Description
Book SynopsisTo improve community college success, we need to consider the lived realities of students. Our nation's community colleges are facing a completion crisis. The college-going experience of too many students is interrupted, lengthening their time to completing a degreeor worse, causing many to drop out altogether. In The Costs of Completion, Robin G. Isserles contextualizes this crisis by placing blame on the neoliberal policies that have shaped public community colleges over the past thirty years. The disinvestment of state funding, she explains, has created austerity conditions, leading to an overreliance on contingent labor, excessive investments in advisement technologies, and a push to performance outcomes like retention and graduation rates for measuring student and institutional success. The prevailing theory at the root of the community college completion crisisacademic momentumsuggests that students need to build momentum in their first year by becoming academically integrated,
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Chapter 1. Neoliberalism Ascending: Persistence, Completion, and Student Success in the College for All Era
Chapter 2. Metrics for Success: Austerity, Accountability, and the New Edu-philanthropists
Chapter 3. Making Sense of the Data: Institutional Success as Degree Completion
Chapter 4. Challenging Narrow Definitions of Success: What Is the Student Sensibility?
Chapter 5. The Student Sensibility and Structural Exclusion: It's Not about Grit
Chapter 6. Early Interactions in Community College: The Marketing of Guided Pathways Meets the Student Sensibility
Chapter 7. Addressing the Crisis: Creating the Community College as an Authentic Caring Institution
Notes
References
Index
