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A newsletter about role of higher education in society — plus Open Campus developments.
This newsletter is about the role of higher ed in society. Each week, we highlight how college is (or is not) working for citizens and communities. It goes out most Friday mornings — If someone forwarded this to you, you can sign up for your own copy here.
Postcards from the college journey
What really gets in the way of college dreams? What barriers are too high, what needs are more pressing? And how do some people find their way?
What, or who, keeps them going? Why do they persevere?
We’re spending this year talking with Californians about their experiences with college, with a special focus on telling the stories of people who live in parts of the state where college-going has long lagged behind. (See the first round of these interviews.)
Naomi Harris and Victoria Franco recently spent time in Riverside, a county where half of the population is Hispanic and fewer than one in four residents has a bachelor’s degree. (Across California, about 35 percent of people do.)
Here’s what people talked about confronting: Imposter syndrome. Burn out. Transphobic classmates, and teachers looking the other way. Parental pressure. Hyper-focusing — and not on the right things. Exhaustion from a long day’s work. A feeling like you need to impress everyone, to be Superwoman.
They talked about their triumphs, too. Many of them had found their way back to college after dropping out years before.
Jennifer Shaw is one of them. She enrolled in community college in 2004, and again, for a semester, in 2017. She started working at Disneyland, where, she says, they were amazing at providing health care for transgender people like her.
“My dreams do come true working with Disney, surprisingly,” she says. But those weren’t enough. “I kept telling myself, life is too short and I want to do more stuff than minimum wage jobs.” She’s now at Riverside City College, studying theater and film.
More from California
In talking with people across California it quickly becomes clear how central a role the state’s community colleges play — and how many people’s lives they intersect. The 116-campus system enrolls 1.8 million students, which amounts to roughly one out of every 12 undergraduates in the nation.
Like community colleges across the country, though, California’s two-year institutions have seen a huge enrollment drop during the pandemic. More than 300,000 fewer students were enrolled in the system in fall 2021 than in fall 2019.
So who exactly is missing, and why? The fellows we work with at CalMatters profiled some of them. They include people who left because they were working overtime in the emergency room, became disillusioned by online learning, were lured by a for-profit program’s job promises, and couldn’t juggle it all as a single parent.
“Everything that’s happened over the past two years has made it so overwhelming and exhausting,” one of the former community-college students said. “I think we’re just all spent.”
Elsewhere on Open Campus
In Pittsburgh: City and county controllers call for greater payments from big eds and meds The county’s five largest nonprofits, including three universities, pay 11% of what they would owe in property taxes if they didn’t receive exemptions and abatements.
In Mississippi: What does ‘contumacious’ mean? The history behind new tenure policies in Mississippi. The term is now a criteria university presidents can use to judge conduct in deciding whether to award tenure.
In Cleveland: After sudden ouster of its president, Cleveland State names provost to usher in change. Laura Bloomberg will continue pushing an aggressive blueprint, dubbed “CSU 2.0,” for revamping the university post-pandemic.
In The Job: Many certificate programs would fail a proposed earnings test. The policy would compare the wages of program graduates with those of workers with only a high-school diploma.
In Mile Markers: How tech changes rural student outreach. To try to stem enrollment declines, and better serve students, Southeast Missouri State U. has tried a number of new tactics.
A bonus installment of Bootstraps
We’re stepping back to review the key themes of the first season of the series — a joint production of EdSurge and Open Campus that explored how the myth of pulling ourselves up shapes education. This new episode looks at what’s changed since we reported some of the controversies we dug into. Plus, we talk with Alissa Quart about why narratives of self-reliance are so hard to shake.
Keep in touch
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