The 2019 report from the National Student Clearinghouse found that the overall six-year completion rate for all types of institutions — two-year, four-year, public and private — was at 59.7%, while the completion rate at public two-year institutions, specifically, is 40.8%.
“Community colleges are generally designed to do what society asked them to do in the 60s and 70s — get students in the door into college
courses cheaply,” says Dr. Davis Jenkins, senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. “They’re not well designed to help students explore their interests … and develop a plan that will enable them to either enter the labor market directly to a good job with prospects for further education or transfer [to a four-year institution] with junior standing in a major.”
Impediments to completion
Jenkins says many community college students have been lost at the onset when they take a placement test. They’re channeled into prerequisite courses in math and English that are supposed to help them succeed in college, but instead sets them up for failure, Jenkins says.
“Abstract algebra is a course that has been taught unchanged for 50 or 60 years,” Jenkins says. “It is not valid preparation for the kinds of quantitative reasoning students need. Society uses abstract mathematics as a means of sorting by race and class.”
What students need, says Jenkins, are courses that spark their interest and build the necessary skills to be successful in college.
