The Seven False Beliefs: Addressing the Psychosocial Underpreparedness of the Community College Student
Through an analysis of student reactions to several classroom interventions, this article suggests that the single, most important personal characteristic which interferes with the attainment of academic success for the typical community college student is what he or she has already learned about himself or herself and, also, about the process of getting an education. Many students enter the community college with misconceptions about college, about what it will take to earn a college degree, about themselves, and about the world. Unless they discover the truths very early in their college careers, they will begin those careers with such poor results that they will never be able to overcome the difficulties they will have created for themselves in their very first semesters. ********** The first public community college in the United States was established by the University of Chicago in 1901 when six high school graduates of Joliet Township High School desired to attend college without leaving their local community (Joliet Junior College, n.d.). Given the fact that only eight percent of the nation's high school students graduated in 1900 (Berger, 2005), there is ample reason to believe that these six Joliet graduates were academically strong and quite motivated to continue their educations. Many of the incoming freshmen at today's community colleges, however, present very different profiles from the original six as they are likely to have chosen to register at their two-year colleges for reasons of academic, social, and/or economic underpreparedness (Valadez, 1993). While community colleges continue to focus on the goal of providing students the first two years of a baccalaureate education (Eddy, Christie, & Rao, 2006), they are particularly proud of being able to accomplish this with at-risk students (Bulger & Watson, 2006) who may very well be the first in their families to attend college (Greenwald, 2012). We can acknowledge the inherent difficulties in this task of the community colleges by examining the following data: * In all student age groups in the fall of 2011, more students were enrolled in four-year public institutions than were enrolled in two-year public institutions except for the age groups "65 and over" and the one which might be considered the most vulnerable to failure, "under 18" (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012a); * While only 75.5% of public degree-granting four-year institutions had programs which offered remedial services to their students, 99.4% of public degree-granting two-year institutions had such programs in the 2010-2011 academic year (National Center for Education Statistics, 2011a); and * Many public university systems, including the City University of New York (the largest public urban university in the United States) and at least twelve state systems, steer academically underprepared students into the community colleges by refusing admission to any applicant who requires academic remediation (Schemo, 2006). When considering these data, can it be surprising that the national graduation rate for students at public degree-granting two-year institutions for the cohort first entering college in 2007 is only 20.4% (National Center for Education Statistics, 2011b)? This is explained, in part, by the estimate that 80% of all students who graduate in the bottom quarter of their high school classes and then go on to college will never earn a college degree (Steinberg, 2010). But even if this low graduation rate may be understood through some of the academic deficiencies in the students entering public two-year institutions, it is a statistic which pleases no one. Community colleges consistently make efforts to search for programmatic ways to improve the results of the instruction provided to students in their classrooms and to give each and every student, without regard to how underprepared he or she might have been upon entry into their colleges, the opportunity to earn a college education and achieve upward social mobility (Thelin, 2007). …