\n<\/p>\n
In rural parts of the U.S., 36\u00a0percent of jobs that pay enough for an individual to be self-sufficient require at least a bachelor\u2019s degree, yet only 25\u00a0percent of rural workers hold such degrees. Many rural communities do not have a university or four-year college nearby. As a result, students in these communities are likely to start their educational journey to a bachelor\u2019s at a community college. Of the nearly 1,000 community colleges nationwide, more than a quarter are in rural areas and many others are designated as rural-serving. <\/p>\n
The paths to a bachelor\u2019s degree for rural students are not as straightforward as they are for students in urban or suburban areas with higher concentrations of four-year institutions. For rural community college students, there are four primary routes to earning a bachelor\u2019s degree. As described below, the first three, more conventional, paths do not always work well. But there is also a fourth path\u2014the community college bachelor\u2019s degree program. While still relatively rare, this path is growing in popularity because, when well designed, it is effective in enabling place-bound students to earn bachelor\u2019s degrees and secure good jobs in their communities.<\/p>\n
The first path is to transfer to a four-year college and either become a residential student there or commute a long distance to get back and forth to campus from home. Laramie County Community College, where one of us is president, has worked with the University of Wyoming, the state\u2019s only university, located in Laramie, to develop guaranteed transfer pathways to UW bachelor\u2019s programs in major fields of economic importance to the region and state.<\/p>\n
But only a minority of LCCC students\u2014mostly younger students who have financial support from their families\u2014can realistically afford to become full-time residential students at UW. Most community college students have jobs and families they can\u2019t leave for several months a year, even if they could afford room and board in addition to tuition (which few can). Commuting to UW is difficult even for LCCC students who live in relatively nearby Cheyenne, almost an hour\u2019s drive from Laramie on a road that crosses the highest point on the Continental Divide and is often closed in the winter. For LCCC students who live in outlying areas and for students at other Wyoming community colleges, commuting to UW is not realistic. <\/p>\n
Theoretically, this should be an effective option for rural, place-bound community college students. In reality, this avenue is not feasible for the many rural students who live in \u201cdigital deserts\u201d or face \u201clast-mile\u201d barriers to broadband access.<\/p>\n
Even when internet access is not a problem, many students struggle to complete online programs. Only a quarter of community college students who transfer to online universities complete a bachelor\u2019s degree within four years of transferring. This compares to 57\u00a0percent of community college starters who transfer to a public four-year institution. In general, undergraduates who take all their courses online are less likely to succeed than those who take just some courses online. And online success rates are especially low for low-income students, those from other underserved groups or those who face other challenges typical in rural areas, such as limited access to transportation and childcare. <\/p>\n
The third path is for students to take upper-division coursework through a university center arrangement, where the four-year university has a physical presence on the community college campus. These arrangements vary in design but typically involve university faculty teaching courses on the community college campus. While reasonable in concept, university centers are often challenging to operate. Beyond common issues of ownership, oversight and authority associated with programs run by two separate institutions, in rural colleges, such programs also often do not enroll enough students to make it worth the investment by the university and thus are difficult to sustain, financially and politically. <\/p>\n
That leaves community college bachelor\u2019s degree programs, which are often the best option for rural students. Research indicates that these programs not only provide effective access to bachelor\u2019s programs for older working students with families and others who are place-bound but also enable these students to secure good jobs. <\/p>\n
Some question whether community colleges should offer bachelor\u2019s degrees, arguing that they duplicate university offerings and represent a form of mission creep. But community college bachelor\u2019s degrees tend to be unlike conventional bachelor\u2019s degrees from universities. First, they are explicitly designed as applied credentials to meet specific regional workforce needs. In the best cases, community college bachelor\u2019s degrees are reverse-engineered collaboratively with employers to meet these needs.<\/p>\n
Second, they are also often designed to help the many applied associate degree graduates of community colleges find a more effective path to completing a bachelor\u2019s degree, in which their applied coursework is built upon, not disregarded. Finally, they are delivered at home so that graduates of community colleges who are tied to their local area can advance into family-supporting jobs. They are offered through institutions that most students are already familiar with and by people with whom students already have relationships.<\/p>\n
For example, LCCC offers a bachelor\u2019s of applied science in health-care administration, with accelerated eight-week courses, offered at convenient times and through a combination of online and in-person modalities. The program is designed to provide the many working health-care clinicians with applied associate degrees (e.g., nurses, sonographers, radiology techs, etc.) a path to management jobs. This program was developed collaboratively with numerous health-care employers to address the strong demand for talent in health-care administration and provide their employees with a viable path to a bachelor\u2019s degree, without requiring them to start over or relocate to another community.<\/p>\n
The number of bachelor\u2019s degrees awarded by community colleges nationally is still small: fewer than 17,000 annually, compared to more than 1.3\u00a0million awarded by public universities. Still, policymakers in a growing number of states are recognizing that rural community colleges are well positioned to meet the needs of students and employers for workforce bachelor\u2019s programs not available from other providers. Currently, community colleges in 24 states are authorized to offer bachelor\u2019s degrees in particular fields, yet the majority (nearly 80\u00a0percent) of these colleges are located in just seven states. Thus, there is plenty of room to grow. Bachelor\u2019s programs offered by rural community colleges provide a model for what we hope is becoming a national movement to rethink bachelor\u2019s education for the large number of place-bound students who must work and care for their families but need a bachelor\u2019s degree to advance in their careers. <\/p>\n
Joe Schaffer is president of Laramie County Community College. Davis Jenkins is a senior research scholar and Hana Lahr is assistant director of research and director of applied learning at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University\u2019s Teachers College<\/em>.<\/p>\n Ascendium Education Group provided funding for this work.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In rural parts of the U.S., 36\u00a0percent of jobs that pay enough for an individual to be self-sufficient require at least a bachelor\u2019s degree, yet only 25\u00a0percent of rural workers hold such degrees. Many rural communities do not have a university or four-year college nearby. As a result, students in these communities are likely to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15743,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[947,9269,9268,2942,678],"class_list":{"0":"post-15742","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-communities","9":"tag-pathways","10":"tag-rethinking","11":"tag-rural","12":"tag-students"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}