City Teams Hone Local College Completion Plans

November 01, 2010

by Jonathan Rogers

A convening of city teams held last week in Louisville, Ky., marked the beginning of the Communities Learning in Partnership initiative’s implementation phase. This initiative will help four cities — New York City, Mesa, Ariz., Riverside, Calif., and San Francisco — increase the college completion rates of their students over the next three years. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has provided each city with a $3 million grant to implement their postsecondary plans in collaboration with school districts, community colleges and other institutions of higher education, and a range of other community and work force partners. NLC’s Institute for Youth, Education, and Families serves as managing intermediary for the project.

The four project cities are part of an 11-city network focused on raising postsecondary completion rates. The network also includes three other cities that participated in the initiative’s planning phase (Phoenix, Jacksonville, Fla., and Dayton, Ohio) as well as four affiliated cities (Boston, Louisville, Philadelphia and Portland, Ore.).

Last week’s cross-site meeting connected network teams with federal officials and highlighted promising city strategies for helping students complete their postsecondary educations.

Dr. Eduardo Martin Ochoa, assistant secretary for postsecondary education at the U.S. Department of Education, joined Louisville Mayor Jerry E. Abramson, Jefferson Community and Technical College President Dr. Anthony Newberry and Jefferson County Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Sheldon Berman in discussing the Obama Administration’s postsecondary education priorities, while the Louisville leaders shared early lessons from the city’s efforts to improve educational attainment.

In mid-October, partners in Louisville launched a new phase of this work. A public-private partnership called 55,000 Degrees will seek to increase the number of residents with bachelor’s degrees by 40,000 and associate’s degrees by 15,000 by the year 2020, as part of a broader strategy to improve Louisville’s standing as a competitor for jobs and investment. Accomplishing this goal would bring the proportion of working-age adults in Louisville who have postsecondary degrees to 50 percent.

“In the Greater Louisville Education Commitment, every university president and our business and civic leaders have agreed to create a college-going culture, leverage the business community to accelerate education attainment, better prepare students for success for school and life, make postsecondary education accessible and affordable to all and increase postsecondary persistence and performance,” said Mayor Abramson.

As an outgrowth of the Mayor’s Education Roundtable created in 2008, the new partnership builds on two years of work to align and coordinate the efforts of education, business and community leaders to increase young residents’ educational attainment. Business Leaders for Education, organized by Greater Louisville Inc., was a driving force in focusing on the link between education and economic development. 

Similar efforts are underway in other cities that participated in last week’s convening. For instance, partners in the Mesa Counts on College initiative will connect more students with resources that promote postsecondary readiness, access, retention and completion.

Dayton’s Learn to Earn initiative includes plans to share student data among schools, colleges and social service and faith-based organizations.

In Portland, the Mayor’s Education Cabinet has approved the city’s first-ever Scholarship Strategy, prioritizing green industry career pathways that include pre-apprenticeship programs, community college programs and labor-industry partnerships.

Assistant Secretary Ochoa highlighted various federal efforts to improve postsecondary success. For instance, a recent White House Summit on Community Colleges chaired by Dr. Jill Biden highlighted the critical role community colleges play in developing the nation’s workforce, and reinforced local efforts to build a community-wide commitment to postsecondary education.

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. To learn more about Louisville’s 55,000 Degrees initiative, visit www.55000degrees.com.