Podcast
Podcast
- 21 Oct 2020
- Managing the Future of Work
Community colleges: AACC head Walter Bumphus on adversity and opportunity
Joe Fuller: Even before Covid-19, American community colleges were facing mounting challenges in the form of declining enrollment, funding shortages, and the need to better align with employers. The pandemic has increased the strain on these institutions and disproportionately affected the populations they serve. As the primary advocacy group for the nation’s over 1,000 community colleges and their 12 million students, the American Association of Community Colleges is at the center of the action. Can the AACC help community colleges make the necessary changes to balance the needs of employers, students, and communities? Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast. I’m your host, Harvard Business School professor and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. Dr. Walter Bumphus, President and CEO of the AACC, joins me to discuss workforce training, remote learning, and government funding. He will also address how community colleges have confronted the Covid crisis and the challenges they face going forward. Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast, Dr. Bumphus. Thanks for joining us.
Walter Bumphus: Thank you, Joe. It’s great to be with you all today.
Fuller: Doctor, I think that most people have a general sense of the community college system and what it’s about. But the role community colleges play relative to four-year institutions and the role of the American Association of Community Colleges that you run may be less familiar to them. Could you just give us all a little background to set the table for our conversation today?
Bumphus: I’d be delighted to do that. Perhaps the most important thing I can say, and it’s a shameless plug, but we’re actually celebrating our 100th anniversary this year. We’re very proud of that distinction. We serve a little over 1,000 community colleges across the country—1,051 to be exact. And we have them located in all 50 states. We serve about 6.8 million students on the credit side of the house, as we call it, and another 5 million in noncredit workforce programs. Community colleges cost about a third of the cost of public higher education as it relates to in-state universities. On average, our tuition and fees are $3,730, and generally speaking, for a four-year state or public university, it is $10,440, just to give you the context of that. In regards to the students we serve, 29 percent are first-generation college students, as was I when I started my higher education, so I relate to that very well. Single parents, 15 percent. And then, generally, most of our students are working adults. Sixty-two percent of our full-time students work. And 72 percent of our part-time students are working. So most of our students are carrying not only a load of classes but also working assignments as well. And that’s before the pandemic. And that’s why the pandemic had such a negative impact on the students we serve. Not only did it hit them from the standpoint of their ability to take classes, but most of them lost their jobs, and that was like a double whammy for them.
Fuller: Let’s go back to one thing you said, just so we make sure everyone understands. You talked about the difference between employment-oriented training, certificates, things like that, versus credit courses. Could you just talk a little bit about that distinction for our audience?
Bumphus: The distinction being primarily that those students who come to us with the intention of spending two years with us, generally, and then transferring on to a four-year regional or state university are the ones I was talking about in that credit-class category. And then those students who really come to us with a goal of going right into the world of work or job improvement are the students that are in the noncredit or part-time category.
Fuller: So let’s go back to, you started mentioning, the demographics of the enrollment at your member institutions. Now, we are talking about: Students are more likely to be underrepresented minorities; as you mentioned, almost 30 percent are first time to attend some college; and you also, of course, have a very large percentage of working learners—people who are employed while they’re trying to go to school. What kind of challenges does that pose, and how do you try to build curriculum and the surrounding support necessary to enable those people to succeed?
Bumphus: Our colleges generally try to be as flexible as they can, because they realize we have a large number of our students that are coming to us as working learners. And for that reason, you have classes that will start at 7:00 in the morning and sometimes go as late as 10:00 and 11:00 at night. And that way, a student is able to build a class schedule, if you will, around their work schedule. And we try to make sure we’re providing lots of opportunities for students to work and learn. And we do that through a number of different programs as well. But that’s why, when you go visit a community college campus, you’ll see as many people there at 7:00 in the morning as you’ll see at 7:00 at night. And those classrooms stay busy.
Fuller: Now, you mentioned how Covid has been affecting the population. A lot of people have lost their jobs. Of course, a lot of people are looking for positions to try to get back in the labor force, which has got to be disrupting the ability of those working learners to stick with their programs and continue their enrollment at your school.
Bumphus: You’re absolutely correct, Joe. It’s been a challenge for a lot of reasons. Unfortunately, during this Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve seen some of the worst of the worst as it relates to that—not only a digital divide, but also just a human-rights divide and the great injustices that have been done in some of our communities that our colleges probably serve more than any other segment of higher education. And to that end, it’s more than just about jobs. I had an opportunity to visit with faculty and students during the course of the last six months, and we had some interesting discussions with them. From a faculty standpoint, lots of challenges. We’re trying to make sure our students had, 1) technology, and then once they had the technology, 2) access to the technology, because broadband and Internet were such challenges for many of our underrepresented groups. And that same thing held true for even some of our faculty that had been assigned to work remotely. And so those were some of the big challenges we had. And when you start to look at access to broadband Internet, it became especially acute for some of our rural colleges. And 60 percent of our colleges are rural and are small. And even if they’re not rural, some of the smaller colleges had some of these same challenges. And to that end, one of the other interesting things that happened that I was especially sensitive to, where we had students that were telling us that they did not want to be in classrooms remotely where they had to use Zoom, because they did not want to have their peer students and others have access to looking into their homes because of their personal circumstances. Many of our students—and I’m sure you can imagine, that would be the case in multigenerational homes—and again, much like myself, I was telling someone the other day that I wouldn’t have wanted anyone necessarily with a camera in my house, either. I’m from a family of 10 kids, and we would not have had a room we could have set aside with access for Internet services and having it be prepared to have a class or teach a class even. So I get that, myself. But those were some of the challenges our students have. But even after that, what we found that we went from having about 9 percent of our classes being taught online, if you will, to then probably 99 percent. And we had to make sure that our faculty members were up to the task. And we’ve got some of the best faculty members in the world. I’ve had the pleasure and the privilege of working at two major universities—University of Texas at Austin and Murray State University in Kentucky—and I’ve been in community colleges for the last 40 years, and not a lot of difference in that regards in terms of teaching. But many faculty members, great faculty members, have just not had training of teaching online. And it’s more than just putting the camera in the classroom. And that’s one of the things we’ve had to prepare our faculty for: to be effective teachers online. And they’ve risen to the challenge, many of them have. And from what I’m hearing today, they’re doing very well and our students are succeeding. But the other challenge we had, Joe, was just providing laptops to our students. And while we were already dealing with some issues like food insecurity, housing insecurity, providing laptops and Internet to our students has really continued to be a challenge, because most of our colleges are online for this fall as well. And I’m sure you’ve heard stories of where some colleges were actually providing students with access to their parking lot so they would have access to the Internet. The most bizarre story I heard was in one community, where they were literally putting Internet service near stoplights, so students could hover around the stoplight and have access to the Internet. But that’s just how desperately students wanted to get their higher education.
Fuller: It seems that this Covid is laid right on top of a couple of other longer-term challenges facing all of higher ed, but including the community college network, starting with a decline in the absolute size of the population of people of an age when they’re likely to be enrolling in post-secondary education—so a demographic squeeze in terms of a population of potential students and a flat, or in real dollars, declining support coming from state governments for institutions of higher education. That kind of “dual threat,” sometimes it’s called. Could you talk a little bit about the implications of that and how you think Covid is going to play into those phenomena?
Bumphus: This fall we’re in constant communication with our college presidents, and we’re working now with the National Governor’s Association, trying to get a sense of what they’re going to do, because it has great implications for many of our community colleges who are largely state funded and tuition funded. And we’ve got a number of our colleges who are very fearful that this fall, with declining revenues in states—from taxes and so forth, sales taxes—that you’re going to find decreased funding coming from the state. With that, our enrollments are declining, so you’re getting fewer tuition dollars. So you’ve got a decline in your tuition money, a decline in your state revenue. That’s tough. Generally speaking, most community colleges have a three-legged stool—your state funding, your tuition and fees, and then local taxes are something coming in from whomever is overseeing the dollars in your state—it could be a mayor, it could be a county supervisor or whatever. But the bottom line is, most colleges are anticipating—even with the same number of students—having fewer resources this fall and spring semesters. So they’re going to have to be making some really tough decisions.
Fuller: That sounds like the deck is really stacked against your member institutions. What do you think are some solutions to that dilemma? Is it just going to be simply a matter of states reprioritizing and making sure there’s adequate funding for higher ed, which is kind of always the prayer people have, but doesn’t seem to be something one can be too hopeful about, looking at the history.
Bumphus: We’re in a situation right now where I think, truthfully, mayors and governors have a lot of competing priorities. And how are they going to solve them without at least putting higher education on the block? But then, they’ve got to make some really tough decisions. Do they fund higher education and not fund the police or other social services? And those are challenges I would not want to have. And I think, for the most part, governors try to do the right thing and make the decisions that they have to make to address those competing priorities, as I just referenced. And we’re hoping—and it’s not just community colleges by the way—but we’re hoping along with our four year university colleagues that we’re all going to maybe get a larger share of the pie. And the pie is really a zero-sum game at the end of the day, because you just can’t expand the pie without a state having more resources.
Fuller: Of course, a lot of your students are relying on either Pell Grants, granted by the federal government, or student loans financed by the federal government. How do you feel about the adequacy of those programs to support the needs of your students and working learners and whether or not those resources can be a source of a solution in some of the economic binds that you’ll be facing?
Bumphus: Well, the Pell Grants are something that we don’t have to continue to even make a compelling case about that. Most legislators and congressional folks understand that, they get that. That’s never something we have to make a really great argument for, because most of them have seen the magic that happens with this kind of funding in a college or in universities. Universities rely on those kinds of funds as much as we do, and with loans even more so. But at the same time, we’ve just got to continue to make that case and continue to talk about this, just not a loan or a grant for students. These are literally people we’re serving. And whenever they can start to see the lives that are impacted by the lack of funding for higher education, I think they start to get a message about that and the impact that it’s having. And I think that’s the job that my office has to do, or my association, or the other associations that represent other aspects of higher education. And then the college leaders, we’ve got to continue to paint that picture of that student that’s impacted. And I think most legislators and other congressional leaders understand that.
Fuller: What about raising the amount available in Pell Grant or broadening the number of programs that are candidates to receive student loans? Of course, those definitions—the amount associated with Pell Grants and the types of programs that you can borrow money to take from federal governments—those definitions been locked in stone for a long time.
Bumphus: Joe, they have, but I’ll share with you the sentiments that I’m hearing from some of our presidents. And in fact, I used to think the same way on occasion. Every time we raised a Pell Grant or opportunities to borrow money, it certainly helps students, and it goes into the hands of our students. But the tuition they pay perhaps might stay the same or slightly more. But increasing the Pell Grant doesn’t necessarily help colleges who are trying to keep their doors open. If you understand the point I’m making, these are great grants for students—and my God, do they need it? Yes, they do. But I think we’ve got to also come up with something similar to what we did with the first CARES package, where we’re doing more to keep these colleges, helping them keep their doors open. They’re going to be increased costs. And I am amazed when I hear the cost of sanitizers, Plexiglas, and other things needed to just combat Covid and keeping our faculty, staff, and administrators safe as they do their jobs. And that’s an expense that won’t necessarily be covered by Pell Grants or student loans and that can only be covered by some state or local appropriation. And we’re hoping that we can get a more of that. And that’s one of the things we’re working with the National Governor’s Association on. And I’m hoping that we’ll see some benefit there down the road.
Fuller: Well, certainly between those costs of keeping facilities open and keeping everyone as safe as possible, layered on top of all these extraordinary expenses related to distance learning, it’s a really been a double whammy for a lot of institutions of higher learning and, of course, for K–12 systems as well. Let’s go back to the longer-term mission though. And I want to come back to something you mentioned earlier, which is the track by which young people are entering community college, putting in two years, often in some form of general studies program in order to matriculate to a four-year institution. How effective is that system? And are we satisfied with the rate of matriculation from community colleges into four-year institutions and the ongoing success of those students who make that transfer? Are they getting all the way through the system?
Bumphus: Unfortunately, our colleges have not done very well in this regard. In fact, the numbers of students who transfer and graduate from a community college and then transfer to a four-year institution has been woefully inadequate, in my opinion. That’s an area that we haven’t improved on in the last 20 or 30 years, I would say. But you have to come back and look at how many of the students that enter our colleges plan to transfer and develop a program of studies where they can transfer in two years. And that’s where a lot of assessments are made. If you look at that rate over a four- or five- or six-year period, it gets considerably better. When you’ve got 75 percent of our students, in some cases, attending part-time, they’re not going to graduate in two years; that’s just not logical. But when you start to extend the time, the numbers get much better. Now, one of the things I have found is, when they stay with us, they’ve graduated, and then they transfer, they tend to perform at or on a higher level than those students who start at a university. So our graduates do very, very well in regards to how they’re performing. But the challenge is the amount of time it takes. And that’s largely due to the fact that many of our students are part-time. And also the fact that, if you’re very honest about it, many of the students that come into our colleges don’t come as a part of the top 5 percent of their graduating class. If you’re coming to a community college, so long as you finish your high school curriculum, you’re accepted. And so when they get to us, they oftentimes are having to take developmental courses or remedial courses, which can add as much as a year or 18 months to their matriculation at the community college. And our colleges tend to be very patient about that and wanting to meet the needs of the students. You know, Joe, one of the things that we’re looking at AACC this year—and probably for the foreseeable future—is trying to extend what I call the three pillars of community colleges: access, which we did extraordinarily well since the inception of our colleges; probably in the last 20 or 30 years, we started focusing on student success and, thus, focusing not on only in terms of the intake process, but what can we do to get those students through our colleges and graduating at a higher level; and now we’re starting to focus on equity and taking a look at those students who come in our doors, how many of them are not only succeeding, but then getting jobs and finishing degrees and programs that provide family-sustaining wages.
Fuller: Walter, you mentioned the need often for students who are coming into your community colleges to get some remedial work, some bolstering, it could be in language arts, math, other topics to kind of make up for some deficiencies upstream from you in the K–12 process. What’s your experience of that? And how are we allocating the burden of giving young people the basic skills in order to be ready to learn at a more advanced level?
Bumphus: That’s something we’re working on currently, Joe. Over the last seven years, we have been having joint meetings with the ASA organization—that’s the superintendent’s organization. And we have joint meetings between our superintendents and community college presidents and chancellors, where we bring together 10 to 12 folks from each group, and we talk about these very issues: What more can we do to ensure that students are graduating at a higher level and are then entering our education? And we like to focus on those students who are entering community colleges and the things we can do to have a better handoff, if you will. And one of the things we’re looking at right now is: What more can we do in dual enrollment or concurrent enrollment and continue to make those students who are in those programs more successful so when they graduate from the high school, they graduate with as many, in some cases, as 24 credits or, in the best-case scenario—and there are a lot of those happening now—where students are graduating from high school and also finishing up their associate’s degree at the same time.
Fuller: I was just going to say for our listeners, that dual enrollment is when someone’s still enrolled in high school, yet simultaneously enrolled in a higher-education institution, like a community college, doing advanced core work and simultaneously gaining course credit while still enrolled in high school, so you get that effect of shortening their period to graduation with a higher-ed degree and also the type of economic efficiencies you’re talking about. One is always anxious to see closer binds between K–12 and higher ed. Let’s look at the linkages between your member institutions and business. Of course, I’m coming to you from Harvard Business School, and we’ve done quite a lot of research about how business feels about these things and the business people that we’ve talked to and surveyed are always saying, “Gee, we want higher ed to provide their students with a better grounding in what they’re going to need to be successful, pursuing work in the private sector and building a basis for economic independence.” But at the same time, talking to your member institutions and other educators, I often hear them say that employers don’t invest the amount of time and attention in helping higher ed prepare students, providing them input and resources to do that, or really understanding the mission of higher ed. How do you see that balance between employers for your students and your member institutions and how we can get that relationship on a better level?
Bumphus: That’s a discussion that I’ve been having probably for the last 30 years, Joe. And it’s certainly one that I consider to be one of the key challenges that any community college president or chancellor is going to face if they haven’t already faced it. When I’m speaking with new community college CEOs—and we run a couple of leadership programs that focus on training new presidents—the thing I tell them all the time is the most significant and important relationship you can have in your community is a relationship with your business leaders. And that includes not just meeting with them, but effectively communicating with them about your programs, any challenges you’re having. And I have to tell you, I have not met with a business leader yet that has not been open to a discussion about what our college could do in that community with talent development. And anything we could do in that regard would be much appreciated and would be a benefit to not only the business, but the entire community. That’s probably stayed with me. And one of the things I’m doing to this day is, I’m involved in something called the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board. I was appointed to that board by President Trump two years ago, and I was appointed to another board by him, and it was a board focused on expanding community college apprenticeships. We, in fact, received a huge grant from—a $20 million grant—from the Department of Labor to increase community college apprenticeships by 16,000 over a three-year period. On that board with me—and I’ve really enjoyed the dialogue and the communications we’ve had—but you’ve got Tim Cook from Apple, Ginni Rometty from IBM, Marilyn Hewson from Lockheed Martin, and several other major companies represented around the table—Google, Visa. Ginni Rometty at IBM, I think, has probably launched the best initiative I’ve seen to date. And it’s one called P-TECH. And it’s an initiative where IBM is working with community colleges around the country, identifying talented students in the community college, giving them a job so they can work and learn, and then a job at IBM guaranteed when they finish. And Ginni is such a visionary that she, along with Tim Cook, are offering another program, and it’s called “Learning and Employment Records” that we’re pulling together from this board. And it’s a way in which students that are attending a community college can continue to track their progress, if you will, just as if they were tracking their credit hours in a college program, but tracking their work experience so that when they’ve finished their degree, they really have a diploma, if you will, and a transcript of their studies and a transcript of their work that they can take to a potential new employee and show the skills that they’ve developed.
Fuller: And one of the ironies of our system is, even though only about a third of young people ultimately graduate with a four-year degree, at least for them, we have an employment process that uses their academic transcripts as a basis for evaluating their fitness as a candidate for a job. We just don’t have the equivalent in terms of work experience for a young person with a certificate or a community-college degree or even something less. And that absence of that kind of portable, documented, certifiable learning record is, it really inhibits the ability of a lot of folks to advance their economic interests and getting types of positions they’re qualified for but don’t present the credentials that the employers are automatically looking for. Let me just ask you, if you were going to say to just a run-of-the-mill employer—not an IBM, not an Apple, not a Lockheed Martin—that does have a skills gap, is going to be looking for talent, what are the two or three things that you would ask or suggest they do to be able to connect with their local community college resource and get what they’re looking for?
Bumphus: Again, that conversation is where you begin and talk specifically about how many graduates will you need, because sometimes you’ll find a college president more than anxious to work with you, but don’t have them start to develop a program that will cost them literally hundreds of thousands of dollars and all you need are seven graduates. Talk to them about what your hiring plan might be. Talk to them about what equipment and curriculum, if any, could you work with the college and put in place. And then be very clear about what your expectations are going to be from that particular college. And sometimes I’ve found that if that one college can’t do it, there might be multiple colleges in the city or the region that could go together and put together the kind of curriculum, the kind of talent they need on the faculty, if you will, to teach these courses and do them well. And I believe strongly in this apprenticeship model. And if we could do something like that with the employer, then I think we could be off to a terrific start. Not all college presidents are willing to meet with a business leader and put their hand out. They’re just wanting to have perhaps the best advice and counsel that they can get from those employers, because they’re, in some cases, better able to do the training than the college. And if they can come together with a dual plan of trying to put that piece in place, I think they’re going to have a more effective program.
Fuller: Well, Dr. Walter Bumphus, president and CEO of the American Association of Community Colleges, thanks for joining us on the Managing the Future Work podcast and updating us on what’s going on and what I consider the most important and leverage-able part of the education system.
Bumphus: Joe, thank you very much for those kind words, my friend. It has been a real pleasure being on with you and your colleagues today, and I greatly enjoyed the conversation.
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