College is supposed to be straightforward: take classes, gain skills and knowledge, get a degree that helps secure a job. But the deal breaks down if a student can’t get into classes they need to take.
That’s an unpleasant reality for more and more college students, according to a recent article in The Hechinger Report.
“Colleges and universities manage to provide (required courses students need for their majors) when their students need to take them only about 15 percent of the time,” it says, making it “a major reason fewer than half of students graduate on time, raising the amount it costs and time it takes to get degrees.”
In fact, according to recent studies, over half of students at all levels of higher education end up spending more time and money at college because they can’t take required classes when they need to.
California colleges are not immune.
“In California’s rural Central Valley, for example, community college students struggled to get into the advanced math courses they need toward degrees in STEM; only a third of the 15 community colleges in the area consistently offer the courses,“ Hechinger noted.
This doesn’t just cause students to spend more time and money on colleges – it can also cause them to change majors, or even drop out entirely.
“Every required STEM course a student couldn’t get into lowered the probability that he or she would major in one of those fields,” The Hechinger Report noted. “At community colleges nationwide, students who can’t get into courses they need are up to 28 percent more likely to take no classes at all that term.”
That’s what happened to Chris.
“I’d been an on-again-off-again community college student for a really long time,” he said. “You start working, life happens, you decide to take less classes, maybe the college isn’t offering the courses that you need, and then you’re not a student any more. For me, that’s just what happened multiple times.”
And in a time of budget crunches and cutbacks to education at the federal level , experts expect the problem to get worse.
A new approach is needed.
Classes, And Support, Are Always There When Students Want Them
The state of California established Calbright College, a new kind of online community college focusing on career education for adults. Its mission is to provide a college education to people who need higher education for their careers but who find the traditional college system to be inaccessible, like working-age adults, parents, or people with unpredictable work schedules.
Most efforts to make college accessible focus on getting people into college, and Calbright has eliminated many of the barriers that keep people from being admitted. Calbright is:
- Currently free for Californians, eliminating the barrier of cost.
- Online, making it accessible from any of California’s 58 counties. It further loans free laptops and wifi hotspots to students who need them, eliminating the barriers of location and technology.
- Flexibly scheduled, so that students can take their classes whenever it fits their lives, and move through the courses as quickly or slowly as they want, without penalty, eliminating the barrier of time.
But at Calbright, making college accessible doesn’t stop when people are admitted. The College also makes sure people have the tools and support they need to complete their programs. That includes making sure every student has access to every class they need to take, and support counselors and staff available by Slack, text or a phone call..
Calbright offers a limited number of programs, each of which is career focused and aligned to industry-valued standards: Calbright has programs in IT Support, Cybersecurity, Project Management, and Data Analysis, for example, because companies across California are offering many good jobs for people with these skills. Because Calbright focuses on these programs, and uses an asynchronous Competency-Based Education model, it ensures that the classes people need to take are always available. Calbright students take the classes they’re ready for when they’re ready.
It’s a system that worked for Chris. When he enrolled in Calbright he found that the classes he needed – and the support he wanted – were always there. He completed his program in IT Support, successfully changed careers, and now has a new job he loves.
Getting into college is only as helpful if you can access the classes you need to take. The Calbright model has solved that problem, like so many others.
