Community College Trap 2.0

A recent piece "Low Income Students Don't Have to Get Into Harvard" (from Inside HigherEd and cross-posted at Slate.com) follows up with an opinion on the previous post I made about community college students achieving better outcomes through greater restrictions and oversight.

When I first saw the article I was concerned that the author would be asserting that recipients of elite-level institutional degrees did not receive social benefits over and above their peers as other less prestigious institutions. (I would assert that they do and not always at the cost of more rigorous academic training.)

Instead, the author focused on the reforms needed at the community college level to ensure that our current population of low-income, minority, and non-traditional students successfully complete their track to graduation (or transfer or careers). While that point is well-taken I felt like they missed the primary reason that we want to diversify the student bodies at elite institutions. Not because community colleges are unable to form the bridge for our students, but because our students deserve the chance to learn at the top institutions in the nation. Graduation rates at existing top-tier institutions may not be entirely because of how they select their student body but of the resources afforded to those students once they are on-campus. If Greenville Tech had a major "on-campus" student body, sports stadiums, and a deep support staff that allowed better student-to-staff ratios similar to Harvard, we would certainly see marked improvement in students' academic completion.

So the question I thought of after reflecting and writing this is: where do we send our transfer students to? Most students come to me with expectations of USC Upstate, Clemson, or another in-state school. Do we dare pass them a brochure for Stanford, MIT, or Duke? If not, why?

(My farthest afield GTC advisee/graduate: University of Alaska at Fairbanks!)