MIT: Raising State Minimum Wages, Lowering Community College Enrollment | Hacker News Reader

MIT: Raising State Minimum Wages, Lowering Community College Enrollment

direct.mit.edu

The current title of this submission is

> MIT: Raising State Minimum Wages, Lowering Community College Enrollment

The "MIT:" in the title is misleading. This is a published paper in a journal that has little to do with MIT. Neither the three authors of the paper nor most editors of the journal[1] are affiliated with it.

[1] https://direct.mit.edu/rest/pages/editorial-info

https://web.archive.org/web/20230811042051/https://www.nber....

In some ways community college is in a no man’s land between no experience necessary jobs and better career paths that require similar lengths of training.

e.g., why study to be a paralegal when it’s a job with possibly worse pay and working conditions than many servers and bartenders enjoy?

I mean we kinda expect community colleges to pick up those who are left behind and willing to learn

They’re a good place for folks to develop more academic discipline in that they tend to have a more rigid structure than university, more like a freer high school than the free for all of university.

Interesting. In what way is the structure more rigid than university?

There's a few reasons:

Smaller class sizes for general education courses so the teacher knows you better and so do your classmates. Leads to more accountability for completing course work as you can't just be a face in a 500 seat lecture pit.

Many of the teachers coincidentally teach advanced high school courses and moonlight as adjunct professors, so that also contributes to the "high school feel".

American Universities are an institution where you are expected to act professional and complete coursework as per the guidelines. There is no one holding your hand to complete the coursework. Thats where you have a lack of rigidness. No one cares what you do once the semester begins. You can omit attending classes and accept the consequences of your actions. You are an independent adult and you are treated as such. Of course many schools offer numerous resources to get help in the coursework but the person must take the initiative to keep up if they are struggling.

The schools are generally upholding a reputation (Especially for the Engineering university I went to) and with the declining standard of high schools, many college bound students are just not ready for the culture shock of a institution that expects a certain level of academic discipline and rigor and will not be kind to you if you do not meet it.(To be clear, at many schools you are still given opportunities to rectify the situation before they permanently close the door on you but it will still stain your record at that point).

Community college is open enrollment, even if you completely fail all your courses and you have a record on your transcript, there is always an opportunity to come back and rectify the failures of the past. In fact the colleges are designed to allow anyone to continually try and improve themselves academically. This allows students to raise the level of standards needed for post high school academic work on their own terms and on their own timeline. One way they do this is create a structure where you are given more attention and the coursework is more "guided" to help you get to the finish line and build that discipline that you may not have gotten in high school.

I'll give you an anecdote I got from the dean of the math department at my local community college which will help paint a picture of the situation(this was 15+ years ago so things may have changed).

The college runs a super basic Algebra math class for people who didn't complete high school or are so far out of school that they need to start at the very basics. They go out of their way to accommodate the students as this course is typically the entry into a majority of all degrees (STEM or otherwise).

To that end, they run multiple copies ("sections") of the course at all days of the week, at essentially any available time to accommodate any possible schedule. This involves hiring over a dozen instructors just for this one course but it is the mission of the school to educate as many people as possible so it makes sense. This is in addition to a dedicated tutoring center open to all students. Yet despite all of this, over half the class(I think it was 60%) failed or didn't make it to the end every semester. The community college makes it possible for students to get a second, third, fourth chance at success. As long as you are alive, it is never too late.

Even at 60% failure rate, that still means 40% of students continue on. Given enough time the hope is that the majority of the population is on the path to achieving their dreams. At least thats the hope and the Community College does everything it can to help students get there.

One of the main services offered by many community colleges is GED courses for people who dropped out of high school for one reason or another.

Not everyone is going to a community college for just a 2 year degree. Many use it as a flexible, affordable solution for taking prerequisite courses required for a 4 year degree.

I hear this all the time, but does that work anywhere? Everywhere I've heard of, so many of the credits don't transfer that it ends up being a waste of time and money. But maybe I only hear about the cases where people have something to complain about, or the states I've lived in have crappy systems.

I did almost 2 years of CC in California before university, and I think every unit transferred.

(I did go to CC specifically to transfer eventually, so I didn't take courses randomly)

From what I've heard, it works in Wisconsin. The state and community colleges have coordinated their curricula in order to make it work.

I did 2 years at community in Pennsylvania and then the university I went to had an agreement with them to accept all the credits.

In Washington State (Seattle) I was attending the UW and targeting Computer Science when I discovered I could transfer in some number of general ed courses (not pre-reqs) from in-state community colleges. It saved me a fair amount of money and I found the courses to be of similar quality to general ed courses at the university.

(Which is to say, the courses were a mix of good and not good, just like I experienced at the university.)

They had a big list of in-state transfers, where you could see which courses you could transfer in, and which you couldn't. Also, you could see if they satisfied any specific requirement.

This anecdote is almost 20 years old at this point though, but I believe this is still possible to do.

Many states require that CC courses transfer for the CC associate's degree program to exist. Virtually all CCs and 4 year public institutions have documentation that you can access well in advance of pursuing a degree plan that will tell you what transfers, so you can avoid the electives that don't.

I went to diablo valley college and then transferred to berkeley. All credits are accounted for.

Yeah, probably depends on the school system.

In my area, the community and state college have a program that allows students to transfer directly into a four year degree after completing core classes at the community college. All credits transfer so long as they’re part of the program.

For us, it was roughly half the tuition cost and student lived at home the first couple years. Worked well for us.

CCs in California offer Associate in Arts for Transfer (AA-T) & Associate in Science for Transfer (AS-T) specifically towards a 4 year degree.

I speak from experience of having a 2 and 4 year degree earned sequentially. Paid my way through school without help from my parents.

The public universities in my state have agreements with the community colleges to maximize credit transfer. Took all my prerequisite courses at a community college, including calculus, linear algebra and statistics with calculus.

Works in Virginia quite well.

California does it very well.

In Massachusetts IIRC the state universities and community colleges have intentionally set things up to make it easy to transfer credits in.

Pretty sure it works almost everywhere. I was a HS dropout who went from an "Intro to Functions" remedial class to DiffEq/Linear Algebra (which they let you take simultaneously) all in community college, before transferring to real college. Managed to knock it out in three semesters and a summer.

The first two years of an undergraduate degree are pretty general anyway.

edit: Illinois.

Well I can tell you that NJ has predefined transfer agreements with all community colleges and public colleges in the state. They even have a website (www.njtransfer.org) where you can input all courses that you will take at community colleges and see the exact course equivalency that is guaranteed to be accepted by the institution you wish to transfer to. Furthermore, if you maintain certain GPA, you are guaranteed a seat at your intended college.

(And if you make 65k or less a year you are also granted free tuition.)

Its not perfect though. When I was transferring for my CS degree, some colleges only accepted my CS courses as general credit to be applied to a selection of non CS courses in the program. You would have seen this ahead of time if you went to the website but it was still a bummer to know that you'd have to take CS classes at the community college and then repeat them at the new institution. This would essentially require me to retake Core CS classes at the school (Rutgers). It would have added at least 1 more semester to my college career. In hindsight, I understand why they did it. The institution I selected(NJIT) accepted the credits as equivalent classes and I was immediately thrown into more advanced classes where I struggled for a while because I hadn't quite mastered the fundamentals.

Still overall super straightforward to get from filling out the application for Community college admission -> working hard in classes -> Getting that final Bachelor's degree.

If you transfer within the state system probably 95% to 100% of the credits will transfer depending on how careful you are in your choices. If you transfer to another state's system you can probably get 70% to 90% of the credits to transfer. Some state systems are more compatible than others. If you are going to a private school the percentages are typically much worse 20% to 50%. There are a few like USC which do a lot better.

It works nearly everywhere, you just need to check (and double check, and get in writing) beforehand that the credits transfer instead of picking classes randomly and being shocked when your University of choice doesn't accept them. Many community colleges even have official systems for transferring to a partnered University.

from https://www.vccs.edu/transfer-programs/

"Through system agreements, students who graduate from one of Virginia’s 23 community colleges with an associate degree and a minimum grade point average may obtain GUARANTEED admission to more than 30 of the commonwealth’s colleges and universities. Please see the list below for copies of the current agreements."

Community saved me $100k before going for my bachelors.

Yep, went to CC, transferred to a school a great computer engineering program and saved a ton of money. My mental health got the best of me in high school and I almost definitely couldn't have gotten accepted anywhere if I hadn't gone the community route, so I am super happy it worked out the way it did.

I didn’t even apply to my community college until a few weeks before the first semester. Not sure if I would have went if I had to take a gap year. Probably would be slinging metal in the union right now but sometimes that sounds nicer.

> e.g., why study to be a paralegal when it’s a job with possibly worse pay and working conditions than many servers and bartenders enjoy?

Because a paralegal gets to work roughly 9-to-5, gets to sit on their ass instead of standing on their feet for 8+ hours, and probably only has to deal with the occasional coked up lawyer rather than drunk assholes every night?

If you're a young, pretty female, you can probably make good money in one of those service jobs. If you're not young, not pretty, or not female, then you're probably WAY better off as a paralegal.

I speak from a little bit of experience as I once dated a paralegal. The job sucked. Zero opportunity for advancement. 100% soul-crushing busywork. It’s also in major danger of being automated away.

When I go out to restaurants I see plenty of male and not-young bartenders and servers.

And let’s not forget that this is a comparison of a job that requires high school education versus a job that requires extra training on top of that.

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