non-profit founded two years ago with financing from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, suggests that may be the case.
The report “Time is the Enemy” found a significant portion of the nation’s college students are going to school part time.* The trouble is that part time students have lower graduation rates than full-time students. Seventy-five percent of today’s students are juggling some combination of family, jobs, and school while commuting to class. Even when given twice as long to complete certificates and degrees, no more than a quarter of part time students ever make it to graduation day.
The study found that even though there are more poor students and students of color entering college, “too few end up with certificates,” the authors wrote.
The report sites several obstacles that keep students from graduating. One of the main concerns is that students spend too much time taking remedial classes, and most end up “trapped in broken remedial approaches that don’t help,” according to the report.
In California, for example, the average Cal State student is taking
anywhere between 5.2 to 5.7 years to graduate with a degree that should
take only four years to complete. Utah has some of the longest degree completion times, with full-time students graduating in an average of 6.7 years while
part-time students take close to eight years to finish school. And this is if
students make it to graduation.
In Texas, out of every 100 students who enrolled in a public college,
79 started at a community college, and only 2 of them earned a two-year
degree on time; even after four
years, only 7 of them graduated. Of the 21 of those 100 who enrolled at a
four-year college, 5 graduated on time; after eight years, only 13 had
earned a degree.
The data available in the report only takes into account 33 states that opted to share enrollment records. These numbers weren’t available before this report was published because the Federal Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) doesn’t track what happens to part-time students, who make up about 40 percent of all students, nor does it count the success of transfer, low-income, or remedial students.
The report makes several recommendations for states to improve graduation rates for today’s students:
Use block schedules, with fixed and predictable classroom meeting times, so that part-time students who are juggling jobs, families, and school can know with certainty when they can go to work each day.
Allow students to proceed toward degrees or certificates at a faster pace, with shorter academic terms, less time off between terms, and year-round scheduling.
Reduce the amount of time students must be in class by using online technology and allowing students to move on once they’ve demonstrated competency.
Embed remediation into the regular college curriculum so students don’t waste time before they start earning credits.
The report highlights the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) at The City University of New York that helps students complete associate degrees more quickly than average programs. By using block scheduling, student cohorts by major, and other support, students effectively balance jobs and school. ASAP students have three times the graduation rate of their peers who do not participate in the program.
* This piece has been updated since publication.
Ward Connerly Joins UC Berkeley’s Republican ‘Diversity Bake Sale’
04 months ago
Ward Connerly, former UC Regent and one of the architects of California’s Propoition 209, the bill that ended affirmative action in the state, joined the Berkeley College Republicans’ “Diversity Bake Sale” this morning.
The College Republicans started selling baked goods at 10am PT this morning. Their first customer was UC Berkeley Professor of Political Science Wendy Brown, who tried to buy all the baked goods but wasn’t allowed.
“I thought the Republicans were free enterprise, but they won’t let me buy all the cupcakes,” Brown told the Daily Californian.
Several counter protests were organized by students, including a phone bank in support of SB 185 — the senate bill that triggered the Republicans’ bake sale. If passed, SB185 would allow University of California and Cal State schools to
consider race, gender and economic background when making admission
decisions.
Members of the group known as By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) chanted directly in front of the bake sale at one point: “Affirmative action is a must. We won’t go to the back of the bus” and “Hey hey, ho ho, this racist bake sale’s got to go.”
An estimated 300 demonstrators also dressed in black had a “die in” and laid across Sproul Plaza, according to the University’s newspaper. (Photo by Bryan Gerhart.)
UC Berkeley College Republicans Hold ‘Diversity Bake Sale’, Mock Race
04 months ago
UC Berkeley College Republicans are hosting a co-called “Diversity Bake Sale” that’s set to include baked goods priced according to the buyer’s race. A Facebook event page created by the College Republican explains the bake sale is in response to California Senate Bill 185, which would allow University of California and Cal State schools to consider race, gender and economic background when making admission decisions.
“The pricing structure of the baked goods is meant to be satirical, while urging students to think more critically about the implications of this policy,” the Facebook event page that was modified after complaints now reads.
From the original post:
Most students feel that their voices aren’t heard in the baked goods distribution process controversy. They also believe that our UCs and CSUs need to be more diverse. YOU have the OPPORTUNITY to increase DIVERSITY and student VOICES by buying some PASTRIES and helping redistribute wealth for SOCIAL JUSTICE through BAKED GOODS on Sproul Plaza (9/27/11).
Berkeley College Republicans will be SELLING BAKED GOODS from 10 AM – 2PM across from the Affirmative Action Phonebank on Upper Sproul, and just like the CA Senate Bills 185 and 387 the phonebank supports, we will be considering RACE, GENDER, ETHNICITY, NATIONAL/GEOGRAPHIC ORIGIN and other relevant factors to ensure the EQUITABLE distribution of BAKED GOODS to our DIVERSE! student body.
To ensure the fairest distribution, and make sure that there are a DIVERSE population of RACES of students getting BCR’s delicious baked goods, the pricing structure will be as follows:
White/Caucasian: $2.00 Asian/Asian American: $1.50 Latino/Hispanic: $1.00 Black/ African American: $0.75 Native American: $0.25 $0.25 OFF FOR ALL WOMEN!Hope to see you all there! If you don’t come, you’re a racist!
The Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC) unanimously passed a bill at an emergency meeting held Sunday to promote “respectful ASUC student organization conduct,” according to The Daily Californian. The bill “condemns the use of discrimination whether it is in satire or in seriousness by any student group.”
The bakesale is scheduled to take place Tuesday, September 27 from 10am to 2pm at UC Berkeley’ Sproul Plaza. It’s an unclear whether the College Republican group — which received $3,791.11 from the ASUC this fiscal year — will face any punitive measures in the coming ASUC Senate meetings.
In 1996, 54 percent of California voters approved Proposition 209, a ballot measure that effectively ended affirmative action in the state. In the years that followed, many of California’s state and UC schools saw a drop in the enrollment of blacks and Latinos. In 2006, UCLA saw its African-American enrollment drop to its lowest level in more than 30 years–UCLA’s 10,000+ incoming freshman class only included 96 black students.
The diversity bakesales are nothing new. They’ve been held across the United States and at other UC campuses before. Slate.com even has a timeline of the history of these stunts. In 2003, UCLA held its own diversity bakesale that sparked outcry from state and national leaders.
As College Students Return to School, They Pay More Than Ever For It
05 months ago
This year, for the first time ever, tuition will overtake the state’s share of funding for students attending the prestigious 10-campus University of California system. It’s not the first state to reach such a milestone, but it is a significant and symbolic one in a state mired in a seemingly interminable budget crisis and where annual funding cuts have been accompanied by yearly tuition increases.
Nationally, that combination of cuts and hikes has made back-to-school season a difficult time for college students of color in particular. A 2010 report released by the College Board showed that black students are more likely than students of all other races to graduate college with more than $30,500 in debt, even when researchers controlled for family income.
“We’ve gone from a model that understood that education is a public good to a model that suggests they are private goods that people are only entitled to if their family is well-off or wealthy, and that is inconsistent with the democracy that is used to define our country,” said Walter Allen, a professor of education and sociology at UCLA.
This summer, just as the California state legislature voted to cut UC system funding by $650 million, UC regents voted 14-4 to increase tuition by 9.6 percent. It costs $12,192 to attend the University of California today. Over the last four years, state funding for the prestigious public university network has fallen by more than 27 percent, and the system has made up for those budget shortfalls by increasing tuition. Tuition has more than doubled since just 2003.
“The whole question of whether you can afford school is a major hurdle for students of color because those students are disproportionately poor,” Allen said, adding that students of color also are disproportionately unfamiliar with the range of options available for paying for school.
“As tuition levels rise, increasingly the burden falls on low income and lower middle income kids,” Allen said.
So as college prices steadily increase around the country, so too do the numbers of those turning to loans to pay for school.
In 1992, just one in five college students were depending on student loans to pay for school; by the 2000s, 35 percent of college students were using loans to pay for school, according to the Institute for Higher Education Polcy. Today more than two thirds of students leave college with some kind of student debt, and the national average is around $23,000 per student. According to the 2010 College Board report, 27 percent of black students have more than $30,500 in debt, compared with 16 percent of white college graduates, 14 percent of Latino college graduates and 9 percent of Asian-American students.
Patricia Steele, a policy analyst with the College Board who authored the 2010 report, said that high debt loads for black students include those who go to for-profit institutions as well as four-year private and non-profit schools. Stele added that high debt levels don’t necessarily correlate with an inability to repay them, and that students with modest debt loads often struggle to repay their loans, too.
According to the Institute for Higher Education Policy, black students in higher education are more likely than students of all other races to borrow money to attend college. But nearly 40 percent of black students who didn’t borrow at all paid their way through school by working full-time, and the same is true for 36 percent of non-borrowing Latino college students.
But more and more, students are turning to loans to pay for school. Steele expects that future data for the current years will show more increases in borrowing, driven by federal policy changes that upped the borrowing limits for some loans.
“What’s going to happen is,” Steele said, “college prices are going up and state systems are struggling because of slow growth in the per student state subsidies, and direct appropriations are just not growing or they’re decreasing, so you’re going to see this big huge sector where numbers are going to go up.”
Allen, though, says that the budget crisis is a matter of misplaced priorities. “We always hear the money is not available,” he said. “Of course the money is not available if you’re spending it on prisons.”
In the short term, even other student advocates seem resigned to the yearly tuition increases.
“Until the economy improves, I think it’s reasonable to fear more budget cuts are on the horizon for us,” said Emily Rusch, the state director for CALPIRG, a statewide student advocacy and organizing network. “But California as a whole benefits immensely from having a strong higher education system that’s accessible to as many students as possible,” Rusch said.
“The future of our state depends on it.”
Undergrads On the Brink of Homelessness
01 year ago
It’s a story of our times: college enrollment is the highest it’s been in the last 40 years, but the economic recession is the worst we’ve seen in as many decades.
For college students, this means fighting to stay in school, even if students have to choose between paying for tuition and books over rent and food. NPR reported this week on the story of Diego Sepulveda, a 22-year-old poli sci major at UCLA who’s getting by in college by sleeping in the library and on friends’ couches and showering in the campus gym. UCLA has created a crisis response team to help students stay in school and get help with basics like canned soup and toiletries.
It’s a totally conceivable picture. College campuses are big, open communities full of lots of amenities if you’ve got the right passwords—couches in 24-hour libraries, computers to get homework done, gyms with hot water and towels.
Of course, people who are homeless have long fought their way inside college classrooms. But colleges are noting an increase in the numbers of students who started on the other side of the line: students from working-class homes whose families have fallen through the cracks in the last few years.
What the NPR piece fails to mention is that college tuition is also on the rise—all of the UC campuses have raised their tuition costs nearly every year for the last five years. Last September, UC students up and down the state turned out for mass protests against another 32 percent increase in their tuition. Students in the state and community college systems are getting hit just as hard by fee hikes and reduced class options. (And don’t forget the decades of student debt that often follow graduation.) What once was an affordable college degree is becoming harder for students from working-class and low-income families to access.
PHOTO: David McNew/Getty Images
Lots More Students of Color in College–and in Debt
01 year ago
From the world of education stats, more news confirming what you probably already knew: across the board, college-going rates are on the up and up. But the gains, while significant, have not been equal.
That’s the word from “Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and
Ethnic Groups,” a new report released yesterday by the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics.
College enrollment for students of all races increased by double digits from 1980 to 2008. And between 1976 and 2008, undergraduate enrollment numbers increased the most for Latinos and Asian and Pacific-Islander Americans. But there are striking differences in where students of color and white students get their degrees.
Most strikingly, given recent headlines about for-profit schools, is that for-profits pull their students from communities of color. Fifteen percent of black students attend for-profit schools–more than students of any other race. According to the Career College Association, students of color make up more than 40 percent of for-profit schools’ student bodies, a proportion that’s much bigger than student of color populations at both public universities and private schools.
More broadly, students of color were largely in public schools. Among students who were in school in 2008, 81 percent of Latinos were getting their education from public schools, as were 79 percent of Native Americans, 75 percent of APIAs, 73 percent of whites and 68 percent of blacks. The numbers are flipped if you look at private schools, where the student populations are predominantly white.
NCES’s other key finding was that while 80 percent of undergrads received financial aid in the form of grants or loans, 92 percent of black students relied on financial aid to pay their bills and depended on more outside funding ($13,500) yearly than any other racial group.
For-profit schools have been criticized for targeting financial aid students. It’s not that for-profit schools are inherently evil, and some education is certainly better than none. Many for-profit schools provide flexible schedules and myriad job-training and certification programs with manageable class sizes. But they often get students in the door on promises of improved job prospects that just don’t pan out.
And recruiting low-income students is a central part of the for-profit university business plan. Two years ago, for-profit schools made $3.2 billion every year in Pell Grants, the federal money designated for low-income students. And it ends up being these students who get stuck with tens of thousands of dollars in loans when new jobs don’t pan out, which may explain why 40 percent of students who take out federal student loans to attend for-profit schools eventually default on them.
Photo: Creative Commons/stevendepolo
Will A College Degree From Wal-Mart Be Worth The Price?
01 year ago
Employees at Wal-Mart will soon be able to sign up for undergraduate classes through a partnership with the for-profit American Public University, Wal-Mart announced yesterday. It’s an innovative program, to be sure, but not without its dangers, especially when it comes to the expanding role for-profit universities play in the lives of low-income students.
In keeping with the buy-in-bulk-sell-for-cheap ethos of the company, classes will of course be discounted. The program will take 15 percent off course fees for Wal-Mart employees in good standing in areas like retail management and logistics. According to the NY Times, at least 200,000 people who work as cashiers, unloaders and managers will be able use training they receive at Wal-Mart as credit toward as much as 30 percent of the units needed for an associate’s degree. “It came out of an awareness that the jobs in our stores are really good jobs,” Wal-Mart Executive Vice President Tom Mars told the Times.
Still, with the efficient coursework and discounted pricing, an American Public University associate’s degree will put Wal-Mart employees back $11,700. And a B.A. will cost $24,000. The new program will certainly be a boon to APU, a privately owned company with a current enrollment of 70,000.
During the recession, for-profit colleges and universities, often called FPCU’s, have seen their enrollment skyrocket, even though they rarely deliver on their promises of higher wages and better job prospects after graduation. They’re the fastest growing segment of higher education, with enrollment expanding at three times the rate of traditional schools.
Along the way, they’ve also recruited at homeless shelters and on military bases. ColorLines covered the common practice among FPCU’s of targeting students of color, who make up fifty percent of the FPCU industry’s student population. (Turns out Wal-Mart does something similar when it comes to finding its own workforce.)
Because without low-income students–and taxpayers who bankroll these operations–for-profit schools wouldn’t exist. According to the Department of Education, two years ago students at for-profit trade schools received $3.2 billion in Pell grants–the federal grants available to low-income students–and by 2012, FBCU students will probably be getting more than $10 billion in Pell grants.
Some FPCU’s get as much as 80 percent of their revenue from federal loans and grants. At the end of the day though, it’s students that end up being saddled with tens of thousands in debt that’s notoriously impossible to get out of. Of course, students from all kinds of institutions graduate college with increasing levels of debt these days–but most schools don’t get by on big promises and federal aid money alone.
Is some education better than none at all? Definitely. What remains to be seen is whether the program will be worth the cost for employees. It might be a Wal-Mart bargain, but given for-profit universities’ track record, it’s very likely a ripoff too.