Book Review: Redesigning America’s Community Colleges

I love when coincidences happen. I’ve had the book Redesigning America’s Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success sitting on my shelf for over a year. Because I work in a community college, I thought it was important to learn more about what the struggles of the colleges were and see if I could help our college succeed. I planned to start reading this book towards the end of October. During our Faculty Development Days, we had a speaker come in and talk about Guided Pathways. As I started to read Redesigning America’s Community Colleges, I realize it was following the presentation very closely.

Over the past year, I have heard a lot about the Guided Pathways program, not the details, but the fact that this was a program that Jamestown Community College was pursuing. Sitting in the Faculty Development Day briefing, I was able to quickly come up to speed on what the program was about. This book helped fill in the missing details. This book is an advertisement for the Guided Pathways program.

Across 286 pages, the authors Thomas Bailey, Shawna Smith Jaggars, and Davis Jenkins lay out their case why Guided Pathways is necessary. The book is organized into six sections as well as an introduction and conclusion. These chapters include:

• Redesigning college programs
• Guiding students
• Rethinking student instruction
• Helping underprepared students
• Engaging faculty and staff
• The economics of college redesign

In their introduction, the authors pointed out that students are struggling with completion. They went into various reasons why this may be happening and also acknowledge that there are many students for whom completion was never a primary focus. With so many post-traditional students now becoming involved in community colleges, I believe we need to assess why they specifically want to come to college. Some of them are testing out whether or not college is right for them. Some do in fact want to get a degree and are satisfied with an associate’s degree. Others want to use the community college system as a springboard to higher levels of academic achievement. Others simply want to beef up their skills and knowledge for career reasons but never had the intent on completing a degree.

One of the challenges community colleges have compared to other colleges and universities is that community colleges have their doors open to anyone who wishes to take classes. Universities and colleges can be much more selective and weed out those who may not be academically fit. The authors also touched upon these issues.

The authors believe the way that community colleges allow individuals to pick and choose from a wide array of classes may be overwhelming for students who are not academically adept. The authors feel that it would be beneficial for students if community colleges restricted and narrowed the number of programs and course offerings to help facilitate completion.

The authors discussed their decisions in financial terms. Pell Grants and other grants are now more rigid and do not allow for course exploration as they once did. It is a waste of time and energy for students to attempt to explore different programs because it may not satisfy their grants thus they may end up losing money from those grants.

As I read this book, I could appreciate what Guided Pathways had to offer. If you wanted to get a degree in this program, here is the path that you need to take. Other elements of this program were layered on such as providing more career discussion and more academic supports based on the program itself. The authors also discussed changes to instruction. I am a fan of the direction they want to take. Throughout the section on instruction, I did not find anything that was surprising and I concurred with most of the findings. For example, they highlighted the fact that students struggled with online coursework compared to face to face work. This is not surprising but I believe it’s an issue that can be fixed with good instructional design. The challenge is that instructors must apply good instructional design and this does not seem to be a current focus.

One of the areas that did surprise me in the book was when they talked about the economics of this college redesign. Moving to a Guided Pathways model will require effort to redesign courses and programs. It may even require tools to help identify students who are struggling. This comes at a cost of time, talent, and treasure.

I believe the authors of Redesigning America’s Community Colleges pleaded their case quite well. I have seen the conversation of Guided Pathways increase steadily over the past couple of years. Jamestown Community College is now pursuing the Guided Pathways model. I do agree that something must be done to help completion but I don’t necessarily believe that changing the models is what needs to happen. I believe that we need to apply what we already have available and successfully Implement those strategies.

Additional Reading

• Book Review: John Dewey and the Future of Community College Education
• Book Review: Old School, New School, No School: Re-Calibrating Higher Education
• Book Review: Democracy and Education

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