NEW YORK, NY July 15 (DPI) – An analyst with a nonpartisan think tank wrote a persuasive nytimes.com post on the financial and political mess at City College of San Francisco, and the vicious backlash among readers suggested he is on to something.
Kevin Carey of The New America Foundation posted on the Upshot blog a description of the ongoing financial and performance failings of City College of San Francisco, which has 77,000 students and several thousand tenured faculty. He wrote that 70% of the students don’t graduate on time, and the school, which depends largely on federal funds, runs massive deficits.
According to Carey, who writes about education issues, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges backed off using the only mechanism it has – de-certification — against CCSF after a political firestorm that included denunciations from local congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and others.
Carey, making some provocative generalities that nonetheless sounded credible, left readers with the impression that reform is impossible, and accountability and leadership are virtually nonexistent, not only at California’s community and other 2-year colleges but throughout the country, where the influence of entrenched faculties is overwhelming.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/upshot/city-college-of-san-francisco-survives.html?rref=upshot
The attacks from readers – many of them teachers, former students and others – were furious. All the highest recommended posts excoriated the writer for not getting his facts straight – all difficult to confirm either way — or for just being critical of a large city institution. The most recommended among 49 comments:
So “The Upshot” has become a mouthpiece for the dubious pronouncements of The New America Foundation? We met the same kind of overheated generalizations from Kevin Carey a couple of weeks ago, with the click-bait-titled “Americans Think We Have World’s Best Colleges. We Don’t,” which was roundly criticized and (to my mind) discredited.
Other comments, presented in order of recommendation:
This is an obscene misrepresentation of the circumstances at City College of San Francisco.
As a graduate of City College of San Francisco who went on to graduate from UC Berkeley, get a Ph.D. from Harvard, and enjoy a successful professional career, it saddens me to hear about the difficulties it, and apparently other similar schools, are having.
CCSF has crumbling infrastructure, 200M annual budget & 77,000 students & has experienced 53M in cuts over the last few years.
It’s an example of an institution doing an outstanding job with limited resources.I know nothing about the issues at City College of San Francisco, but I do know a great deal about the rates of college persistence and completion. If 31 percent of the students at CCSF graduate on time, that makes it one of the best performing community colleges in the country. This author doesn’t explain what the accrediting agency found, although reading between the lines it sounds as if the main problems are financial. Is the school living beyond its means?
I teach at a CA community college as well as a state university. As others have mentioned the article seems to be inflammatory and fails to understand key points.
Expecting CCSF to get things in order in a year was never a reasonable objective given its sheer scope – it’s over 5x larger than a typical CCC and has many campuses. A longer period of time with appropriate milestones should have been the strategy from the start given the size of the school and its problems.
I welcome the idea of accreditation and will tell you that the default for faculty is that they are very committed to providing a quality education for their students with accountability. The ACCJC accreditation process is highly bureaucratic and focuses on administration, not instruction. They issue sanctions at such a high rate that their own processes have been called into question.
Extremely poorly researched article. CCSF has one of the best records, academically, among all the colleges in the huge California community college system.
CCSF exceeds the state average in graduation rates. Numbers don’t adequately reflect reality. Some are not counted in graduation statistics. Many take a few classes needed for transfer or for job retraining. Many work, have families or other challenges (like poverty) and need more time. The ACCJC found NO problems with educational programs at CCSF!
“The best students would attend elite University of California research universities; the next-best would enroll in the California State University System” I find this offensive.
Two weeks earlier Carey wrote an equally provocative post on how the US stacks up against other countries in adult testing, the results of which are none too impressive.