Higher Ed | Daily Report

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Five California institutions are among the top 120 community colleges in the United States, according to a new ranking from the nonprofit Aspen Institute.

The colleges on the list – selected from 1,200 institutions nationwide – are now eligible to compete for the first-ever Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence. The top college and two or three runners-up will be selected in December and will split a $1 million award.

In California, the list includes Coastline Community College in Fountain Valley, Santa Barbara City College, Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton and Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut.

To develop the list of the top 120 colleges, a committee looked at overall performance measures – such as graduation and retention rates – change over time, and performance measures for underrepresented minorities. The panel of advisors, co-chaired by William Trueheart, CEO of Achieving the Dream, and Keith Bird, former chancellor of the Kentucky Community College System, developed a methodology for ranking community colleges using publicly available data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Josh Wyner, executive director of the Aspen Institute College Excellence Program, said the purpose of the competition is to work with community colleges to define excellence and to identify the practices that enable community colleges to achieve high levels of student success. The underlying idea: Community colleges are key to the nation's health.

"Community colleges have been remarkable points of access for many students...and that's something to really celebrate," Wyner said. "But in the last couple of years we have been realizing that access isn't enough, and that many of these students don't complete a degree or transfer. So the question is, what is it going to take for us to improve the graduation rates for students?"

In the next round, a selection committee will invite the top 120 colleges to submit additional data on student completion, learning, and workforce outcomes, along with contextual information, such as the size of the college and its ability to perform institutional research.

Some education researchers and leaders – including U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan – have hailed the Aspen effort as a good step towards better measuring success in the community college world. Others have questioned whether colleges should be ranked based on limited data.

For example, Inside Higher Ed reported that Mark Schneider, a vice president at the American Institutes for Research, questioned how the selection committee could judge institutions on their learning outcomes and labor market outcomes without standardized measurements.

Wyner said there are two choices for how to approach community colleges in the United States: "One is, we can decide this stuff just can't be measured and we shouldn't bother trying to define excellence across the sector because institutions may look at things differently," and the other is to "do the best with the information we have today, which can tell us a lot, and work hard to try to figure out what helps students on a campus-wide basis."

Nancy Shulock, executive director of the Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy at CSU Sacramento, called the Aspen program a "really worthy effort" that could start an important conversation about how to improve the data that's available for measuring community college excellence.

A key problem with the current data, Shulock said, is that many key measures are limited to the traditional college-goers: first-time, full-time students. But community colleges serve many more part-time students.

"The data issues are present but they're not a deal breaker," Shulock said. "One of the by-products might be accelerated attention to creating more comparative, better (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) data for state comparisons."

Here's a look at some of the key measures used by the Aspen Institute's advisory committee to rank the five California colleges. The rates, provided to California Watch by the Aspen Institute, are averages of the three most recent years of data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Sources: The Aspen Institute and the National Center for Education Statistics