City Leaders Visit Philadelphia to Shape Local Plans for Boosting College Completion Rates
April 05, 2010
by Michael Karpman
Municipal and education leaders from seven cities participating in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Communities Learning in Partnership initiative gathered in Philadelphia recently to develop plans for boosting local college completion rates.
As managing intermediary of this multi-year initiative, NLC’s Institute for Youth, Education, and Families is helping cities better coordinate the services that colleges, local governments, schools and communities provide to help students complete their postsecondary education. These collaborations will aid students in overcoming obstacles to college completion, such as affordability, academic readiness, and family and work responsibilities.
Project cities include Dayton, Ohio; Jacksonville, Fla.; Mesa, Ariz.; New York; Phoenix; Riverside, Calif.; and San Francisco.
Participants, including city and school district officials, community college and university representatives, workforce partners and other community leaders, heard from Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter; Greg Darnieder, special assistant and advisor on the U.S. Secretary of Education’s Initiative on College Access; Steven Curtis, president of the Community College of Philadelphia; and (via recorded remarks) Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.).
“Education is economic development,” said Mayor Nutter. “Over the time I’ve been mayor, I’ve been laying out a series of goals, and there is no place you can go in Philadelphia where people don’t know that we’re trying to cut the dropout rate in half and double the college completion rate.”
Site Visits to Innovative Local Initiatives
As one of the founders of the Mayors’ Action Challenge for Children and Families, a national initiative to promote city leadership and innovation on behalf of children and families, Mayor Nutter has set an ambitious goal of reaching these targets in the next 5-10 years.
The Mayor’s Office for Education recently opened a PhillyGoes2College Office within City Hall providing comprehensive college access information as a key strategy toward achieving his education goals (see the March 8 edition of Nation’s Cities Weekly). While in Philadelphia, the seven project city teams had the opportunity to visit the PhillyGoes2College Office, as well as the office for the Philadelphia Gateway to College program, which helps dropouts ages 16-20 get back on track by simultaneously earning a high school diploma and college credit.
In addition to the site visits, city teams learned lessons from the Success Boston college completion initiative, as well as Philadelphia’s citywide Project U-Turn dropout prevention effort. The seven cities also received advice and ideas from experts at NLC, the Gates Foundation, the Academy for Educational Development, OMG Center for Collaborative Learning, Research for Action, College Complete America, and the Chicago Consortium on School Research at the University of Chicago.
Postsecondary Completion Plans
Project teams are in the process of developing comprehensive, three-year action plans for increasing college completion rates. Elements of the plans will include four system outcomes:
* Community commitment to achieving postsecondary success goals, especially among key stakeholders;
* Continuous measurement of progress toward a set postsecondary success goal and use of this information to drive change and publicly report progress;
* Development of sustainable structures for the community to plan, coordinate and execute strategies that increase postsecondary success; and
* Adoption and implementation of supportive and effective postsecondary success policies and practices by relevant stakeholders.
By this summer, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will select a subset of the communities from the planning phase to receive three-year implementation grants of up to $1 million per year. Throughout this implementation phase, cities will participate in a peer learning community and NLC will provide in-depth technical assistance in helping cities coordinate their postsecondary efforts.
Bolstering National College Completion Efforts
Communities Learning in Partnership is part of the foundation’s postsecondary success strategy of doubling the number of low-income young adults who earn postsecondary degrees or credentials by age 26. The project will also bolster national efforts to raise college completion rates.
Speaking to 3,000 mayors and city council members about increasing postsecondary education at NLC’s recent Congressional City Conference in Washington, D.C., Secretary of Education Arne Duncan discussed President Obama’s goal for the U.S. to have the world’s highest college completion rate by the end of the decade, and to ensure that every high school student graduates prepared for college and a career.
Emphasizing the importance of postsecondary education to cities’ economic vitality, Duncan noted that “nearly eight out of 10 future job openings in the next decade will require some postsecondary education — either college or job training.”
Details: To learn more about the Communities Learning in Partnership initiative, visit www.nlc.org/iyef or contact Kate Sandel at (202) 626-3046 or sandel@nlc.org