Opening Doors:
Building Learning Communities at Kingsborough Community College

A Forum — May 20, 2005

Community colleges are accessible, relatively affordable and offer a diverse array of course and degree options making them the gateway to higher education for about half the of the nation’s college students with approximately 1,200 community colleges nationwide. Nonetheless, the U.S. Department of Education reports that 46% of students who begin a community college degree or certificate program do not complete within six years. The non-completer percentage is higher for students who must first take remedial English or math courses. To address this problem, MDRC, a social policy organization, developed a national project called Opening Doors to test innovative programs that could improve academic success among community college students. This forum included early results from MDRC’s evaluation and a presentation of the Opening Doors program at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, New York.

Dan Bloom, Deputy Director, Work, Communities, and Economic Security, the MDRC division that evaluates employment programs for hard-to-employ groups, presented an overview of the Opening Doors project. Opening Doors is funded by 12 foundations and three federal agencies and includes six participating community colleges: Chaffey College, Rancho Cucamonga, CA; Kingsborough Community College, Brooklyn, NY; Lorain Community College, Lorain, OH; Owens Community College, Toledo, OH; and Delgado Community College and Louisiana Technical College, New Orleans, LA. Each college is testing ,a homegrown program that builds on one or more of the following strategies: curricular reforms, enhanced students services, or financial aid enhancements. Students were randomly assigned to a program group that received Opening Doors services or a control group. MDRC will follow both groups of students for several semesters, measuring a wide range of outcomes including credit accumulation and academic achievement. The MDRC evaluation plans to include long-term outcomes such as success in the labor market, health, voting, and civic participation. Bloom noted that the National Institutes of Health is one of the project funders in part to learn about possible links between health and higher levels of education.

Rachel Singer, Director of Academic Affairs at Kingsborough Community College (KCC), provided background on Kingsborough generally and its participation in the Opening Doors project. Kingsborough is one of 18 campuses of the City University of New York. It is the leading entry point for Brooklyn residents to higher education, ranking in the top five percent of community colleges nationwide in awarding associate degrees. Students come from more than 100 countries and speak 60 languages.

Singer said that KCC initially created its own program of Learning Communities in 1995 for students speaking English as a second language. This program was expanded to non-ESL students in 1999 with a Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technology Education grant that permitted the addition of career-related courses and significant counseling support. Singer said the preliminary assessment showed that participants in the program earned higher grades, had higher pass rates on standardized tests and were more likely to stay in college. With this background, Singer said KCC was eager to take advantage of the Opening Doors research and funding from MDRC. By the time the MDRC study assignment period ended, Singer said the Opening Doors/Learning Communities approach was so popular with both students and faculty that KCC is offering it to a pilot group of evening students and would look forward to possibly offering it on weekends as well.

Dan Bloom described the structure of the Opening Doors program at KCC. He said the study began in fall 2003 and eventually included more than 1,500 students over four semesters. They were all first-time freshmen and full time day students; 88% failed at least one CUNY skills test in writing, math or reading, and were assigned to developmental English. They were organized in groups of 25; each small group took three courses together during the first semester – English, a content course required for the students’ major (biology, psychology, etc.), and a student development course. The student development course was taught by an Opening Doors counselor who saw each student at least once a week and considered the entire group his/her caseload. The student development course had a strong core curriculum covering college life, learning styles, career exploration and diversity. The MDRC study also provided vouchers for student book purchases and compensation to faculty for collaborative planning time.

Marcia Babbitt, Chair of the English Department at KCC, co-directs Opening Doors. She said KCC faculty is very enthusiastic about Opening Doors because “interdisciplinary approach because it gets us out of our cocoons.” She said the small learning communities enable faculty to actively engage students in reading, writing and critical thinking, adding that students are put in the “middle of the learning process” and begin to see connections with their own lives.

Discussing the early results of the MDRC study, Bloom said two hypotheses underlie the Opening Doors program: that the Learning Communities model would help students perform better during their first semester and that a positive first semester experience would translate into later success and persistence. He compared results from students in the Opening Doors group and the control group. After the first year, 62% of the Opening Doors students had passed the CUNY reading and writing assessment tests compared with 52% of the control group. Among students who failed both the writingand reading tests prior to enrollment, 33.9% passed both tests after one year compared to only 14.8% of the control group. Bloom said this is a key indicator that Opening Doors is helping students get out of remedial classes. He also said students in the program are moving more quickly through their required English courses.

In the area of persistence or retention, Bloom said about the same percentage of students from the treatment and control groups were still enrolled by the second semester after the Opening Doors experience. He said this was the most surprising result because it offered no evidence that Opening Doors increases the number of students who stay in college. He said it is too early to draw final conclusions, and later reports will include longer-term results. Bloom said the study will eventually look at transfer rates to colleges within the CUNY system as well as transfers to other colleges, for-profit training academies and employment.

Peter Cohen is Director of the Freshman Year Experience at Kingsborough Community College. Before moderating a discussion with two Opening Doors students, Cohen said his goal at KCC is to help students make meaningful connections and feel good about being at college so they are more likely to stay. Two KCC students took questions from Cohen and from the audience. Kiesia Messado is a 27 year-old student from Jamaica majoring in education. She took paired courses in English and psychology during her Opening Doors semester. Messado said she has a 3.92 GPA and is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. She said she especially appreciated the sense of support rather than competition among members of her group. “When we have a paper due, we make three copies and critique each other’s papers.” John Spanos is a biology major and the first in his family to go to college. He said he felt like an outcast in high school and especially appreciated the positive environment at KCC in general as well as the close relationships developed in his small group. Because there is more one-on-one attention, Spanos said he is able to perform better. He said he liked the connections between courses, mentioning that at the same time he was working on a project on vital signs in his biology class, his English class was learning how to write and structure a scientific report.

Questions

The first question related to the costs of the program. Singer said the initial cost was $1,000 per student per semester. She said that has dropped to $500 per student per semester because training costs are going down as more faculty become familiar with the program. She also said that one of the biggest expenses is the voucher to cover book purchases.

Both students were asked about the “selling points” that made them want to participate in the Opening Doors program. Messado said the community concept appealed to her because she was starting college after being away from school for 12 years. Spanos also said he liked the idea of working as a group, remembering that in high school “if you miss something, no one stops to pick you up.” In the Kingsborough Learning Community, Spanos said the group worked toward a solid outcome for everyone.

Asked about the policy implications of the Opening Doors project, Bloom said the study is more about ways to structure classes at community colleges, but he says funding to support such programs is key. Singer said the KCC program is funded heavily by a local foundation that is committed to changing social policy and the biggest challenge is always money.

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