IHE: Performance Based CC Funding

[lightning]

My late office mate had a saying that resonates with me daily:  "You can't make chicken salad out of chicken s%&t." 

In one semester of Comp I, I can't make up for student coming to us after 12 years of little to no literacy training/education  (and we "don't do" developmental/remedial classes anymore, at all). Nobody can.

Yet under many performance-based funding CC plans, there would be one pot of money for all CCs in the state, with the worthy ones (who can show that students pass--and not even getting into the question of the legitimacy of those passing grades) in outstate areas with competent-to-good feeder schools will get the bulk of the money, leaving those of us in the areas with awful feeder schools (mostly, but not exclusively, in urban areas--and some urban CCs in the state get and produce very good students) to do our unending work with even less.

Related: the idiotic focus on CC "completion rates," when traditionally and increasingly, most of our students don't come to us to complete a degree--they come to pick up cheap gen ed classes to take back to their 4-year schools, or

<SNIP>

Making matters worse for the CC in my area, my university tries to cherry-pick and poach the best CC students, before they finish at the CC. We have designated scholarships for CC transfer students, and we don't hesitate to use them to lure them away. The CC transfer students are great. They are already broken in and "get" college. And, they are the highly motivated students from the CC.

The thing that sucks, like everyone is saying, is that the CC gets punished for doing what they were designed to do, under success metrics that are not butts-in-seats metrics.

[Antiphon1]

Making matters worse for the CC in my area, my university tries to cherry-pick and poach the best CC students, before they finish at the CC. We have designated scholarships for CC transfer students, and we don't hesitate to use them to lure them away. The CC transfer students are great. They are already broken in and "get" college. And, they are the highly motivated students from the CC.

The thing that sucks, like everyone is saying, is that the CC gets punished for doing what they were designed to do, under success metrics that are not butts-in-seats metrics.

The conundrum stems from how different systems within a state are funded.  If all freshman level writing classes were funded at the same rate per student regardless of where the class was taught then we could have a conversation about the cost of educating students.  But that's never the case in educational funding.  Most states fund different types of educational providers depending on the level of degree offered.  The closer to secondary education the students are in in their education, the more the higher education funding resembles the secondary model. 

Community colleges are more likely to be funded partially as secondary schools and partially as colleges.  For instance, in some states the community college district collects property taxes to support the college much like property taxes for public schools.  Supplementing these taxes are contributions from the state based on enrollment, attainment of benchmarks and other student participation measures.  Tuition is set and regulated most times by the state higher education authority.   Sounds fair, right?  So, how does the state balance the funding for these colleges when a community college in a large urban area's tax revenues is 5 times the per student rate as a small rural school? Obviously, you set up yet another system to balance out the discrepancy much like recapture is supposed to balance rich and poor district funding.  And so it goes.

Legislatures are really good at addition and multiplicatio but horrible at subtraction and division.  Again, the success or failure of the new funding wrinkle is yet to be seen.  I, for one, am interested in what outcomes the legislature is really seeking.