"Any time you have a difference it points to an inequality," Nettles says, who adds that there is no question that students of color -- other than Asian Americans -- do not graduate at the same rate as Whites.
But the problem is that even that study -- which is the best there is -- only goes five years. Because community college persistence patterns require a longer time frame to see, they are virtually invisible to the researchers.
One piece of evidence that may be true is a study of students admitted to open admissions community colleges in the City University of New York (CUNY) system, Changing the Odds -- Open Admissions and the life Chances of the Disadvantaged. In that study, conducted by David E. Lavin and David Hyllegard, it appears that although students admitted under the open admissions standards typically take longer to graduate -- six to eight years is not uncommon -- 56 percent of them do go on to graduate and about 18 percent go on for post-graduate work.
According to the Ford Foundation's Bernstein, Lavin's study shows hat you can have "gloom and doom" if you look at some statistics, but it is not exactly clear who is doing what in higher education.
"We're taking pictures in a very traditional way. We are taking pictures with a four-by-four camera. You need to have a more panoramic frame."
As Community College of Philadelphia's William says: "We just don't know. The criticism I accept is that we don't know. Should we know more? That's an expensive proposition."
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