Last week in the fall Message to the College Community, I shared a concise framework for MCC’s strategic activities regarding college completion: Ready, Start, Complete … Compete. For the next four Wednesday Messages, I’d like to share a bit more on each of these components and, really more than anything else, would love to get your feedback on MCC’s role and responsibility for each. This week, “Ready.”
What does it take to be “college ready”? It isn’t as simple a question as it seems. In NYS, graduating with a NYS Regents’ Diploma should mean that a student is college ready, but as a recent NYT story highlighted this isn’t always the case. Returning adult students who were college ready a decade or more ago when they graduated high school may have not used some of the skills required of entering college students in years. At MCC, more than 30% of our entering students are not ready for college work in their first term, and too many in that cohort are also not ready in their second term or their third.
So, what can MCC do to help more students check the “ready” box when they apply to college? And, as a college, what is our level of responsibility for college readiness anyway? (In other words, isn’t that someone else’s job?)
We actually already have two remarkably powerful tools to address our role and responsibility: placement testing and dual enrollment. How we use these two existing avenues for promoting college readiness might just be the key to changing the tide and to helping more students find their way to MCC.
Placement testing: For years, MCC has partnered with school districts to administer the Accuplacer onsite, but we left it up to the districts to use that information as they saw fit. We are now shifting course and becoming more intentional and strategic. In our pilot with East High School, we administer the Accuplacer and then work with the school on offering remediation strategies—including coursework and modules—so that more students can graduate college ready. This practice has already proven successful in other communities among at-risk students, helping to create a seamless pathway from high school graduation into college-level courses. As we see the impact of the program at East, we will roll it out more broadly.
Dual Enrollment: MCC has long offered dual enrollment classes to local high school students, but we have not really viewed this program as a way of cultivating college readiness and improving college access. By offering dual enrollment opportunities in high school that provide students with a way of solidifying their college goals, exploring academic options, and identifying potential career paths, we can use these classes to create a culture of college readiness. We can also do much more to help our dual enrollment students to see themselves for what they really are: MCC students. They are not only college ready; they are IN college. They are on the path to starting right.
Ah, but that’s a topic for next week’s message: Start. So, this week, I encourage you to offer feedback and suggestions, to share concerns, and to expand our discussion. How can MCC help our students be “ready” on day one? Please share your thoughts on the blog.