Rankings Help Community Colleges and Their Students

This article by Kevin Carey is in Inside Higher Ed and has a nice set of comments going:

Last month, a woman from Seattle named Misty Wheeler told me a story of two community colleges. She went to the first college ten years ago, as a 19-year old freshman with dreams of becoming a writer. Unfortunately, it didn’t give her what she wanted, or needed. The English classes were dull and rote, and Misty soon dropped out without earning a degree. Jobs, marriage and children quickly followed, and her youthful aspirations began to fade. This kind of small educational tragedy occurs far too often in American higher education, for many reasons — poor high school preparation and inadequate financial aid among them. But one reason is rarely mentioned: a lack of community college rankings.

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The stakes here are high. Community college students are often first-generation, lower-income students who got a substandard high school education and who struggle to balance work, family, and career. Many stand at the precipice of social and economic opportunity. For them, the difference between a good two-year education and bad one can be the difference between one life and another.

Community college rankings, incorporating surveys like CCSSE along with graduation and transfer rates, employment outcomes, and other measures, would help those students most of all. They’d be able to make better choices — perhaps looking beyond the nearest college to an institution more likely to help them succeed. Rankings would reward innovators and identify best practices for others to follow, providing strong external motivation for every college to stretch and improve. Given the importance of community colleges to the nation’s higher education system and long-term economic prosperity, the sooner we can create that kind of transparency and accountability, the better.