Junior Colleges Try Niche as Path to Top Universities

To all her snooty high school peers, who looked at her with pitying smiles upon hearing that she was bound for a junior college rather than the Ivy League, Tiana Cornelius has one thing to say.

By GREG WINTER NY Times

"Who’s got the last laugh now?" said Ms. Cornelius, who spent two years at Rockland Community College in New York before transferring to Barnard College as a junior this fall.

Of course, with a 1320 on the SAT and a grade point average just shy of 4.0, she might have landed at a top-tier university straight out of high school. But she figured, why bother?

"We just saved so much money," she said, referring to the full ride she got at Rockland compared with the $22,000 in tuition for Barnard. "How could I not take advantage of two free years of college?"

No sweeter words could be heard by the many deans, professors and presidents who are busily reshaping the nation’s community colleges, eager to entice the best and brightest with promises of huge savings and easy transfer into a premier university after two short years.

Long derided as repositories for underachievers, as trade schools devoid of academic rigor, community colleges are recasting themselves as wise first choices for the serious student looking to sidestep crushing debt. At stake for the colleges is more than just the extra government money that often comes with higher enrollment. They also recognize that nearly two-thirds of the nation’s first-year undergraduates start at community colleges, yet very few actually move on to four-year universities.

To turn the tide, community colleges are composing curriculums that so closely mirror what one might expect from a liberal arts university that even the pickiest admissions officers would be hard-pressed to call their students unprepared.

Nothing short of a 1200 on the SAT and a 3.7 grade point average gains entry into the honors college that opened this fall at Miami-Dade Community College, the nation’s largest junior college, with about 140,000 students, and while studying abroad is not required, it is "strongly encouraged."

Rockland Community College spent the last four years teaching a dozen of its counterparts how to replicate the philosophy courses at Yale and the "history of ideas" as envisioned by Columbia. And come summer, students at the Maricopa Community Colleges in Arizona will study anthropology in China, biology in French Polynesia, architecture in Scandinavia, art history in London, ceramics in Mexico, and the list goes on.

"You’d have to be crazy not to take advantage of us," said Dr. Eduardo J. Padron, president of Miami-Dade Community College. "You get all this for practically nothing, you save $30,000 at a minimum and then get to go to the university almost of your choice, very often on a scholarship."

More than 168 community colleges now have honors programs intended to catapult their students into the nation’s best four-year universities, compared with at most two dozen 15 years ago, the National Collegiate Honors Council says. At least 68 of those junior colleges started their honors programs in the last five years, propelled by basic, yet inescapable, realities.

"The better our students do, in terms of getting into a four-year university, the more students will come to our school," said Anne S. Maganzini, director of the honors program at Bergen Community College in New Jersey. "The more students come, the more money we get."

Though it varies, community colleges get about 60 percent of their money from counties and states, the American Association of Community Colleges says, and how much they receive is directly tied to how many students they enroll.

Netting top students, who, in turn, transfer to elite universities, has become such an effective marketing tool that some community colleges mail personalized invitations to high school students with high SAT scores. Others give free rides to the top 10 percent of graduates of nearby high schools, or buy television, newspaper and radio advertisements to trumpet their success at breaking through the walls of privilege.

"Community college students actually have a better chance at getting accepted by us than transfers from other four-year universities," said Carol Christ, the president of Smith College, where almost 9 percent of the student body comes from junior colleges. "They provide the socioeconomic and racial diversity that we, and basically every other four-year college, is looking for."

So welcoming have private universities become that some, like Smith and New York University, have signed agreements with select community colleges, ensuring that when students transfer they get to bring their old credits with them. Thirty states have passed legislation to ensure that courses taken at community colleges count toward graduation at public universities, a move motivated as much by money as a desire to confer more degrees.

"If the credits don’t transfer, then the state ends up paying twice for the student’s education," said Richard Novak, a director at the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. "You can imagine how costly that gets."

Popular though they may be, honors programs and the steep entry requirements that often accompany them, have critics.

"There’s a whole school of thought that by making them exclusive, instead of egalitarian like they’re supposed to be, community colleges have lost their mission," said Terese Rainwater, an analyst at the Education Commission of the States, which helps states set education policies.

The argument is not very hard to make. Honors programs are highly labor-intensive, entailing countless hours of coaching by expert faculty bent on getting students into the best possible universities. Yet the pool they end up working with is seldom the poor, academically troubled students who make up much of the population at community colleges, and who rarely go on to get bachelor’s degrees. In fact, honors students often need the least help.

Consider Alan Silverman, a senior at Brown University. With a 1370 on the SAT and better grades than more than 90 percent of his classmates in Suffern High School in New York, Mr. Silverman knew he would get into a good college, somewhere.

Still, he had his doubts about Harvard and Yale, his dream schools, so he swallowed his pride and spent two years at Rockland Community College to shore up his academic record even more. In the end, he said, landing at Brown was something of a disappointment, but "at least I got two years of college free."

For the students who fall short of honors programs, though, the outlook is considerably more bleak. Only 15 to 25 percent of community college students advance to four-year universities within a few years, depending on which researchers are talking, leading some to question if community colleges are congratulating themselves too quickly.

"There is something really wrong with this picture," said Kay McClenney, director of the Community College Survey of Student Engagement. "Even the students who say they want to transfer are not really doing so."

Because 60 percent of low-income freshman begin their undergraduate careers at community colleges, the American Council on Education says, many educators worry that tepid transfer rates disproportionately hurt the poor.

With that in mind, a coalition of 100 junior colleges, representing the nation’s largest cities, signed an agreement this month with more than 60 historically black colleges, as well as other four-year universities serving large numbers of Latinos and Native Americans. The covenant allows any of the community college students who earn associate degrees with a grade point average of 2.5 or better to transfer into the participating universities, no questions asked.

"No other sector of education, public or private, enrolls as many students of color as the community colleges," said Dr. Philip R. Day, the chancellor of City College of San Francisco who organized the pact. "Yet in negotiating the minefield of transfer, we’ve pretty much let people fend for themselves. Ending up on the doorstep of a community college should never mean that the doorway to a university is closed."

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