The Completion Agenda: The Unintended Consequences for Equity in Community Colleges

Abstract

The recent national attention to community colleges as the sector of higher education to help achieve “The Completion Agenda” and serve as a major economic driver in the United States has not considered the consequences of narrowing educational opportunity for groups of students that historically use community colleges as their gateway to higher learning. Research demonstrates that women and men from underrepresented groups disproportionally begin their higher education at community colleges. The purpose of this chapter is to unravel the complex consequences for the completion focus in the context of decreased student access to community colleges through state policies that limit enrollment and federal policies that focus on graduation rates as opposed to learning. The chapter will provide a review of the literature on barriers to student success in community colleges and discuss recent policy shifts on the federal, national, state, and institutional levels that have a detrimental but possibly unintended consequence on educational access and opportunity as it relates to gender, race, and socioeconomic class. The chapter concludes with specific recommendations of ways to promote awareness and change within individual institutions and at the state and federal levels.