Younger, wealthier students pick community college, bringing expectations

By: Paul Fain
Via: Inside Higher Ed



Community colleges are hot these days, and not just with photo-op seeking politicians. They’re an increasingly popular choice for 18-22 year-olds from the upper middle class, thanks to cheap tuition, a career focus, smoother transfer options and growing public respect for the sector’s academic chops.

Nationwide, 22 percent of college students with annual family incomes over $100,000 attended community colleges last year, up from 16 percent four years ago, according to a study by Sallie Mae.

“Community college gradually is gaining wider acceptance as the default option out of high school,” said Stephen G. Katsinas, director of the University of Alabama’s Education Policy Center.

Relatively affluent young students are typically better-prepared academically and have a good chance of earning a degree. They are also more likely to attend full-time, require less remediation than their peers and can be cheaper for community colleges to educate.

But this group is also demanding, as traditional-age students want a full campus experience with amenities like fitness centers and extracurricular activities, which can mean new buildings and strained student service budgets. They are also more likely to seek out counselors, experts said.

“You have more students coming to our campuses who see themselves transferring,” said James Jacobs, president of Macomb Community College in Michigan, and who sometimes view community college as a “stepping stone.”

Raritan Valley Community College, which is located in a suburban swath of northern New Jersey, has welcomed a surge of young students. Many of those students would have attended a nearby four-year college in the past, administrators said, such as Rutgers University or Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Over the five years before 2011, Raritan Valley’s total enrollment went up by 32 percent. But the number of students under 21 years old increased by 49 percent, from 2,472 to 3,675, while older students accounted for a much smaller portion of the growth. (See table here.) Full-time students are also gaining ground in the mix.

Casey Crabill, the college’s president, said the college hasn’t studied which four-year institutions students are passing up to come to Raritan Valley. They know, however, that more students are arriving from two wealthy counties.

Historically about two-thirds of Raritan Valley’s students have come from Hunterdon and Somerset Counties — which are among the top 10 most affluent counties in the U.S. — and that proportion hasn’t changed as overall enrollment has grown.

“Our market share from those counties is reaching deeper into the high school graduate markets,” Crabill said.

The recession has played a big role in Raritan Valley’s recent enrollment bump. “A lot of Wall Street lives in our counties,” said Crabill, and many of those families suddenly had less money in 2008, making community college a more appealing option.

New Jersey’s public universities have increased their tuition in response to state budget cuts, but they remain a cheaper option than most private colleges. The state has also seen a large population increase in the traditional college-age bracket, which means more competition for slots at public institutions, particularly at the increasingly selective flagship, Rutgers.

The competition is contributing to the growing number of young students at Raritan Valley, Crabill said. “It’s like a wave.”

New Jersey’s experience is not unique, Katsinas said. The research center estimates that the total number of 18- to 24-year-olds nationwide increased by one million between 2009 and 2012.

“A lot of folks in the middle class are taking a look at community colleges,” said Walter G. Bumphus, president of the American Association of Community Colleges. “The increases are significant.”

Fielding Teams

Raritan Valley has had plenty of recent success stories, including students who have transferred to Cornell University, the University of California at Berkeley and other high-profile institutions. Crabill said the publicity has helped convince more traditional students that the two-year college is a good choice.

“Our profile peaked at the same time” that the the recession began, she said.

The college has taken many steps to respond to the changing demographics on its main campus. To improve student amenities, college officials remodeled the cafeteria and expanded and updated the fitness center. The college also created a first year experience office and related programming. A new student life and leadership center is in the works, with a related fund-raising campaign launched in 2010.

The increase in full-time students has helped to offset those costs, said Crabill, because part-time students use student services, too, without paying full-time tuition.

So while the Obama Administration talks up job training programs at community colleges, many of which are aimed at helping workers update their skills, Raritan Valley has added some of the trappings of a four-year college.

To wit, the college recently added men’s and women’s varsity soccer teams, and a club ice hockey team. It’s a big change for a community college that has often struggled to field teams.

“I don’t think we’ve had to forfeit a game this year,” Crabill said, “which was not our tradition.”

Older students are still a strong, visible population at Raritan Valley. Jill Marie Winters is one of them. She’s in her fifties, and is working toward an associate degree in social work. Winters said she sees plenty of students like her on campus. But she likes going to class with young students, and interacting with them through Phi Theta Kappa, the honor society for students at two-year colleges.

“I just love the young kids,” Winters said. “I think they like being around us.”

Crabill said the college predicted its enrollment growth, but was surprised a bit by the numbers of students who are just out of high school. And while those students expect more campus life options, the increased energy has been a plus.

“Young students are demanding and that’s what makes it fun,” she said.

By Peggy Lowe
via npr.org


Recruiting doctors to live and work in rural America is a chronic problem. Most health centers try to attract workers with big salaries and expensive homes.

Shots previously reported that one center in Maine was trying to lure medical students to the countryside for their final two years with the hope that they stick around.

The Ashland Health Clinic, a tiny hospital in southwest Kansas, is trying a different tack — a reverse-recruitment model. It’s called mission-focused medicine, and it’s based on serving problems most commonly found in third-world countries.

Ashland, population 855, sits about a five-hour drive south of Kansas City. It’s one of the last outposts on the Kansas open range, where buffalo still really roam along the rolling, dusty plains. There’s no gas station, unless you count the pump at the farmer’s co-op that uses dial-up for credit card approval. The nearest Starbucks is 160 miles away.

The Ashland clinic has 24 beds. The next closest center is 50 miles north, in Dodge City. (Yeah, the same one from those old cowboy movies.)

So when Benjamin Anderson interviewed for the clinic’s CEO job in 2009, he says the board chairman was exceedingly blunt.

Anderson says the chairman told him, “Ben, our facilities are 55 years old. Our finances are challenged. Our morale is low. Turnover is up. We’ve been without an administrator for six months. We’ve been without a doctor for seven or eight months. We really need this facility in this community. And if we don’t have this facility, we’ll lose our school. And if we don’t have our hospital and our school, this will become a ghost town very quickly.”

That pitch clicked for Anderson. He gave up his physician recruiter job in Dallas and moved with his wife out here to become Ashland’s new CEO.

“I’ve always had to have a job that matters,” he says. “I have to have a position that I know it’s not just a paycheck.”

Anderson is now well known on Ashland’s Main Street. But he knew he needed doctors for the hospital to succeed, and he knew he had to offer something different than the thousands of small towns he was competing with.

So he came up with a novel plan. He offers potential candidates eight weeks off to do missionary work overseas. Because he’s found that a doctor who is willing to sleep on a cot in the Amazon or treat earthquake victims in Haiti is ready to serve in rural Kansas. He calls it mission-focused medicine.

“When you recruit a mission-focused provider, they want to see the ghettos,” he says. “They want to know that there’s no Spanish-speaking provider in more than a one-hour drive. They want to see houses that are falling down, widows that are uncared for. They want to know that there’s need and that by them coming there, they would fill a disparity that would otherwise not be filled. So we reversed it.”

It worked. Last July, Dr. Dan Shuman and his family moved here from the Austin, Texas, area. The difference between here and all the other needy areas was his ability to continue his missionary work in Haiti and Mexico during his eight weeks off. But Shuman says Ashland’s own challenges were equally attractive.

“When you’re primary focus is sort of a mission-based focus, when you get into things in order to try to relieve suffering or work toward eliminating disparities,” Shuman says, “then you want to know about those things. It’s appealing to see opportunities.”

Studies suggest that finding primary care providers in rural areas is at crisis levels. More medical students are specializing, so general practitioners are very hard to find. And those who can deal with the lower pay and isolation in rural areas? Even harder. So Anderson raised the bar by shooting for a higher cause. At every staff meeting, he’s part cheerleader, part chaplain.

Indeed, things are looking up for Ashland. In addition to Shuman, Anderson has recruited a nursing director. And that doc who slept on the cot in the Amazon was recently in Ashland for interviews.

Peggy Lowe is a reporter for Harvest Public Media.

Over the past two months, we have been engaged in a conversation about the future of jobs with economic development practitioners at the TEDC and IEDC conferences.

Now, we’d like to create an open forum to continue this dialogue beyond the conference setting. In the comments section of this post, you’re invited to respond to the following questions, or pose additional questions for your peers.

How will the “future of jobs” change how you approach economic development?

What mechanisms have you created to support corporations and freelance workers in your community?

Below you’ll find a video of Jon’s recent IGNITE presentation from IEDC’s Leadership Summit in San Antonio. The IGNITE structure allows speakers 5 minutes total to present in the form of 20 slides, with 15 seconds per slide. A brief overview of the presentation follows the slide show.

The Future of Jobs from GIS Planning on Vimeo.

This is a discussion about the future of jobs. The idea of what a job is has changed throughout history (and continues to change). Farmers and craftsmen have always had trades, or livelihoods. Since the industrial revolution, a fundamental shift in the nature of jobs has occurred; individuals are employed by entities (corporations) and in return for their labor (9-5), they are compensated (wages) and receive benefits (healthcare, etc.). When unemployment is high, as it has been in the aftermath of the recent recession, we must ask ourselves who should create jobs: the public sector? the private sector? Can the economy continue to grow, even if jobs are not being created? (answer: yes).

The economy grows when value is created. Corporations can create value by increasing productivity (but not necessarily increasing employment), and independent contractors can create value outside of a traditional employee-employer relationship. If we take this thought experiment to its logical extreme, could there be corporations without people on the horizon? Will trade guilds become an organizing structure for independent contractors in a variety of professions?

If jobs are no longer the most useful or accurate measure of economic development success, how can practitioners best promote economic vitality in their communities? Are there mechanisms by which cities, regions, and states can offer resources to corporations and freelancers that will support their ability to create value, regardless of hiring trends or employment status?

We invite you to participate in this conversation in the comments section below.

via Morning Edition, NPR

As the Mayor’s Conference takes place in Washington D.C., city governments are dealing with severe problems at home — from high unemployment to funding cuts. Steve Inskeep talks to Mick Cornett, the Mayor of Oklahoma City, about how his city has managed to avoid some of these problems.

via The Baltimore Sun


Baltimore Inner Harbor from Federal Hill – photo by ktylerconk on Flickr

Frustrated by Maryland’s high rate of health disparities, state leaders are proposing a new attack — one more commonly associated with economic development. Gov. Martin O’Malley’s 2012-2013 budget will include funding to create Health Enterprise Zones, where doctors and community groups in areas with large health disparities, such as Baltimore, could add medical and support services for minorities. Tax credits and other financial incentives would be available to spur interest.

The plan is designed to save lives and healthcare dollars, according to Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown, who last summer formed a work group on disparities led by Dr. E. Albert Reece, dean of the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

“Maryland has world-class hospitals, top medical schools and one of the highest rates of primary-care physicians per capita, and yet we continue to see disparities in health care and outcomes among Maryland’s racial and ethnic communities. It’s clear that a lack of access to primary care in many communities is a significant factor driving these disparities,” Brown said, adding that funding is in the governor’s budget proposal, which has yet to be released.

According to state and national data, the disparities are many: In Maryland, the infant mortality rate among blacks is almost three times that for whites, the incidence of new HIV infections among blacks is almost 12 times that of whites, and Hispanics are more than four times as likely not to have health insurance as whites. Moreover, nearly twice as many African-Americans suffer from diabetes as whites, and hospital admission rates were three times higher for blacks with asthma and 41/2 times as high for blacks with hypertension. Treating such illnesses is costly, according to the work group, which cited data showing nearly $230 billion in direct medical costs could have been saved from 2003 to 2006 if there were no racial and ethnic health disparities.

The proposed program would work something like economic enterprise zones, where businesses receive subsidies to create jobs and activity in certain areas. The health zones program would be a pilot, available in two or three geographic areas. New and existing primary-care practitioners could receive loan assistance repayment; income, property or hiring tax credits; and assistance in installing health information and other technology. Subsidies would be capped, likely in the tens of thousands of dollars. Local health departments might get involved in recruiting participants.

Brown said he would push to expand the program statewide if it proves successful in a couple of years — not a given, considering the logistical and cultural complexity of the problems. For example, residents of some neighborhoods don’t have easy access to grocery stores that sell fresh fruit and vegetables, or don’t visit the doctor until there is an emergency. Reece said many groups have tackled disparities, but the work group wanted to focus its attention on chronic diseases responsible for 80 percent of health costs. They drilled down to a few key maladies that often have “ripple” effects. They include diabetes, hypertension and asthma.

“We decided to identify … areas where we thought we could make an effective impact within a reasonable time frame,” he said. The health enterprise zones approach is unique, he believes. Work group members got the idea from a similar program built around children’s needs in the community of Harlem in New York City. Program applicants are likely to come predominantly from rural and urban area where disparities are most pronounced.

In Baltimore, studies show a 20-year gap in life expectancy between upper-income, predominantly white neighborhoods and poorer, predominantly minority neighborhoods. Recently, city health department officials began working with community leaders in 55 neighborhoods to identify the most pressing health needs and develop plans to tackle them. The state’s zones would complement these efforts, Reece said. His work group also proposed other elements to promote health and track outcomes.

The group suggested Health Innovation Prizes with small financial rewards and public recognition for individuals and groups that improve health and well-being in their community. The group also recommended tracking disparity data for programs that already exist for primary care physicians and hospitals. Incentives and penalties assessed through these programs could eventually be linked to disparities.

Reece said the prize and the enterprise zones are two things Maryland can do now to help reduce disparities in a few key geographic and health areas. If legislation to create the zones is passed during the current legislative session, the details will be worked out by the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Already, Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, department secretary, supports the move: “The creation of Health Enterprise Zones will help communities target resources to have the most powerful impact.”

meredith.cohn@baltsun.com

An interactive graphic developed by the American Human Development Project and the United Way allow you to see, by county, a dashboard of indicators of health, educational attainment, income, and civic participation. What makes this visualization particularly informative is that the user can manipulate educational attainment levels and see how changing that variable affects the other metrics.

For example, here is the first screen when Bastrop County, Texas, is selected.

Then, a pre-set scenario from the menu in the bottom left corner to “All up one educational category” was selected. Note the changes in median personal earnings, poverty rate, and unemployment rate. Users can also manipulate the orange bars under each educational attainment level on the left manually rather than selecting a pre-set scenario.