Washington, D.C. – In an effort to provide a more nuanced snapshot of completion rates at community colleges, the College Board on Monday launched a new Internet tool described as a “quick and easy” way get a handle on various measures of student outcomes.
While the usefulness and user-friendliness of the new website is a matter of perspective (it only provides already-published data that must be downloaded in spreadsheet form) College Board collaborators described it as a welcome attempt to shine light on the role that community colleges are being expected to play in providing workforce training for students from diverse walks of life.
“Data by themselves as we know them don’t change anything but can be a powerful prompt for constructive change, and monitoring the impact of the work we’re doing to improve outcomes for a wildly diverse student population,” said Kay McClenney, director of the Center for Community College Student Engagement and an adjunct professor in the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas at Austin.
McClenney made her remarks on Monday in a conference center at the Newseum during an event hosted by the College Board Advocacy & Policy Center to announce the new web tool, formally known as “The Completion Arch.”
The Completion Arch takes its name from the fact that it is based on a symbolic semicircle divided into five parts that represent separate areas of community college completion: 1) enrollment; 2) developmental education placement; 3) progress; 4) transfer and completion; and 5) workforce preparation and employment outcomes.
The website features the ability to break information down by state, race and ethnicity or gender, but it does not include institution-specific data, thus, it is not possible to figure out the percentage of students at a given community college who landed jobs in their field of study.
Attendees included several high-ranking education officials within the Obama administration, several higher education association leaders and a number of community college presidents who serve on the College Board’s Community College Advisory Panel.
