Search DU CTLAT Blog

Thursday, May 20, 2010

POD Member Offer: Epigeum's Learning Technologies Online

http://www.epigeum.co.uk/downloads/courses_for_review/eLearning/usa/cd_content/learning_technologies/5_resources.html
Epigeum announces release of Learning Technologies Online - 7 online courses for faculty who would like to know more about using technology in teaching


Do you need more of your teaching faculty to adopt learning technologies?
Epigeum would like to invite you to take just two minutes to have a look at their newest release: Learning Technologies online.

Learning Technologies online comprises seven courses / 10 hours of training for faculty who want to utilise the power of learning technologies in their teaching. The highly inspirational courses contain a wealth of video case studies, dramas and simulations. They are ideal for integration into faculty development programs, or as training for adjuncts and GTAs, or simply as an online reference tool for anyone on campus who needs instant help.


The courses were developed in conjunction with 18 universities and a host of well-known international experts including Professor Ray Schroeder (Springfield-Illinois), Larry Ragan (Penn State), Diana Laurillard (University of London), Caroline Haythornthwaite (Urbana-Champaign) and Terry Anderson (Athabasca).


Click on Developing Course Content (http://www.epigeum.co.uk/downloads/courses_for_review/eLearning/usa/cd_content/learning_technologies/5_resources.html)(Larry Pagan - Penn State) to see an example course.

These courses are currently available on institutional license (minimum of 10 users). An individual license option will be released in the next few weeks if you would like access just for yourself. A special 5% discount on price is available to all current POD members.


If you would like further details on prices, and a free trial to all 7 courses, simply email david.babington-smith@epigeum.com . The courses in the programme are:
1. Introduction to Learning Technologies
2. The effective use of LMSs
3. Internet based collaboration tools
4. Course planning
5. Developing Course Content
6. E-Assessment
7. Teaching with Learning Technologies

For more information please see the dedicated web page or contact:
David Babington-Smith
CEO, Epigeum
david.babington-smith@epigeum.com
www.epigeum.com

Share/Bookmark

Innovative Educator Webinar: Intrusive Academic Advising: An Effective Strategy to Increase Student Success

Tuesday, June 22nd, 3:00-4:30pm EDT $345

Webinar Description

This session will examine the concept of "intrusive academic advising," which was formulated by Robert Glenn an in the mid-1970s. Intrusive (or "proactive") advising has been found to have a positive impact on student success. Intrusive advising means that colleges and universities - through instructional faculty, academic advisors, counselors and others - take the initiative to reach out to students to offer advice, support and assistance, rather than waiting for students to seek help. For example, intrusive academic advising expects that advisors will schedule meetings with their advisees at critical junctures, especially during the first-year of enrollment, following receipt of notifications of academic difficulty, planning academic programs, changing majors, etc. Intrusive advising does not mean "hand holding" or the return of in loco parentis. Rather, it suggests that faculty, counselors, academic advisors and others demonstrate an active concern for students' academic progress and a concomitant willingness to assist students to understand and utilize programs and services that can increase the likelihood for their success. Intrusive advising programs and advisors understand that many students, especially those who may be at greater risk for dropping out, often do not seek assistance in time for the assistance to have a positive impact on their progress.


Objectives
Principles and philosophy of intrusive advising: What do we mean by intrusive advising?
How and why intrusive advising impacts student achievement, persistence and success
How to implement intrusive advising programs and interventions.
Professional development for intrusive academic advising programs and advisors
Best practices in intrusive academic advising.


Who Should Attend?
Faculty
Vice-Presidents and Deans Advising administrators
Student affairs professionals
Student affairs leaders
University 101 instructors
Retention coordinators
Anyone interested in improving student retention and engagement


Who is the Speaker?
Thomas Brown is a lifelong student and academic affairs educator with an impressive record of effectiveness in creating academic and student affairs programs that promote increased learning, achievement, and success. Tom served as Dean of Advising Services/Special Program at Saint Mary's College of California, was a member of the Board of Directors and Vice President of the National Academic Advising Association, and was chairperson of the Prelaw Advisors National Council.
Tom is currently Managing Principal of a consulting network that assists campuses to increase student success, build inclusive communities, and manage change (www.tbrownassociates.com). He also writes and occasional column, The Advising Dean, for The St. Helena Star newspaper in California's Napa Valley. His work is based on an integration of theories, research findings, and practical experience that makes a real difference for individuals and institutions.
Share/Bookmark

Check Out Black Art in America Website! Thank You Dr. Eartha Johnson!


Share/Bookmark

Online Classroom: Teaching an Online Course Developed by Others

Featured Higher Education Presenter: Susan Ko, Ph.D.

Date: Tuesday, 6/15/10
Time: 12:00-1:00 PM Central Daylight Time
Cost: $239 ($264 after 6/8/10)

Three easy ways to register!
Phone: 800-433-0499 / 608-227-8182

A key seminar for...

Instructors
Faculty
Department Heads
Instructional Designers
Online Administrators
And anyone involved in the online course experience.
Promo Code: MA0AW3


In an interview with Online Classroom, Susan Ko, co-author (along with Steve Rossen) of Teaching Online: A Practical Guide, talked about the changes that have occurred in online teaching in the 10 years since the book was published. (It is now in its third edition.) Among the significant changes Ko has observed is the shift toward a team approach to developing online courses and the increasing likelihood that an instructor may be called upon to teach courses he or she had no part in creating. Below is an excerpt of an interview on this topic, which she will address on June 15 in her upcoming Magna Online Seminar Teaching an Online Course Developed by Others.


OC: What impact does the team approach to developing online courses have on the way the individual faculty member teaches and the way students learn?
Ko: This does depend on how the course design and development process takes place. Usually a team approach is used for courses that are going to be offered more than once or in multiple sections. This definitely lends consistency to what students in successive semesters will experience in the course. And you've got more resources, so potentially the presentation should be a little more sophisticated. Generally speaking, the team is going to be able to bring something more to the mix, and ideally the end product is going to be a richer, more consistent, more effective, and stronger course. I think the hard part is that the course is still going to be taught by faculty, and if the faculty member is not the one who is part of the original team, then there does remain this issue about how well the faculty member can fit his or her teaching style into a course that was created by a team. I'm not even talking about courses that are completely standardized, but obviously a team approach usually means that there are certain elements–modules, resources, assignments, or some part of the course used by all the faculty who are going to be teaching it. So then how does the instructor approach that? What is it like to teach a course you didn't create? What are the issues, and what does that mean for faculty and administrators? I think it's a challenge. You're lucky if you have a team who can work on this course together, but then in the end the course has to be taught.
OC: What advice do you have for online instructors teaching a course they had no part in creating?
Ko: Thoroughly familiarize yourself with the course you are going to teach, because if you don't understand the content, approach, and principles of that course, you will find it hard to be an effective instructor. Also find out what you can add or change in the course, whether that is your own commentary, additional resources, assignments, or discussion questions. Or it may be that your unique contribution will be in providing feedback and facilitating interaction in the class.


Great Value
With so many vital members of the online course team, why not invite them all? Magna Online Seminars are easy to set up in an auditorium, conference room, or small office. And the best part is, pay just one fee per site, no matter how many people attend. Each attendee gets all the information and interactivity of a large conference, without the outrageous travel expenses and registration fees.
Share/Bookmark

TLT Group Inc. New Hybrid Workshop this Summer! Using Classroom Assessment Techniques to Promote Student Learning (CATs)


Start June 01, 2010 02:00 PM Eastern
End June 18, 2010 03:00 PM Eastern
Location: Web access will be distributed by email
Spaces left: 95


Invite your colleagues to participate with you.
Special - New Individual Membership plus Workshop! - $200.00 (USD)
Become a member and register for the workshop at a discount.
TLT Group Individual Members & Subscriber Registration - $125.00 (USD)


For Members and Subscribers. We encourage you to convene a group for maximum benefit.
This summer The TLT Group is presenting a new hybrid version of a classic Online Workshop...

One of our most successful workshops, "Using Classroom Assessment Techniques to Promote Student Learning (CATs)", will be presented this June in a format that combines live sessions and downloadable archives. Digital archives (complete recordings) of three one-hour sessions originally presented in October 2009 will be made available for two weeks from June 1 until June 17th.

Also... on June 1, Steve Gilbert will host an online session with tips and suggestions for archive viewing.
On June 17, the original presenters will offer a live Q&A for all who have viewed the archives.
TLT Group subscribers and members receive discounted rates.


Barbara Millis, University of Texas San Antonio,

Ray Purdom, University of North Carolina Greensboro,
Douglas Eder, Emeritus, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Steve Gilbert, TLT Group


How classroom assessment techniques when carefully structured and monitored support the research on teaching and learning and prove very adaptable as “Low Threshold Applications (LTA) online.


"LIVE" Session June 1, 2010 2 pm Eastern Participants meet with Steve Gilbert to explore how best to use these Archives, especially when convening a group.


Outline of Session Archives: A research-based, theoretical foundation underlies the sessions. One summary of this foundation appears in the book “How People Learn,” edited by John Bransford et al. and published in the year 2000. This book summarizes important research undertaken during the immediately preceding Decade of the Brain and presents them as three principles.


1. Prior Knowledge: Students construct new knowledge based on what they already know (or don’t know).
2. Deep Foundational Knowledge: Students need a deep knowledge base and conceptual frameworks upon which to build and retain new ideas.
3. Metacognition: Learning is improved when students identify their own learning goals and monitor their own progress toward them. In other words, they learn better when they spend time reflecting about what they are learning.


Our three sessions will offer Low Threshhold Approaches that address these three principles.
Session 1 examines turn-key mechanisms that promote, and assess for, student use of what they already know in order to enhance learning of new material.
Session 2 offers several simple, research-based, pedagogical tools that precipitate deeper student understanding of material.
Session 3 focuses on devices that promote “thinking about thinking,” that is, the processes that foster reflecting on and reframing of ideas. Throughout the three sessions, the emphasis is on effective, simple pedagogies that both teach and assess simultaneously.


The second "live" session is a conversation with Barbara Millis, Ray Purdom, Douglas Eder, and Steve Gilbert, based on the questions the participants have submitted during the period that the archives are open and have been accessed.


All of the TLT Group’s online offerings include use of “low threshold” tools, examination of controversial issues, options for participants with a range of experience, and suggestions for assessment as you integrate what you’ve learned into your repertoire.


Participants for this workshop should sign-in 15 minutes early for tech instructions and to meet others in the group; they also have the option of remaining online for a half-hour follow-up discussion immediately after the workshop.
Share/Bookmark

Inside Higher Education: Getting To Green: An administrator pushes, on a shoestring budget, to move his university and the world toward a more sustainable equilibrium



Unit-fication By G. Rendell May 19, 2010 9:09 pm

I confuse easily. I 'm aware of that fact and, being aware of it, take solace when I learn of someone else who confuses as easily as I do.


Someone ostensibly named "Dan Barrett" apparently falls into the easily-confused category. According to an item in the Feedback section of an old NewScientist magazine (is that a contradiction in terms?), Barrett was sitting in an unspecified location in his house, reading the information (as one apparently does in locations unspecified but inferable) on a package of toilet paper. Daniel was puzzled by the fact that the packaging specified that each of eight rolls contained approximately 360 sheets, that each sheet was 124 x 110 millimeters in size, that the average roll length was 44.64 meters, and that the average total area for an entire package was 39.28 square meters. Barrett's response to this information? To consider it silly, to wonder whether others were using TP for some non-obvious purpose such as papering a wall, and to ask "why are they not using a more standard unit of measurement, such as the football field?"


Now I always thought that, as units go, the square meter (or metre, NewScientist being published in the UK) was about as standard as can be. Football fields, on the other hand, come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, depending on whether you're in the USA, Canada, Australia (or anywhere else where they play by Aussie rules), one of numerous places where they play one of the various games which have gone by the name of "Rugby", or the rest of the world.


The whole situation reminded me of one sort of question which always perplexes me at work. If I calculate that a certain sustainability-related initiative will reduce (or has reduced) Greenback's GHG emissions by a certain number of metric tons, I'm often asked to express that in cars taken off the road, or hamburgers not eaten, or trees planted. Now I understand that many people have difficulty visualizing a metric ton of CO2, and that they have an easy time visualizing a car or a burger or a tree. But the reason we have units of measurement is . . . ummmm . . . to measure. And to allow the measured comparison of two disparate objects or quantities. And even if I tell someone that a set of emissions eliminated is equivalent to the result of taking 100 cars off the road for a year, has meaningful measurement taken place? Is measured comparison going on? Is a sense of scale really being created?


So the GHG emissions reduction you achieved is the same as would be triggered by taking 100 average cars off the road for a year. How much CO2 does an average car produce in a year? Most people don't know. Most people hear "100 cars for a year" and discern from that a number and an object. But the object, for all its familiarity, doesn't imply anything meaningful. How many cars are there in the USA? The world? How much of the world's GHG emissions are created by cars anyways? If all the world's GHG emissions were to be generated by cars, how many cars would that take? And what portion of that is 100? And when we say "average", do we mean US average, North American average, global average, or something else? The statement "x metric tons of CO2" has meaning. The statement "equivalent to taking y cars off the road" does not. It has, at best, an appearance of meaning. In reality, however, it boils down pretty much the same as "a whole lot" or "not very much".


And anyway, it takes more cars than that to fill a football field. Unless it doesn't.
Share/Bookmark

Inside Higher Education Blog U: Technology and Learning - A space for conversation and debate about learning and technology


10 Questions for Discussing Menand


By Joshua Kim May 19, 2010 9:18 pm


This week, faculty and staff at my institution will be getting together to discuss Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University.


Thought I'd share with you some of the questions I came up with to help guide our discussion. Any suggestions that you have for discussion questions (or answers to the questions below) would be appreciated.


The questions:
1. "The university literature department is not especially well suited to the business of producing either interesting literary criticism or interesting literary critics". (page 110) Menand argues that what the Ph.D. program is good at is "cloning" the next generation of (humanities) professors. Do you agree with Menand's statement? Do you see an effort in your department to recruit young academics that break the mold, or challenge the status quo, of your discipline and department?

2. Menand writes, "The academic profession in some areas is not not reproducing itself so much as cloning itself" (page 153). What does Menand mean by this statement? What issues does he see with how new professors are produced, and does he offer any solutions that you find either compelling or problematic?

3. According to Menand, "It is the academic's job in a free society to serve the public culture by asking questions the public doesn't want to ask, investigating subjects it cannot or will not investigate, and accommodating voices it fails or refuses to accommodate." (page 158). How are we doing at this job? Can you point to specific instances where we, as academics, are paying back the academic freedom that we enjoy by challenging the larger (or campus) culture?

4. Today, approximately 22% of undergraduates major in business, while only 4% are English majors and 2% in history. As educators we tend to share the value that all students should have a broad, humanities based education (do we actually share this assumption?). How do these trends in undergraduate majors square with both our values and the realities of the new PhD generating graduate school structure?

5. Menand writes, "The world of knowledge production is a marketplace, but it is a very special marketplace, with its own practices, its own values, and its own rules" (page 158). Does this separateness of the academy that the author recognizes continue to serve the larger needs of students, payers and society? Or is the divide between the "knowledge production marketplace" and the larger market breaking down, particularly as funding (and endowments) erode and the demand to educate and prepare more students for the knowledge economy increases?

6. In the humanities the median time to receive a Ph.D. is 9 years. Menand argues that this process seems designed to create cheap teaching labor (ABDs) as opposed to qualified teachers (as grad students without a Masters degree will routinely teach across the U.S.). Should we follow Menand's suggestion to make the Ph.D. program easier to start and faster to finish, with new Ph.D.'s taking different jobs than the traditional tenure track route? Or will this only add to the problem?

7. The practice of requiring an undergraduate degree prior to a professional degree (in law, medicine, business etc.) is traced back to the 19th century and Harvard's President Eliot. The practice of "liberalization first, then specialization" defines our thinking about the modern liberal arts university. What do you see as the benefits and costs of this system that we have inherited? Are you involved in any initiatives (either in your own classes or in a larger sense) where theory and practice are combined in undergraduate education?

8. Menand writes that "The instinctive response of liberal educators is to pull up the drawbridge, to preserve college's separateness at any price. But maybe purity is the disease". (page 55) What do you think Menand is getting at in this sentence? How do Menand's views about the autonomy of academic work relate to efforts to challenge the status quo and evolve our institutions?

9. Menand notes that from 1945 to 1975 the number of undergraduates increased by 500% and graduate students by 900% (page 144), leading to a situation where we have more Ph.D.'s than the current demand for professors can accommodate. Is the solution to cut the number of graduate programs, and Ph.D.'s that are being created, or to do what Menand suggests and push Ph.D.'s into jobs outside of the academy?

10. Menand successfully straddles the worlds of academic success (English professor at Harvard) and a public intellectual (staff writer at the New Yorker). Should academics be trained, encouraged and rewarded to publish for nonspecialists and for a general audience?


Feel free to use any of these questions in your campus discussions of the Marketplace of Ideas.
Share/Bookmark

Inside Higher Education Web Audio Conference: Helping Your Faculty Land More Grants!

June 16, at 1 p.m. Eastern

Winning grants has never been more important – to faculty members and to their institutions. Yet many professors with great ideas for research, teaching and service have very poor grant-application skills.

On June 16, at 1 p.m. Eastern, Mary W. Walters will lead an Inside Higher Ed audio conference on concrete steps that colleges and universities can take -- whether theyare major forces in sponsored research or relative newcomers to the scene – to help their faculty members write more effective funding applications. Ms. Walters has worked with academics on grant proposals and other writing projects for more than 20 years.


Among the topics she will cover:
• Encouraging faculty members to see their proposals from the perspective of reviewers.
• The importance of context.
• Developing a grant-writing timeline.
• Helping faculty members – experts in their fields – to write with clarity.


The program will feature a 30-minute presentation and a 30-minute question-and-answer period. The entire program will last one hour.


The conference is ideal for:
• Grant-writing offices
• Offices of sponsored research
• Deans and department heads
• Provosts
• Faculty members who want to apply for grants


This audio conference, "Helping Your Faculty Land More Grants," costs $199 for a single telephone line; listen yourself or with a group around a conference table. (Institutions wishing to have multiple people participate from separate locations may need to purchase additional lines.) Register early -- through Wednesday, June 2 -- and the cost is only $149. Upon registering, you'll be e-mailed information about how to dial in. The day before the conference, we'll send you a PowerPoint that you can use to follow along with the presentation. This is an audio-only conference; you will not need to be connected to the Internet to participate.


About the presenter:
Mary W. Walters is a freelance writer and editor who works primarily with academics. She is the author of Write an Effective Funding Application: A Guide for Researchers and Scholars (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). The former awards facilitator at the University of Saskatchewan, she now lives in Toronto where she consults and gives workshops on effective grant-writing.
Share/Bookmark

The University of Texas at Austin Intellectual Entrepreneurship (IE): An Inter-Collegial Consortium


"University of Texas' Intellectual Entrepreneurship Program is a model for campuses across the country that seek to integrate civic engagement into arts and humanities education."
Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman


"IE is right in the center of all that I see as positive about the role of higher education today and the re-definition of what it means to be entrepreneurial and civically engaged."
Syracuse Chancellor Nancy Cantor


Sponsored by and part of the portfolio of the Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement (DDCE), Intellectual Entrepreneurship (IE) is an inter-collegial Consortium of the Colleges of Communication, Liberal Arts, Fine Arts, Natural Sciences, Engineering, Law, Education, Pharmacy, and the Schools of Information, Business, Public Affairs and Social Work. The mission of IE is to educate "citizen-scholars"--individuals who creatively utilize their intellectual capital as a lever for social good. IE is not a program, nor a compartmentalized academic unit or institute; it is an intellectual platform and educational philosophy for instigating learning across disciplinary boundaries, promoting diversity in higher education and generating collaborations between the academy and society. IE initiatives pertain to the undergraduate experience, graduate study, faculty research and the connections between the university and community.
Share/Bookmark

Needy Students Don’t Apply for Financial Aid, College Board Report Says & Connecting Students to Aid

Diverse Issues in Higher Education by Arelis Hernandez, May 20, 2010
 WASHINGTON – The financially neediest students are the least likely to apply for financial aid, according to a new study titled “The Financial Aid Challenge” by the College Board’s Advocacy and Policy Center.

Less than 60 percent of eligible community college students completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) compared with 77 percent of eligible students at four-year schools in the 2007-08 academic period. During that time, full-time enrollment at two-year schools increased 24 percent nationwide.

“The [report] highlights the startling fact that millions of dollars are left on the table each year by eligible students who just aren’t applying,” said College Board President Gaston Caperton, who added that the report is part of a series on community colleges the organization plans to release. Caperton, College Board officials, and community college experts announced the report’s release in downtown Washington on Wednesday.

Two-year schools educate more than half of all students in higher education—primarily low-income, first-generation and minority students who often lack basic financial literacy, said Dr. George Boggs, president and CEO of the American Association of Community Colleges.

“To see so many students who could be qualifying and are not shows a breakdown in the student aid system,” said Boggs, who also applauded the federal government’s move last year to simplify the FAFSA form and process.

But simplification needs to happen at the institutional level as well, said Marc Herzog, chancellor of Connecticut Community Colleges. Most two-year students and their parents are mystified by the financial jargon and without clear information about their options they often remain clueless.

When community college students don’t receive financial aid, they are forced to attend school part-time or work more than 20 hours, the report said, which reduces their chances of completing a degree and jeopardizes national goals for degree completion.

Accessing the financial aid office is a challenge for students taking evening classes or for those who don’t navigate college well, said College Board Vice President Ronald Williams.

“When it comes to financial aid within the institution we tend to wait for students to arrive and then we react to them. In many ways, we look for ways not to provide services,” said Williams, a former community college president. “We need to be less reactive and more proactive.”

If financial aid isn’t a school’s priority, the office is often tucked away and underresourced, adding to the difficulty for students who don’t speak English well or are wary of providing personal information to the government, experts say.

In Connecticut, Herzog — a self-described recovering financial aid director — decided on a centralized financial aid services model consisting of six financial aid and technical staff members that coordinate financial aid for 12 community colleges from the system office.

Along with providing daily support for financial aid officers at individual schools and aligning all their policies, the bureau is the technical backbone of their massive internal data system that manages student records and streamlines daily processes, according to Herzog.

Other strategies, such as providing free checking accounts to students from local banks and packaging all applicants as full-time students, initially has resulted in significant increase in applicants and saved the system up to $2 million in salaries and administrative expenses, Herzog said.

For cash-strapped community colleges in this economy, the price tag on a new technological infrastructure could be expensive, but Herzog said the benefits outweigh the short term costs. The economy, he said, is a perfect excuse for investing in efficiency.

“We’ve had an 18 percent increase in student applicants while I got $50 million less,” Herzog said, adding he’d rather have teachers in a classroom than clerical workers filing aid papers.

Report authors made recommendations to fill financial aid service gaps that include offering bilingual services, offering extended hours, using online media, building partnerships with secondary schools and community organizations and linking financial aid to enrollment or registration.

The report also describes other examples of best practices in California, New York and Kentucky schools. But financial aid officers know one primary hurdle for them is the lack of resources available to help deal with the revamped student aid reform regulations.

The historic investment in financial aid comes with its share of “complex and labor-intensive” rules that squeeze administrators out of time and sanity, according to Haley Chitty, spokesperson for the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

“Financial aid administrators lack the resources to do a lot of counseling outreach because they are focused on making sure the school is compliant with Title IV regulations,” Chitty said. “There is just not enough time and manpower to give a lot of these students the attention they need.”

Although he agrees with the report’s recommendations and examples, Chitty said the number of students applying and the number that are eligible are both at record levels.

“With record numbers applying, a whole host of regulations to be implemented and with community colleges hard hit with the fewest resources, it’s not easy,” Chitty said. “But there is an opportunity for schools to use technology to be innovative to find ways to do more with less. In some ways, there is no other option.”

SANDRA M. PHOENIX
Program Director
HBCU Library Alliance
404.592.4820
1438 West Peachtree Street NW
Suite 200
Atlanta, GA 30309
Toll Free: 1.800.999.8558 (Lyrasis)
Fax: 404.892.7879
Honor the ancestors, honor the children.

Register now http://www.hbculibraries.org/html/meeting-form.html  for the October 24-26, 2010 HBCU Library Alliance 4th Membership Meeting and the "Conference on Advocacy" pre-conference in Montgomery, AL. The Pre-Conference and Membership meeting are open to directors and other librarians.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Inside Higher Ed May 20, 2010
WASHINGTON – Millions of dollars in federal financial aid go unclaimed each year by eligible low-income students at community colleges, according to the inaugural report from the College Board’s new Advocacy & Policy Center.


The study notes that community college students are less likely than their four-year counterparts to complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. During the 2007-8 academic year, 57.8 percent of Pell Grant-eligible community college students applied for federal financial aid, while 76.8 percent of eligible students at public four-year institutions did so.


Ronald Williams, vice president of the College Board, told a group of educators gathered for the report’s release that boosting the number of community college students receiving federal financial aid was critical to the “completion agenda” that the Obama administration and numerous advocacy groups have embraced with the goal of drastically improving graduation rates at two-year institutions.



The failure to fill out a FAFSA and therefore to qualify for financial aid can negatively affect students' ability to complete college, the report notes. For example, a student might choose to attend community college part-time, or work more than 20 hours a week while studying full-time. Numerous studies show that students who attend part-time or work while attending college are less likely to complete a degree.


George Boggs, president of the American Association of Community Colleges, described as a "breakdown in the system" the fact that so many students qualify for aid but do not apply for it. Students are shortchanged by community colleges, he noted, when they do not receive consistent, early and accurate information about their financial aid options before enrolling. College officials, he said, should focus on improving the financial literacy of both students and parents.


Among other suggestions for remedying this financial illiteracy, the report recommends that community colleges “involve families of students when providing financial aid materials and activities,” “provide bilingual services and materials,” and “link financial aid application and followup with college enrollment or registration.”


Williams, former president of Prince George's Community College, said that financial aid offices need to be more “proactive” than “reactive,” noting that many help students through the aid process only if they ask for assistance. Debt counseling, he added, is an important part of this process that needs to be addressed early on, especially for low-income students, who may be more reluctant to borrow or take on debt to pay for their college education.


Williams acknowledged, however, that some groups of community college students may distrust government agencies that ask students to provide personal information in order to qualify for aid. In these cases, he suggests that community colleges work with community organizations that serve minority and immigrant communities and use them as a “broker” -- since they are perceived as a trusted, non-government source -- to relay relevant financial aid information to these groups.


The report highlights numerous examples of community colleges that have made changes to their financial aid structures with success. The Connecticut Community College System, for example, streamlined its financial aid practices and regulations across its 12 institutions about a decade ago.


Marc Herzog, chancellor of the system, noted that the system now uses the FAFSA alone to determine aid eligibility instead of the FAFSA plus 12 different institution-specific applications. The reduction in paperwork has simplified the process and encouraged more students to apply for aid, he said. Among other changes, he said, the colleges also adopted the same “satisfactory academic progress” requirement for students who receive aid and those who do not, whereas most institutions have two different standards. This change, he said, lessens the burden on institutions to determine continuing eligibility for financial aid, allowing financial aid officials to concentrate on getting students aid in the first place.


Since the system streamlined its financial aid operations and created a centralized aid office for its 12 institutions in 2001, it has seen “the number of students applying for and receiving aid more than double at a time when enrollment has grown by 25 percent.” Last academic year, 63 percent of the system’s students applied for federal aid, while only 42.5 percent of community college students nationwide did so.
— David Moltz


Share/Bookmark