The CCA Blog

Stan Jones, President of Complete College America, recently addressed the administration and staff of Prince George's Community College for College Enrichment Day 2011. Watch video of his remarks:

Continue reading: “Stan Jones speaks at PGCC College Enrichment Day”

This week, Complete College America President Stan Jones was part of a four-person panel moderated by NBC's Andrea Mitchell at the 2011 Education Nation Summit in New York. The panel discussed Complete College America's new report, "Time is the Enemy," which provides – for the first time ever – a comprehensive picture of today’s college student, the challenges students face and the reasons why they are not completing their degrees and certificates.

The report includes self-reported data from 33 states on both full-time and part-time students at public colleges and universities. The federal government currently requires colleges and universities to track first-time, full-time students, but 40 percent of students today attend part-time.

Watch video of the discussion and let us know what you think about our groundbreaking new report.

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Today, I issued the following statement in response to the formal announcement by Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis of $500 million in grants to community colleges for job training and workforce development.

CCA provided technical assistance to a number of states for their applications. In her announcement today, Solis highlighted CCA’s National STEM Consortium, a collaborative of 10 leading community colleges in nine states organized to develop nationally portable, certificate-level STEM programs as well as build a national model of multi-college cooperation in the design and delivery of high quality, labor market-driven occupational programs.

Continue reading: “Complete College America responds to award of $500 million to community college”

Today’s the day.

For the past six months, Complete College America has been compiling data from 33 states to produce a report that paints – for the first time ever – a comprehensive picture of today’s college student, the challenges students face and the reasons why they are not completing their degrees and certificates.

You won’t want to miss the story in this morning’s New York Times about the report and what it means.

We’ll officially be releasing the report at 11 a.m. EST as part of NBC’s Education Nation Summit.

Continue reading: “Big news”

Today, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation blog, Impatient Optimists, published a guest post from Complete College America:

"Complete College America recently challenged the nation’s governors to improve the postsecondary performance of low income students and students of color by enacting innovative, high-impact reforms in their states.

"Their potential reward: a $1 million grant from Complete College America, a national non-profit whose sole mission is to work with states to significantly improve college completion.

Continue reading: “Impatient Optimists: “Governors Leading on College Completion””

Our last example of co-requisite remediation model takes us to the University of Maryland, College Park, where roughly 20 percent of incoming students testing as deficient in math.

Based on their placement scores, the university offers the upper 60 percent of that group a combined course that meets every day (instead of three days) of the week for a whole semester. Students take a developmental class for the first five weeks, and then they are tested using the same placement test as they first took.

SUCCESS STORY: After the initial developmental course, more than 80 percent of the students were eligible to enroll in a regular college math class every day for 10 weeks for the rest of the semester. Those students completed at the same rate as students who did not need remediation.

We believe colleges would be well served to explore these innovative co-requisite approaches to end serial remediation and focus on students completing gateway courses.