The following article was originally posted as part of my blog series on the Huffington Post where I am sharing experiences and insights I gained from my recent travel. 

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a twenty-year anniversary celebration for the National Society of Collegiate Scholars in Washington, D.C. It was a special honor to be there because I knew the founder, Steve Loflin, some twenty-five years ago before this concept had completely gelled in his mind. What started as a “crazy idea” to convene a college honor society on scholarship, leadership, and service was hatched with two of Steve’s friends over a lasagna dinner at his apartment. Twenty years later, this organization is a million strong with chapters at some 400 colleges. In Steve’s speech he spoke to the messiness of start-up ideas and the organic, sometimes random nature in which crazy ideas take root; an excellent perspective as the college culture can protect students from the uncertainties and ambiguities they will meet in the reality outside of school. With all of the news stories and data on how students struggle academically, emotionally, and socially, it is nice to see so many examples of students who are thriving and doing their best to make the world a better place.

Continue reading on the Huffington Post.

If you know a college student or new college graduate, you’ve probably had a conversation with them that revolved around their anxiety in finding full-time employment in their field. And rightfully so. The correlation between a college degree and a high-salary job are a lot more uncertain than in the past. Unlike generations before them, a degree is no longer the final step before setting forth on a career path.

While some graduates still able enter the workforce with a degree and a high-salary job,  the reality is that 44% of young college graduates in 2012 were “underemployed”, or rather working in jobs that did not require a college degree, according to the new report, “Are Recent College Graduates Finding Good Jobs?”.

In the Atlantic article ‘The Growth of College Grads in Dead-End Jobs”, Jordan Weissman explains that this number is not much different than it was in 1994, however, the definition of “underemployed” has changed. In the 1990s, an underemployed college graduate might find a job as an administrative assistant bringing home a $40,000 salary. Today’s underemployed graduates are more likely to be working as dog walkers and baristas, and are bringing home closer to $20,000.

It’s a new world for new grads, but they are prepared to hit back hard with unwavering optimism. Jobs may be scarce, but they’re there. We may be hurting from a recession, but it’s turning around. There may be less high-paying career paths to set out on, but there are more entrepreneurs, innovators, and social movements for change. If millenials can be optimistic, is there any reason we shouldn’t be?

Imagine you are offered a position to work as a museum attendant. Your only job is to stand around making sure that no one touches a painting. The job doesn’t sound too bad, right?

In reality, for many, standing around is a “boring” job that doesn’t offer much variety, interaction with people, or enjoyment. So why do people take these boring jobs?

The results of new research out of Duke University, shared in the NPR story “Why Do People Agree to Work in Boring Jobs?”,  suggests people trick themselves into taking these boring jobs by thinking they will be more enjoyable than they actually know they will be.  They also may suffer from effort aversion. When given multiple choices, people are more likely to choose the one that will require less effort.

Though a low-effort job may sound appealing, the luxury of exerting low-effort comes at a cost. Not only is the job boring, it probably doesn’t pay as well as a job that requires skill. In one experiment, researchers took a group of business students and asked them to unplug from their devices for 5 minutes in order to get paid $2.50. They were given the option to solve word problems while they waited out their 5 minutes. At the end of the time, the students who chose to solve word problems with their 5 minutes rated themselves as happier than those who did not solve word problems, though expected more money for putting in more effort.

What does this study mean for students and career seekers? If you’re searching for happiness, taking the easy road may not always be the best decision. Happiness comes to many people when they exert effort, have their ideas heard, finish projects, and have variety in their day, not from being asked to stand around.

How might these psychological studies change the way you think about making your next decision between something easy and something potentially more difficult but potentially more gratifying?

This summer, we partnered with the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC) to present a summer series of FREE webinars on Academic Coaching.  Over the past few weeks we’ve presented on the following topics, which are now available to view on archive.

SESSION 1: Coaching for College and Career Readiness: It’s Not What You Know, It’s What You Know How To Do

Presented by Carol Carter, Maureen Breeze, and Lynn Troyka

This session shares hands-on ideas of how educators can coach students to master specific, practical connections for excelling in reading, writing and math. We discuss the development of professional skills as well as setting structures for accountability, challenge, and growth that can ensure success in college, career, and life.

WATCH NOW

SESSION 2: Academic Coaching for Advisors and Student Success Staff

Presented by Carol Carter and Maureen Breeze

In this informational webinar tailored to student success staff and advisors, participants will learn about various academic coaching strategies and professional development options for student services staff supporting redesign efforts in developmental education.

Through academic coaching, faculty and advisors ask powerful questions and promote deeper level thinking to help students make connections, set goals and action plans, create a vision for the future, and develop persistence, grit and accountability.

WATCH NOW

SESSION 3: Introduction to Academic Coaching for Reading and Writing Faculty

Presented by Carol Carter 

In this informational webinar tailored to reading and writing instructors, viewers learn about various academic coaching strategies to support reading, writing and critical thinking skills necessary for college success. Discover how academic coaching promotes academic, professional and life success.

WATCH NOW

Coming up this Thursday, August 22, is the final session of the NROC/LifeBound summer series. Space is limited.

SESSION 4: Introduction to Academic Coaching for Math Faculty

Thursday, August 22

2:00 pm ET

Presented by Maureen Breeze

In this informational webinar tailored to math instructors, participants will learn about various academic coaching strategies to support math understanding and quantitative reasoning skills for college success. Discover how academic coaching promotes academic, professional and life success.

REGISTER NOW

What are some webinar topics you would like to attend? I look forward to hearing from you in the comment section.

This article was originally posted on The Huffington Post on May 8, 2013.

Last February, The National Center for Education reported that 50 percent of the 3 million students who begin college annually require some level of remediation. This trend costs students, parents, institutions, and taxpayers nearly $7 billion a year, while remedial students fail to earn a single college credit.

The high volume and costs of remediation have policymakers and education leaders scrambling to stop this financial hemorrhage. While reform in remedial education is inevitable, the unintended consequences of swooping changes can be harmful to students, institutions, and the economy at a time when the U.S. is struggling to fill the 21st century workforce with high-skilled workers.

Who are remediated students?

A report released today by the National Center on Education and the Economy states that many community college career programs demand little or no use of math, and high school students are taking math courses they will likely never use. In reading and writing, the group noted incoming college freshmen had simplistic and academically unchallenging skills. Finally, NCEE discovered that very little writing is required of community college freshmen, and when it is, there are low expectations for making a cogent argument and employing basic rules for writing, punctuation, and grammar. The report calls for the bar to be raised if students are to succeed in college, career, and life. Some of these same patterns exist for freshmen admitted to open admission four-year colleges.

Policymakers believe the solution to plugging up the remedial financial drain is to stop offering remedial classes in college, cut funding, or hold high schools accountable. Yet, these all-or-nothing solutions oversimplify who is entering remedial courses and how they got there. The spectrum of today’s remedial students includes:

• Nontraditional, returning students who’ve been out of school for years and need to brush up on learning skills while pursuing a degree or certificate.
• Students with undiagnosed learning disabilities.
• Low-income, minority, and first-generation students.
• Misplaced students who were misidentified as needing remedial classes.
  Multiple studies indicate up to 20 to 30 percent of remedial students are misidentified and don’t belong in developmental classes.
• Students who failed to master high school material due to a lack of focus, emotional/social maturity, home support, poor instruction, or a combination of these factors.

As funding plummets, remedial students still remain, as does the need to fill many of the 3.9 million U.S. job openings that require a college degree. Realizing remediation will be anything but a quick fix, many people and organizations are offering cost-saving strategies.

What does remedial reform look like?

Mike Petrilli, executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, recently argued that Pell grant funding — a need-based grant that helps qualifying students afford college — should not be available for students who require remedial education. Instead, he believes this $40 billion annual federal aid should only be awarded to students who take credit-bearing classes. The argument has merit. Statistically, the 35 percent of students who require remediation in four-year institutions complete a degree within six years, and worse, less than 10 percent of students enrolled in one or more developmental classes in community colleges graduate within three years.

Petrilli’s solution raises many questions. Is limiting college access to low-income students really a solution to remediation? Will high schools have the bandwidth to take accountability for the underprepared students who are denied grant-funding because they don’t possess basic skills? Are college-ready students more deserving of federal dollars than those who are underprepared for college?

Already, a recent change to Pell grants is negatively impacting developmental students. In the past, students were allowed to receive funding for up to 18 semesters. Now, they are limited to 12 semesters. For many students who work while going to school or are required to take several semesters of remedial education, this reduction in aid is a huge barrier to degree attainment.

Institutions, as well as people like Petrilli, are evaluating their best response to the remediation crisis. For example, in Ohio, only 25 percent of residents hold a college degree. The state hopes to improve the number of grads by adopting a new formula that aligns the amount of funding four-year colleges receive with the amount of graduates they produce. The community colleges are also seeing a shift to performance-based funding but not at as high a rate as four-year colleges. Like Ohio, more states than not have transitioned, are transitioning, or are discussing transitioning away from enrollment-based funding to performance-based funding.

Another solution for some states is to simply get rid of remedial funding. In addition to Ohio’s performance-based funding, the state government will start phasing out funding for remedial classes in the 2014-15 school year and completely end funding by 2020. In Connecticut, a bill attempted to cut remedial courses and put those students who would have been placed in a remedial courses in college-level, credit-earning courses. A bill was ultimately signed into law which allowed students to take one remedial course.

There are a number of different strategies being proposed by states and colleges to cut costs in remedial education. Until the pipeline to college improves, however, the need for remediation will remain. Without careful analysis of tradeoffs, cutting funding, courses, and opportunity is not reform: it is giving up and hoping someone else will pick up the slack. We need a holistic solution for the short and long term. As the NCEE stated in their report this morning:

“The logical conclusion might be for community colleges to raise their expectations and for high schools to step up the rigor… but that would not help today’s large proportion of high school graduates who do not meet the criteria to enroll in credit-bearing college courses.”

What are solutions which impact pipeline preparation before college?

Remediation may never be completely eradicated, but improvement can be made in the K-12 to college pipeline to better prepare students for college from the start.

Continue reading at The Huffington Post

Professionals and athletes aren’t the only people who can benefit from a coach, students who participated in an academic coaching program found increased retention and graduation rates.  Through the process of coaching, students deepen their learning, take responsibility for their actions, improve their effectiveness, and consciously create their outcomes in life.

How can you use coaching to improve student outcomes? LifeBound’s Academic Coaching Training is a great professional development option for professors, teachers, administrators, counselors, and other education professionals who want to learn to be a coach for their student by listening, asking powerful questions, and encouraging problem solving. Our next 3-day coaching session is June 24-26. Let me know if you would like to learn more about our Academic Coaching Training in the comments or by sending an email to contact@lifebound.com.

Last week I had my first blog published on Huffington Post. The open forum in the Huffington Post comment sections has already been a great writing and learning experience, and I look forward to engaging with more opinionated readers.

My latest article explores why low-income students are often less likely to receive a quality K-12 education, graduate from high school, and enter college with college-level skills. Over the next few weeks I’m going to continue the conversation by sharing how low-income students can find learning opportunities outside of school to improve their personal, academic, and professional achievement as well as share some stories of  people I know personally who have overcome poverty.

You can read and comment on my blog “Why Aren’t Low-Income Students Succeeding in School?”  at the Huffington Post.

“We cannot rest until each of us would be satisfied with randomly assigning our own children to any public school in the nation.” 

-  Jason Kamras

MOOCs are on the minds of many educators and students today as the new open source trend opens many discussions on what learning will look like in the 21st century. Technology can bring a free college course taught by the best of the best professors from universities like Stanford and Harvard right to your living room. The popularity of MOOCs has people asking, why pay for a college education when you can get one for free online?

If the demand for more online learning persists, so must the demand for affordable devices and services  In addition, students taking primarily online classes will have to have the initiative, determination, and follow through to get the experiences and networking they need to augment classroom learning with professional skills.   In the new world of learning, the power is in the student’s hands but that alone will not be enough.   Ingenuity, ambition, and the ability to have a strong track record will allow online students, or any student for that matter, to show how they have single-handedly crafted meaningful professional experiences to complement college learning.

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Sources:

“The Professor’s Big Stage,” by Thomas Friedman. The New York Times. <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/opinion/friedman-the-professors-big-stage.html?ref=opinion&_r=0>

“Data Caps Could Dim Online Learning’s Bright Future,” by By Benjamin Lennett and Danielle Kehl. The Chronicle.<http://chronicle.com/article/Caps-on-Data-Use-Dim-Online/137653/>

As more students flock to colleges to earn a degree and better their chances at employment, more students are landing in developmental education courses before they can enroll in a degree-earning program. Though the demand for workers with a college degree only continues to increase in the 21st century workforce, college retention and graduation rates have failed to make significant gains.

Some states that are determined to greatly increase the number of college graduates are redesigning their developmental education programs in hopes of finding more potential graduates in the population of remedial students; a population which is significantly less likely than their non-remediated peers to graduate from college. In 2009, 29% of Colorado’s college students required remediation in reading, writing or mathematics, and over half (53%) of students attending two-year institutions needed remediation. Of 100 students enrolled in the lowest level of developmental math, only four will graduate.¹

Many remedial students must take at least three remedial courses per subject before being able to enroll in a credit-earning college class. Remedial classes can quickly become costly for the student in both time and money. Research shows that the longer students spend taking remedial classes, the more likely they are to drop out before earning a degree. Colorado, along with handful of other states, is trying to retain more developmental students by accelerating courses and decreasing the time students spend in developmental classes.

In a study that used a database of over 45,000 student observations, researchers found that shorter, more intensive courses earned students better grades than a 16-week semester.² Developmental education programs are using findings such as these to redesign their curriculum to speak specifically to the needs of developmental students. One method states like Colorado are using to retain more remedial students is to accelerate the remedial process by merging topics like reading and writing into a single semester-long course. Another is allowing students to simultaneously enroll in a remedial course while taking a college-level course so that they’re getting remediated while moving toward earning a college degree.

Developmental education must be redesigned to become a springboard for students instead of a wall. The workforce is different for youth today, and more employers will require degree holders to fill their positions. A recent study by The Chronicle and Marketplace  found many employers filter resumes by whether or not a job candidate holds a 4-year degree. They also found two-thirds of employers will not waive degree requirements for a new applicant.³

What can be done in K12 to eliminate the need for developmental education at the college level? What are other needs that are specific to developmental students that need to be met in a developmental course?

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Sources:

1 Colorado Proposal Narrative Statements, http://www.completecollege.org/docs/Colorado%20Proposal%20Narrative%20Statements.pdf
² Impact of Course Length on Student Learning, http://www.economics-finance.org/jefe/econ/Gustafsonpaper.pdf
^{3 “}A College Degree Sorts Job Applicants, but Employers Wish It Meant More,” http://chronicle.texterity.com/chronicle/20130308a/?pg=26&pm=2&u1=friend#pg26

A new study by the Milken Institute found a strong relationship between a well-educated population and a region’s economic performance.¹ Though it’s common knowledge that well-educated workers often make more money and have better jobs than less-educated workers, this study stands out in that it also found that just by their geographic location, less-educated people can make more money if they live in the same area as more-educated people.

Other key findings from the report include:

• Education increases regional prosperity. Adding one year to the average years of schooling among the employed in a metropolitan area is associated with an increase of real GDP per capita of more than ten percent, and an increase in real wages per worker of more than eight percent.
• Better educated = bigger benefits. The better educated the worker, the greater the benefit of additional schooling, to both the worker and the region. Add one year of college to a region’s workforce, for instance, and GDP per capita jumps 17.4 percent.
• Clusters count. In metros with clusters of high-skilled occupations, the share of workers holding at least a master’s degree is much higher than in metros without significant clusters, perhaps because of the intense competition for employment.

 

In order to use the findings to improve the economy, one recommendation by the institute is to increase the number of college graduates. As we all know, this is easier said than done. One of the greatest barriers that stands between a student and graduation is unpreparedness. This unpreparedness can start as early as preschool, and if not addressed, will stick with the student until graduation day, if they are lucky enough to make it there. Many of today’s students and high school graduates understand the need for some form of higher education in order to have real career options in the 21st century. However, many students today get left behind in K-12 and enter college unprepared, often taking developmental (or remedial) courses before they can enroll in a college-level course.

If you read my blog earlier this week you know every year 1.7 million 4-year and 2-year students will enroll in a remedial course. The vast majority of these students will not enroll in a college-level course.  Today I am leading the session Professionalism for Developmental Students:  Workplace Mindsets for Classroom Success at the NADE conference. I’ll be answering questions like: “How Does Lack of Preparation at the College Level Impede Employment?” and “How Can Faculty Set Expectations for Professional Success in Your Developmental Class?” Today’s students — developmental or otherwise — need to be held accountable for coming to class, doing the work, and passing the course. Today’s educators need to get an investment from their students and make a choice to show how the skills they are teaching will impact the student’s future prosperity. Not until we have accountable students and educators will we begin to have the graduation rates we desire.

This is LifeBound’s last day at the NADE conference. If you haven’t stopped by our booth, come say hello and learn more about becoming an academic coach for your students. You can also visit our coaching website at www.lifeboundcoaching.com.

¹“Better Higher Education Leads to a Better Regional Economy, Report Says.” The Chronicle. <http://chronicle.com/blogs/bottomline/better-higher-education-leads-to-a-better-regional-economy-report-says/>
²A Matter of Degrees: The Effect of Educational Attainment on Regional Economic Prosperity.” The Milken Institute. <http://www.milkeninstitute.org/publications/publications.taf?function=detail&ID=38801395&cat=resrep>