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This assignment is half Internet research and half writing task.
OBJECTIVE: The objective is for you to determine and compare the transfer rate between the three community colleges you identified in a previous assignment as your top choice(s) for teaching.
Cohen, Brawer, and Kisker (2014, p-65) report that determining the reasons students attend college is not an exact exercise because they come for a variety of reasons; perhaps as many as a half-dozen.
The National Postsecondary Student Aid study found that 52 percent chose “transfer” and 43 percent chose “complete associate degree.”
PROCEDURE:
Copy and paste this link in your browser to get to the web page for the National Center for Education Statistics (US Dept of Ed.): http://nces.ed.gov/?src=ft
In the |search| box at the top-right of the window banner enter “college navigator” and click “go.”
Click on the “College Navigator” link
On the left-side of the College Navigator page choose:
1-your “state,”
2-Level of Award-“Associates”
3-institution type- “Public” & “2-year,”
4-“Show Results” show results
Scroll down to find each of the three colleges where you are interested in teaching, in turn, one-by-one.
Click on the “+” to expand the drop down on “open-close RETENTION AND GRADUATION RATES”
Focus on “OVERALL GRADUATION RATE AND TRANSFER-OUT RATE” section – what does the description paragraph tell you?
Note the statistics for “OVERALL GRADUATION AND TRANSFER-OUT RATES FOR STUDENTS WHO BEGAN THEIR STUDIES IN FALL 2014?”
Copy and save the data for comparison analysis.
Complete this process for each of your three colleges.
REQUIRED:
Review the “overall graduation rate” and the “transfer-out rate” data for each of the community colleges you selected.
Then write an analysis narrative (your opinion) of how the transfer rates for these three community colleges compare to the stated goal of “transfer” by 52 percent of students surveyed by NPSA.
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Cohen, Brawer, and Kisker (2014, bottom of p-212, top of p-213) state that research has shown that class attendance is the best predictor of academic performance.
One could infer that factors that affect class attendance ultimately impact academic performance.
REQUIRED PART-A:
What does the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) 2012 report (p-212) reveal regarding community college students skipping class, etc.?
Context for Part-B
Davis (2009) states that a high amount of research (surveying students) identified five variables (5) that appear be related to (impact on) class attendance (Brewer and Burgess, 2005; Dolnicar, 2001; Fjortoft, 2005, Friedman et al., 2001;Gump, 2005; Moore, 2005, Rocca, 2003).
Those five variables include:
GPA – students with better academic records attend class more regularly
Elective vs. required courses – student in elective courses attend more regularly
Class size – smaller classes are attended more regularly
Teaching method – attendance is lowest in lecture courses
Instructor qualities – students attend more regularly when the instructor is perceived to be –
friendly and approachable
open to feedback and criticism
respectful toward students
knowledgeable about students’ names’ and interest
REQUIRED PART-B:
What observations and conclusions can you make regarding community college students skipping class based on the above factors?
If you have ever skipped a class (once or more than once) what was the biggest contributing factor from the list of five, above?
If item #4 – lecture classes have lowest attendance, what conclusions might you make regarding the effectiveness and efficacy of lecturing to students?
Context for Part-C
Cohen, Brawer, and Kisker (2014, p-198) state that devotees of interactive media and all sorts of reproducible instructional situations have been constantly stymied by the difficulty of duplicating a “live learning experience.”
REQUIRED PART-C:
Describe the various issues presented in the text regarding what is “missing” in the distance learning classroom vs. the live instructional brick-and-mortar classroom.
What strategies or methodologies can you suggest that would contribute to making the distance learning classroom more robust and more on a par with the live instructional experience for the student?
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Tuition for community college courses in California has been as low as $11.00 per unit, making a three [3] unit class cost $33.00. At some colleges the tuition is $0.00. One budget package once proposed by the Governor of California explored asking for tuition to be raised, perhaps as high as $24 per unit for under grads and $50 per unit for those with a bachelors degree coming back to take courses at a community college.
For 2017, California residents paid only $46.00 per unit, and students from other states and other countries paid non-resident tuition of $243.00 per unit plus $46.00 per unit enrollment fee. Tuition for a full-time (12.0 units) resident student was $1,104.00 per year, and $5,832.00.
Regardless of your socio-economic background, the community college remains a bargain compared to the 2017 yearly tuition of: CSU ($6, 346), UC ($13, 500), and private institutions such as USC ($51, 442), Stanford ($47,331), Cal Tech ( $45,846), Chapman University ($48, 310), and Occidental College ( $50,492) , etc.
Currently, there are special programs that reduce tuition for students with good academic performance. Recently, we have seen the emergence of a popular movement to eliminate community college tuition altogether, perhaps even eliminate university tuition.
REQUIRED A:
What might be some positive results if community college tuition is eliminated?
What might be some negative results?
REQUIRED B:
How would the add/drop rate be affected?
Would the time to complete a degree increase or decrease? Why do you say that?
REQUIRED C:
If everyone can apply to the “best” college of their choice, given the financial burden is removed, what might be the impact on:
the Admissions staff?
the speed of completing the application review process?
What impact would this have on “enrollment management?”
