What Educators Should Know about College-for-All Policies: A More Thorough Understanding of Community College Occupational Programs Might Give Districts, Schools, Teachers, and Advisers the Tools to Help Students Make Informed Choices among All Their Options

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In recent years, U.S. has adopted an ambitious college-for-all policy that aims for every high school graduate to complete a college credential. Our increasingly information- and technology-based society has made postsecondary education crucial to individual economic success so high school is now seen primarily as a mechanism to prepare students for postsecondary education. This policy has dramatically increased access to postsecondary education, encouraging many students to attend college who never would have in prior decades. But many of those students have gone to college with academic skills insufficient to complete a bacheloru0027s degree. The oft-repeated college- and career-ready goal is vague and open to interpretation. Some of most prominent interpretations support preparing students for careers by preparing them for academic rigors of college. Florida has taken a leading role in ensuring that students are college- and career-ready, which state defines as having the knowledge, skills, and academic preparation needed to enroll and succeed in introductory college credit-bearing courses within an associate or baccalaureate degree program without need for remediation (Florida Department of Education, 2015a). This notion of college-and career-readiness attempts to transform students who would ordinarily stop at a high school diploma into students who are ready for college. Although this is a noble goal, Florida still experiences high numbers of college dropouts, both at community colleges and four-year, degree-granting institutions. Our Florida research has found that K-12 teachers have doubts about prevailing interpretation of college- and career-readiness. Teachers question whether most of their students can achieve that goal, and theyu0027re eager for alternative postsecondary options for their low-achieving students. In contrast, CTE Technical Assistance Center of New York promotes college attendance but also stresses importance of separate career preparation standards. These standards aim to give students preparation in three major skill areas: core academics, employability skills, and technical skills. Such preparation helps students transition seamlessly into a career and/or a postsecondary credentialing program (CTE Technical Assistance Center, 2012). But both conceptualizations of college-and career-readiness fail to capture dizzying array of post-secondary options that community colleges offer. In particular, certificates and applied associate degrees, which students can complete relatively quickly in community colleges, receive little attention. Many high schools and colleges do not publicize diverse options of higher education, in part due to traditional, narrow interpretation of college- and career-readiness. Instead, high schools and colleges emphasize four-year degree plans, and primarily focus on boosting math and English achievement, possibly at expense of developing other interests or abilities. Community college credentials, certificates and associate degrees can lead to significant labor-market benefits for low-income or low-achieving students, but educators are often unaware of these options. Community college credentials Analyzing a nationally representative survey of over 15,000 students in class of 2004 and their outcomes eight years later (Rosenbaum et al., 2015), we found that 90% of on-time high school graduates manage to enroll in college within eight years of graduation. Of those, 37% enroll in a two-year college, usually a community college. Although 56% of two-year college entrants said they expected to earn a bacheloru0027s degree as seniors, only 20% had completed a bacheloru0027s by 2012. Expanding college success to include alternative credentials, we find that an additional 33% completed certificates or associate degrees. This means that more students who begin in two-year colleges will complete an alternative credential than a bacheloru0027s degree. …