The Focus on Enrollment

I think it comes down to funding. Under many community college funding systems, enrollment determines how much money a college receives each year. Colleges are rewarded for building their enrollments and very little was said about how many students actually graduate from those institutions. This indifference to student success and graduation seems to be changing. In recent years, community colleges have come under greater scrutiny from accreditors, state and federal governments, and private organizations because of their failure to produce graduates. What do you think would happen if funding were directly related to graduation?

Performance-based Funding

One of the potential ways to coax community colleges into focusing on student success and graduation is through Performance-Based Funding (PBF). The thought of PBF strikes fear in the hearts of some community college administrators. It means that community colleges will have to care about student success and therefore graduation. Performance-based funding brings with it a set of unique problems as well:

1. How do we define performance-based Funding?

2. What ‘performance’ will be measured?

3. Who will measure this ‘performance?’

4. Will this performance-based system create some unintended consequences like grade inflation or the “weeding-out” of students who are more likely to be unsuccessful?

Access

Community colleges were created to provide greater access to higher education and they have done very well in that regard. The National Center for Educational Statistics reports that 39% of all college students attended community colleges in 2014. This means that 6.2 million students who made the decision to attend a two-year institution have a very low chance of success. We have removed many of the barriers that prevented students from entering higher education. Now, we have to finish the job. We have to work to remove those barriers that prevent community college students from persisting to graduation.

Barriers