Peter can certainly attest to this lack of focus. The graduate of New York City public schools who went on to a community college in his neighborhood in Queens, Peter knew he should go to college, but for what purpose was another question. Directionless, he signed up for a smattering of classes, most of which he failed. In his second attempt in Georgia, he also stumbled badly. After dropping an English class he was failing, he enrolled, like more than half of community college students, in a remedial course to meet minimal levels of competency for required math courses down the road.12 The class required students to pass all the tests during the term to move on. Peter failed three, “so I just said, ‘Forget it.’ ”
“Forget it” is a common response. “Fewer than half of community college students earn a credential in six years,” says Ivry. “Remedial classes are a huge falling-off point for kids. They’re just not prepared, even after high school. There’re too many ‘skills and drills’ classes, they’re too didactic, for students it’s boring and they get discouraged.”
Many students are as ambivalent and confused as Peter. Community colleges can become a “why not” choice for those in their early twenties who know they need some kind of education but are uncertain what they want to do in life. As a result, rather than poring over colleges listed in U.S. News & World Report, community college students often choose their schools for reasons that are less than lofty. “My friends were all going there,” one student told us, or “I needed to get out of the city.” “I wanted to stay in the city,” another said. Other responses include, “It’s what I could afford,” “My sister went there,” and “It was close to home.” One student even said he made his choice because of “parking.”
Mirabel chose her community college because her friends were attending “and we would just carpool.” Her decision making reflects a deeper ambivalence about school for many students. Mirabel wasn’t a bad student in high school, just more of a social butterfly. At a time when college admissions offices pore over a student’s extracurricular life, Mirabel had little to show. “Just one time I was in extracurricular stuff. It was like, I forgot the name of it.” She hadn’t given her future much thought. Instead, she followed her friends to community college. “I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I wanted to maybe become a nurse, or study business, or accounting. One of those. I just wasn’t sure. At that point in my life, I didn’t really know. I had no major or anything like that.” Instead, she enrolled in the General Studies program.
Mirabel was also working part-time, which made it hard, she said, to fit school in “because at that time I liked going out with my friends. And I would just get lazy. You know, you work, and you have class, and you go out. I had a hard time finding time to study. Actually, I didn’t know what I wanted to do.
“I think you have to really be into college,” she says. “You have to be driven. I think it’s just who you are. You can’t really blame [others, saying], ‘The high school didn’t teach me enough.’ I think you have to be dedicated and want to go to college.”
Now twenty-five, Mirabel recently broke up with the father of her child, and she’s living with her parents and her two-year-old daughter. She works full-time processing loans for a real estate agency. She is happy with her job, and hasn’t ruled out returning to school, though the possibility seems further and further away. “Gosh,” she says when asked if she would ever consider returning to college, “I would really like to go to school just to have something to back me up. You know, later on.”
The odds of Mirabel doing so are slim to none. Although most community college students aspire to a four-year degree, the Network and MDRC find that nearly half of all students who begin at a community college drop out and don’t enroll elsewhere.13 Why? They may get discouraged after taking a string of no-credit remedial courses, or they may decide to give up after learning that their credits might not transfer to a four-year school. Ultimately, some just lose motivation because they cannot see the forest for the trees—a college degree begins to seem like more work than it’s worth. Others persevere, but their hold on education is tenuous. An example of this is Tanya. Like so many community college students, Tanya is juggling several balls at once: She is a parent, she works two part-time jobs, and she is struggling to make ends meet. Although older students like Tanya are often more motivated to “do it right” than are younger students like Mirabel, they also face many more real-world obstacles.
Tanya grew up in St. Paul, the daughter of a single mother who was putting herself through college at the University of Minnesota. Her mother stressed the importance of education. “She helped me with all my options,” says Tanya. “She helped me apply to several colleges, but at that time I was applying into a radiology class and I don’t know why I did it. I thought it was cool at the moment but eventually didn’t want to go. I was applying for a lot of things and still didn’t know what I wanted to do, and then when the time would come I’d get scared. Now I’m trying to get an AA degree, get started somewhere.”
Tanya’s path has not been an easy one or a direct one. She fell in with a bad crowd in high school, became pregnant with her oldest daughter, now eleven, and dropped out of high school because her boyfriend “was abusive and I didn’t want people to see my face.” She returned for a GED after her daughter was born—her “wake-up call,” she says.
After two more children and a steady live-in boyfriend, Jackson, Tanya is once again back in school, taking two courses at a time between her full-time day job as a teaching assistant and part-time work as a van driver and assistant in a recreation program ten hours a week in the evenings. Her hope is to eventually transfer her associate’s degree to a local university for a degree in educational management. In many ways, Tanya is a typical community college student today. At twenty-nine, she is the average age for a community college student, and she has children at home, and is a member of a minority group. Like the majority of her classmates, Tanya is in school part-time and working full-time, and she ultimately hopes to transfer to a four-year college.14 She has twenty of the sixty-four needed credits under her belt with a long road ahead. “I can see I’m probably going to be somebody old” when she finishes her degree. She is trying to keep a positive attitude, but the prospect of being in school for another ten years is “depressing. This working [two jobs], it’s going to take too long. It makes you not want to go at the rate I’m going.”
It is this back and forth—the failures and do-overs, the ambivalence about school—that start many young people on a hopscotch path into adulthood. Failure in school sets them on a course of floundering as the jobs don’t materialize or those that do don’t pay enough to let them get by. They often realize too late that without the resources that a good job offers or that an education helps ensure, setting up an adult life is hard. They then return to community college to try again on a different path. Life, however, often intervenes again, and they never get that coveted diploma or the pay raise that comes with it. With a bachelor’s degree, a young person will earn 54 percent more, on average, than those who attended college but did not finish. Imagine how that adds up over a lifetime. And then think of all the people who never finish.
Education with a Purpose
Still, we find some success stories—hopeful, even inspiring ones—among community college students. For these young people, who are often from disadvantaged backgrounds, community colleges are a critical turning point in life and even a source of salvation. Community colleges can also be perfect solutions for students who know they don’t want to ultimately work toward a bachelor’s degree but need specialized training or a certificate for a job.
Matt, from Iowa, spent his high school years working for his dad’s landscaping business. He put in ten-hour days on the weekends and often four to five hours after school during the week. There was little doubt in his mind that he would continue to work for his dad after high school, with the hope of eventually taking over the business when his dad retired. “I considered other
things, but I had done landscaping so long, and I liked it, and I also knew that I’d have a good job doing it, too, and that was the major decision maker—that I knew I’d have a good place to work.”
Matt chose nearby Hawkeye Community College, a well-established technical school in central Iowa for welders, nurses, auto mechanics, and truck drivers. He signed up for their twelve-month horticultural program. “I didn’t feel like I wanted to go to a four-year school ’cause I didn’t know if I wanted to commit that much time to it,” he says. He enjoyed the program, particularly because it afforded him additional work experience. “I got to work for another landscaper, [and] it still kind of gave me some different ideas and ways to do things and ways not to do things.” Matt’s school experience, in other words, gave him just what he needed: insights and skills in a field he already liked. It was the perfect fit.
Matt had moderate aspirations, which in this high-powered world might be perceived as shortchanging himself. Yet perhaps his embrace of the less glamorous road of landscaping was just the ticket to a successful launch into adulthood. Eduardo, too, had a more “pedestrian” set of goals. After “hanging out for a while” after high school, working in customer service for a travel agent and holding other odd jobs, Eduardo decided that it was time to return to school. He chose Mira Costa Community College in San Diego, where he fell in with a group of friends who were taking classes in phlebotomy. Those motivated friends inspired and encouraged Eduardo, and within six months he had a medical assistant certificate and a job in the field. After working for a year and moving up, he decided it was time to become a nurse. He re-enrolled at Mira Costa in the Licensed Vocational Nursing program.
Again, having supportive friends in the field was critical. “My friend Tom’s an LVN. My other friend, she’s a health educator. I have other friends that are RNs and phlebotomists. It’s good money, and it’s a good experience.” The “gap” year spent working was also important because it exposed him to a built-in support network, which bolstered him when courses were difficult or he felt like calling it quits. The gap year also gave him a clearer sense of what the job entailed and how to get there.
Eduardo was also lucky in another way. He started the program part-time, but when the slow progress became a “roadblock to finishing,” he was able to get help from his parents. He accepted his father’s offer to pay for college, under the condition that he would quit his job and focus full-time on school. He credits this strong family support for his success. Eduardo says, “What helped me the most was that my parents helped me a lot. Like they supported me financially and with [other kinds of] support. Helping me, you know, with my homework. Or telling me, ‘Go here to check this book out.’ Or my mom even going to get the books for me because I was too busy. My mom pays for my books, pays for my equipment. They also paid off my car.” It comes down to parents once again—their importance cannot be underestimated.
With their help, Eduardo was able to finish the program in just under three years. His parents “were so excited. They were so proud when I walked the line in graduation. They told me that’s the payback. Not to worry about any of the money.”
Eduardo is proud of himself, too. “People look at me more seriously. ‘Did you hear about Eduardo? He graduated, got his LVN degree, and he works as a nurse now.’ ‘He finished school and everything.’ I like that feeling.” Eduardo’s story is a testament to the fact that, even for individuals without a clear vision up front, exposure to a community college or technical school, coupled with support from parents and friends, can provide routes to better-paying jobs. Among those not bound for four-year colleges, those young adults like Matt, who have a distinct idea of what they want to do before they enter a community college or technical school, or like Eduardo, who find their niche once they enter, find their lives are furthered and even transformed by their educational experiences in these settings.
While Eduardo’s parents are rightly proud of him, this story raises an important issue. Parents are often shouldering the entire responsibility for their children in less elite schools, whether community colleges or state universities, by tracking down books while their sons or daughters work or reviewing their schedules to warn them against taking unnecessary classes. This is a testament to the major systemic gaps in support on the part of colleges and technical schools. The high price tags of elite schools like Penn or Smith include the perks and “parenting” they provide; they wrap their students in services and supports to ensure they don’t fail. And those students rarely do fail. Elite schools graduate roughly 90 percent or more of their students, while nonselective ones graduate only about one-third. It seems that the more vulnerable students—those from families with fewer resources or know-how—would benefit even more from being cocooned in these types of support. And the costs of their mistakes when they drop out with nothing but a bill are more burdensome for them and for society. It is but one of the catch-22s of the anxious middle class.
Beyond “College for All”
All this pain and expense begs the question: Why do students who are unprepared for college, or who are uncertain about what they want to do in life, enroll? “Because they don’t know what else to do,” says Kris Winter, director of family outreach at Oregon State University. “They’re going to college because they think they’re supposed to go to college.”
Perhaps more important, they choose college because they have few viable alternatives. Our magnet schools and top-tier suburban high schools have done a wonderful job of preparing the best and the brightest for college. However, for every striver, there are many more who hear the siren call of college, but are simply not yet college material. They may not be less intelligent, and they could be pushed to achieve. But at this point in their lives, their hearts aren’t in it. They do not see the connection between what they learn on the page and how it plays out in real life. Or they are simply not “books” kind of people. And there is no shame in that. Yet as the current feeder system in high school is designed, young people like Tyler, who don’t excel in academics or are in trouble, are shunted to the margins, or into a shop class or a vo-tech track, with the implicit message that they are losers. The vo-tech track is often considered a dumping ground for young people with behavior problems or low ability—often two conditions that are self-fulfilling prophecies when kids are tracked early on. Later, once they graduate from high school (if they graduate), they often slouch into a community college program as the next best alternative and patch together some credits in English or history, with a vague plan to transfer to college “later.” Sure, some students may stumble into something that clicks with them. But given that more than half of community college students drop out, it is not a stretch to say that those who click are the exception, not the rule. What many students need instead is a system that embraces their talents and creates a viable bridge to training and later jobs in the real world. The problem is, of course, that there are few alternative paths for non-college-bound youth.
It should go without saying that the hope of pursuing higher education rests on having a high school degree. Yet high school dropout rates are alarming. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the dropout rates among people sixteen through twenty-four years old in 2006 were 9 percent.15 An alternative calculation puts the number even higher, with as many as three in ten ninth-graders today not graduating four years later, and for Hispanics, blacks, and Native Americans, as many as half. In 2000, the most recent census point, a dramatic 14 percent—3.7 million—of all young adults ages eighteen through twenty-four were neither enrolled in school, employed, or in the military, nor had a high school degree or GED.16 These proportions have most certainly surged upward with the hard economic times that occurred thereafter. These young people have fallen through the cracks. They are not prepared for higher education, but they do need ways to connect to society and play useful roles. We won’t improve higher education, and diversity in higher education, if we don’t first grasp these b
asic facts.
Education is the key to success in life, says criminologist and sociologist D. Wayne Osgood, editor of the Network book On Your Own Without a Net: The Transition to Adulthood for Vulnerable Populations. Children from the professional classes may be more strongly school-oriented—they are doing well in school and are committed to it. Yet if working-class children are equally directed, they can also be upwardly mobile. Likewise, money and security do not guarantee academic success, as many parents can attest. Sometimes, no matter how firmly parents guide or how diligently they intercede, kids derail or lose interest in school. And like their peers a few rungs down the economic ladder, children from more privileged families run the risk of floundering if they do not gain a sound education. It is too easy and, as we show in the remainder of the book, too perilous to slip at this first step on the path to adulthood—for everyone.
“I think the big issue is, what about the kids who aren’t going to college?” says Osgood. “If they can find a good niche in a trade school in a technical field or even construction management, or a higher-level job in manufacturing, then they’ll have some resources. But so many are seriously alienated from high school, or they’re sort of just mouthing the I’m going to college mantra because everyone does. But they don’t have the academic skills, and aren’t likely to succeed in that. So the question for society is, how do we prepare more kids to get more education and not become so alienated from school?”
A first step, he says, is acknowledging that the problem exists. “I’ve always been struck by data showing just how unrealistic kids’ expectations for education are. Everyone says they’re going to college, even kids who hate school. It’s nice to have aspirations, but it’s a bad sign we let that many people be out of touch. And we need more alternatives—ways to help people get through school, paths they can take if it’s hard for them. As a society we have to address how widespread the disaffection is. There’s a whole lot who hate school. And we just kind of turn our heads and let it be their problem.”
Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It’s Good for Everyone Page 5