To make progress toward better-prepared college students, stop pointing fingers and start working together, writes Paul Fain for
Inside Higher Ed.
Fain explores what's working at two community colleges -- Long Beach City College in Long Beach, CA and South Texas College in McAllen, TX -- that are collaborating with local school districts on strategies to lower remedial placement rates.
He writes:
Dual enrollment, an approach that President Obama lauded in his State of the Union earlier this week, is one of several ways South Texas has tried to boost the college preparedness of high school students, including pre-college counseling, academic camps, early college high schools and scholarship programs. But dual enrollment is the most extensive, and perhaps most appealing to students and their families, as the college waives tuition for participants.
Taken together, the high school partnerships have helped drive down remedial placement rates to 17 percent, an extremely low number for a college that serves a largely lower-income, first-generation college population. The remedial placement rate has dropped by 45 percent since 2004, and Shirley A. Reed, the college’s president, credits dual enrollment as being a big part of that improvement.
Read the full story
here.