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Chicago’s plan to dramatically “reinvent” its city college system is running into a few problems. For the past year the city colleges have been working on a “journey of Reinvention to ensure student success at the City Colleges of Chicago.” The city colleges’ website explains that:
Task forces are developing and refining hypotheses in each of the priority areas for improvement, conducting research at best practice institutions, and are engaging their frequent collaborators.
That sunny, if vague, summary disguises the fact that the process has been a little slow going.
According to a piece by Joanne Jacobs in Community College Spotlight, the person in charge of reinvention, Chancellor Cheryl Hyman (right) is a little controversial:
A blog is calling for her removal and “a straw poll taken at each of the seven colleges found that a majority of the faculty had no confidence in the administration.” Critics say she’s wasting millions of dollars on new central-office administrators, while demanding that six of seven college presidents re-apply for their jobs.
No surprise there; if Hyman really wants to reinvent something, she should be controversial to those who aren’t interested in major changes.
And major changes are probably necessary. The on-time graduation rate in the Chicago City College system is currently seven percent.
In addition, Hyman has never run an academic institution, something that apparently worries many city college employees. Hyman was an executive at Chicago’s utility company.
Again, seven percent graduation rate. Experience being “vice president for operations strategy and business intelligence” for an electric utility doesn’t necessarily mean Human can have some dramatic role in improving graduation rates. But whatever the city colleges are doing now sure isn’t working. [Image via]
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Joy Walker on April 19, 2011 5:45 PM:
This seven percent figure is presented a lot lately and it does sound very low, that is if you assume students enroll in a community college to obtain a two year degree - but in the thirty plus years that I have taught at the City Colleges I've written countless letters of recommendations for students who are transferring to programs in four year colleges. They took courses with us with no intention of getting a degree at all. We haven't had a good system for following up on these transfer students. I hope that will change.
Another consideration is that we are an open admission institution. That means we take everybody who thinks they want to go to college. We do our best to place them. Many of our incoming students are victims of substandard K-12 educations. They may want to take college courses but if they can't do simple algebra and they can't read then it is rather difficult to teach them college level courses. We need more help for these remedial students.
Washington Monthly on April 19, 2011 6:18 PM:
According to the Jacobs article 16 percent of full-time, degree-seeking students at the City Colleges transfer to four-year institutions.