Davis Jenkins on Navigating the Future of Community Colleges

Work Forces

Davis Jenkins is senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center and a research professor at Columbia University's Teachers College. With over four decades of experience in enhancing education and employment outcomes, Jenkins shares his insights on redesigning community colleges and the implementation of guided pathways. His work focuses on improving access and outcomes for underserved students, rethinking dual credit, and enhancing bachelor's degree transfer rates. This episode not only highlights Jenkins' significant contributions to community college reform but also explores the broader implications of these efforts on the future of education and workforce development.

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Transcript

Julian Alssid: Welcome to Work Forces. I'm Julian Alssid.

Kaitlin LeMoine: And I'm Kaitlin LeMoine. And we speak with the innovators who shape the future of work and learning.

Julian: Together, we unpack the complex elements of workforce and career preparation and offer practical solutions that can be scaled and sustained.

Kaitlin: Let's dive in. Welcome to this episode of Workforces. Today, we're joined by Davis Jenkins, a senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center, and a research professor at Columbia University's Teachers College. Davis has over 40 years of experience working with colleges, schools, community groups, and employers in communities and states across the country to find ways to improve educational and employment outcomes for students that have been poorly served by the U.S. educational system. He is a prolific author of publications that address how to redesign America's community colleges with a specific focus on the development and implementation of guided pathways. Davis is currently leading research and advising on how to rethink dual credit as an on-ramp to college and improving BA transfer outcomes for underserved students. He's among the leading experts on community colleges in the country, and we're so excited to speak with him today. Welcome to the podcast, Davis.

Davis Jenkins: Glad to be here.

Julian: Yes, Davis, welcome. And, you know, Kaitlin got us started there with your initial background or bio, but it would be great if you could tell us a little bit more about your background and how you've come to your current work at Teachers College.

Davis: So this is my 41st year working in higher ed. I started out of college working as a speechwriter and report writer for these two guys who had pioneered management consulting for higher ed. I started working with them in 1982. In 1983, we did a big study for Governor Hunt in North Carolina who recognized that if North Carolina was to move from textile and tobacco to tech and a knowledge workforce, you needed the research triangle, but you also needed a technician workforce. And while he didn't develop the North Carolina Community and Technical Colleges, you know, he really helped improve their strength and their workforce focus. So I had been through a very elite, preppy kind of education. I knew nothing about community colleges. I fell in love with them and worked with them ever since on how to, how community colleges and public higher ed generally, and public education generally, can be rethought from what is– essentially a system of sorting by race and class, which is inequitable (but it also sorts out talent), to one that supports upward mobility by meeting the workforce needs of local community.

Kaitlin: So building on that, what are the projects that you're currently most excited about in what you're working on today?

Davis: So in 2015, Tom Bailey and Shanna Jaggers and I wrote this book called “Redesigning America's Community Colleges”. And the idea was that despite a lot of effort, especially since the early 2000s of community colleges, and we were part of this, we weren't seeing big improvements in outcomes. Our diagnosis was that a lot of the efforts, again, well-intentioned, a lot of people work on these, were a very small bore focused on especially the onboarding process and what's called developmental or remedial education. We said that that's really not enough to improve outcomes at scale. We saw outcomes for small groups of students served, but not outcomes. And that basically our thesis was that to improve outcomes at scale, colleges have to redesign from the model in which they were built, which was based on the needs of the United States in the 1960s and 70s, which is to broadly improve access. And community colleges and public higher education generally was the marvel of the world to an expanded access to higher ed on a level that had never been achieved before. But in the 2000s, certainly in 2010, given, you know, economic developments, demographic, this sort of cafeteria college where there was a lot of courses and supports available, but it's really up to the students to find them and navigate themselves through was not adequate to, you know, enabling students to get where they need to go. This caught the attention of people because starting in 2011, community college enrollments started to tank. It's continued to tank and then of course it really tanked in COVID. So we've been studying over 100 colleges intensively through tracking what they're doing, the reforms they're implementing, as well as using data to look at their student outcomes. And what we found is we've seen improvements in early progression and because, they've gotten rid of hopefully Dev Ed, and replaced that by co-requisite Dev Ed. We're seeing better onboarding of students into programs. A couple of things, we're not seeing, we're still seeing problems with persistence of students. And while we're seeing improvements overall for all groups, we're not seeing closing of the gaps. We're currently writing another book, but the thesis of that is that the guided pathways ideas, which were on the, which is, you know, you help students clarify the path for a student, help them get on a path, help them complete and support learning across programs. Those were good ideas. They're hard to implement because you're basically redesigning a 60 year old, 50 year old system. And, so much of the effort was really, thus far, while we have seen marketing increases, improvements, it's been on removing barriers and not on motivating students. And there has been two little effort on three areas, which are now the focus of our work. Number one, the idea was always, and this goes back to my work with Julian and others on the career pathways, where the idea is where you start with the end in mind where the end is career path employment, that is employment that pays living wages and offers opportunities for advancement, those kind of jobs. And backward design, the education system. That's basically been the one idea of my career, which came out of actually working colleges in the 80s in areas where they were implementing quality systems, the Japanese were beating us up in manufacturing, but lots of, and so the idea was, how do you apply this to education to get rid of the prep school sorting system, right? So there are three areas we're working on now. Colleges map programs, but they didn't necessarily map them to jobs or to transfer in a major field without excess credits. They were mapping their associate of arts programs. They weren't really scrutinizing their programs, and this is hard, to make sure in their workforce areas, that they're enabling students to get living wage jobs. And Julian and I, I don't know if we invented it, but we certainly popularized the idea of stacking credentials in the nineties as part of the Career Pathways Movement. Everyone talks about it, seems like a good idea because we pushed it because it seemed like such a good idea. Turns out that there's very little stacking that goes on. Very few students who get this sort of short-term training go on to get degrees. And where it does happen in some advanced fields, but it happens like an upskilling that in like computers or certainly advanced manufacturing or engineering tech, but that happens really as part of the work and that's fine. But for underserved students and workers in low wage jobs, the kinds of certificates that community colleges and other offering them aren't even getting them that first step in these advanced fields. So, I talk about stacking credentials to learning and earning ladders. A big change that's happened since the 1990s when Julian and I began to work on Career Pathways was that increasingly, pretty much the only family supporting jobs by and large are held by people with a bachelor's degree and higher. Even living wage jobs, a living wage nationally according to MIT is $39,000. That's about $18.75 an hour. And then 1990s when Julian and I were working, you could get like an advanced certificate and get into one of those jobs. And it is true in some industries like construction, where you can get a pretty decent job, or you can get a job in welding that pays above a living wage. But I'm also interested in jobs that provide opportunities for learning and advancement. And working as a construction laborer, working in welding, well, those are great. You can't do that your whole life, generally. So this is a challenge for a community college. But they're going to need to address this challenge because their enrollment is tanking. So we say, if you want to recruit and retain students in this highly competitive environment, you have to have programs worth offering. Very briefly, the two other, the three other areas we're working on is helping students. Community college lose 40% of their students from the start because they come in and traditionally they take dev ed, which looks like high school and it's, it doesn't work. It's well intended and they're like, well, there's nothing here for me. No one's asking, what are you good at? How can you, you know, what are you interested in? Oh, you're interested in drones? You have to see Professor Alssid. He is the biggest drone nerd. And not just drones, any technology. The guy goes crazy. He works in this program and you know, you gotta meet the students there. So ask, connect. And then very importantly, and this is hard, there hasn't been enough innovation. We have to have a really inspiring, well-taught, challenging course where students are learning what we call college learning, that is. Thinking, writing, not just regurgitating information. Students don't like it. It's hard, but there's a lot of good research, much of it funded by NSF actually, that the experience of active learning is really early on is transformative. And then finally, you have to have a plan, give the student a plan that shows a path that gets to a job that pays a living wage or transfer to a major in your field of interest, because otherwise students take too many. Then you have to, the third area is we're helping, once you have that plan, schedule the courses and offer them so that students can take them when they're working and integrate working in that. And then finally, we're seeing opportunities to build these pathways down into the schools in a more equitable way using dual enrollment which has become very big in community college, the only growing segment of community college students, one in five community college students. And yet it's been very, they've taken a very laissez-faire approach to it, which is sort of like, you know, programs of privilege and random acts, random courses not tied to a program. The big area also in high school is the millions of students who are in high school CTE shockingly few of whom go on to post-secondary. Even though the certificates are great, it shows interest, they'll be able to get a little bit better job, but to get that living wage job and to get your employer to pay for your on the job training and your further education of the bachelors and beyond, you need at least an applied associate. Well, the good thing is, is that the market forces, they're just losing students, even as, you know, if this were just about technical training and skills training, community colleges, you know, community colleges and universities would go out of business. But really it is about a broader being able to think and, you know, communicate. That doesn't mean we can provide, I'm not just talking about community colleges, but universities as well, the kind of, you know, the traditional college degree that we have. But, you know, education still, pays despite what people say and I'm mostly interested in helping people get into career paths. You know there's huge and you know important work of you know helping continuing those skills but the the biggest benefit that public higher ed and public education can pay for students in society is get them into a career career path job. And that's by and large, mostly what community college do. They don't do much up school.

Julian: So Davis, as you're thinking about the future of work and learning in this country, what keeps you up at night? What are the most pressing challenges?

Davis: Well, there are challenges, but there are also opportunities. Technologies are transforming every job. And for example, in the energy area, I was just talking to folks at Southwest Wisconsin's Technical College. And they were looking at the job opportunities available through solar farms that are being built in rural areas like. But then they started to talk to employers in manufacturing, but banks, hospitals, their own campus, and realized that everyone needs these employers with these kind of core set of skills and sort of understanding to help assess and identify and implement ways to save energy. And this isn't just because of the federal funding that's available. This is, you know, people talk about that and going to have an effect. But the bigger effect is the investment private sector. So in other words, all these jobs are being transformed and the traditional job titles don't reflect these. Another example is in advanced manufacturing. Lorraine County Community College was dealing with their people who do electronics manufacturing and identified these micromechatronics skills. And they're finding they're useful across industries, not just in manufacturing, but in warehousing. They started this a decade ago, and now Intel is moving into Ohio, those jobs are going to be two hours away in Columbus. But what they found was this hole in Northeast Ohio, they didn't even know, every manufacturer needs to implement these micromechatronics technologies in their existing products and their new products. So in other words, it's being transformed. And again, those jobs, those skills aren't well defined. And then finally, AI, I mean, that's going to transform every job. The challenge is that the work is changing fast. On the other hand, it's fairly broad-based. If you're just talking about like biotech or advanced manufacturing or chip manufacturing, those places are taking relatively few places, but these are affecting jobs across industries. That's the opportunity. The challenge is to define what those are and the traditional sort of inward looking curriculum development process that we have to try to, well, meaning to try to, sure quality control doesn't work. You really have to develop a relationship, a sort of, you have to work with the employers to map out the job ladders because they're really not clear and talk with your alumni who are in these jobs, you know, not just the HR departments about, you know, how are these fields changing and what would you recommend, you know, your peers who are coming in. The point is, this is a big inflection point for, a turning point for higher ed. They've got to make big changes. And we're seeing colleges that will make those changes, and they will survive. But many are already seeing it, consolidation. So there's going to be a lot of change. And I think it's a time of opportunity.

Kaitlin: And building upon that, Davis, I think Julian and I have been talking a lot recently about the convergence of higher ed and workforce development. And where is the line drawn? Or is there a line anymore? Jjust because as you're saying, all these pathways seem to merge and come together, and that's more and more the direction that we're headed. What do you see as higher ed's role in this convergence, in this moment of change and convergence?

Davis: Many of these ideas come out of workforce development, but higher ed needs to see itself as a workforce development. The most important one. Again, if the fact is, and it's complicated, and yes, there is credential inflation and this on the other hand, and that's something we've seen accelerate. That's sort of what got me out of the career pathways or moving beyond that in the early 2000s, because when the dot-com boom hit, anyone who didn't have a bachelor's degree was sort of laid off. And since then, companies have automated. So you're gonna need to have a broad-based education. When you look at the skills that are needed, oral and written communication are not only the most desired, they're also the most valuable. Critical thinking, then I think teaching and learning by which they want to see evidence that you can learn and change. And then only then do you get to technical skills, which are important, but they have to be applied in a context. So I guess what I'm saying is higher ed has to get over this idea that it's just for education for education's sake. On the other hand, it's not just doing skills training. It's teaching people how to learn. One area where there's huge opportunity is just at University of North Texas, which is a really forward-thinking institution. Very diverse, but they've moved up in the research rankings. They're now the number three university in Texas, in Denton, Texas, northwest of Dallas. And they've done this by really focusing on the basics to recruit and retain students from underserved populations who the other universities are just sorting out, right? And so they've benefited from this. One of the big things they've been focusing on is math. And this is an area of huge interest to me because I believe you talk about workforce. We teach math. It's Sputnik era math. No one else in the world teaches it that way. It's much more applied. But basically, they recognize that the people teaching math in the intro math courses, and they have a lot of engineering and science programs there, were people with PhDs in math who have, nothing against them, but they have no teaching, training, or experience. And so their education school trained graduate students who are learning in teaching and math programs to teach these courses and alongside with the faculty. And this has been found in other random assignment studies where decorated faculty members with teaching awards are compared to graduate students or whomever that have been trained in modern cognitive teaching techniques. It really isn't rocket science, and they get much better outcomes. So that's an area where teaching and learning can come in that is profoundly impactful on workforce because teaching math in an applied way with good teaching techniques equips you to have quantitative skills that will get, just like writing skills, will get you, you'll be able to do anything.

Kaitlin: And applied in all different contexts, regardless of what the specific problem is you're looking to solve, right?

Julian: It really is that convergence of what a good traditional liberal arts program teaches with how to apply yourself. Right.

Davis: It is. But in community colleges, it's sort of not their fault. But in community colleges, in higher ed, generally it's become like an atomized smattering of courses that aren't really applied. And they have learning outcomes and the accreditation agencies. But no, you learn by doing. I mentioned Loraine County Community College. Anatomy and physiology is a required prerequisite to nursing. In some ways when you think about it, that course is a gateway to the middle class for people and nursing programs are the program in community colleges that have really for women of color, not men of color, but women of color, we can see it have truly been a path of upward mobility for low income women and women of color. It's really extraordinary, but they're still exclusive. They redesign their anatomy and physiology, which almost everywhere is taught as a lecture-heavy memorization course. The nursing faculty were saying, these students haven't retained this because it's a lecture heavy memorization course. Redesigned it as a lab course. And I talked to the faculty in this course, they're really dynamic. They've gotten much better results. The nurses, because you're learning anatomy and physiology in a lab setting, the nurses are much more happy. They've gotten uh you know many more underserved students to not just through but to master this so really have to focus on this uh learning again if this were just about skills training you know community colleges universities they're not so good at that so that but we have to think about education starting with the end in mind where the end is you've got to teach people to think, to solve problems, and you learn that through active teaching and engagement. It is hard to do.

Julian: What we should be doing to make ourselves forces on these matters.

Davis: You have so much experience and insight into helping and working with employers to define skills that I think serving as translators, as interlocutors between employers and trainers but also educators is really important because we're gonna need to figure this out. And it isn't gonna be done by looking at labor market data or even labor data on the skills, it's going to need to be a conversation. I think you guys can help translate the skills.

Kaitlin: And I was just going to say, I think it so often comes down to the deliverables, right? Like what is it on the job that you are creating? And, and again, backwards planning from that. Well, if this is the thing you need to create, what are all the skills?

Davis: Yes! If I'm a physics teacher, or I'm a, yeah, how can I teach these kinds of skills? What I was saying about the, you don't have to teach writing bio reports, but you can customize your general instruction in composition to teach how to write clinical reports. You know, if that's something people want. And it really allows for the creativity. It's not just skills training. You're not teaching critical skills. You're teaching in a way that enables students to develop critical skills, most of which requires learning by, by doing.

Kaitlin: Right. Well, and in my experience to apply it to what people are doing in a job is more practical. Like it makes the learning come to life, which is great too.

Davis: Which gets at the student motivation. So another thing we're saying is the reason students aren't completing is they're not motivated. They're not motivated first. And I'm telling you why, community college, because most of your programs aren't worth completing and they don't lead to good jobs. Many of them don't lead to good jobs or transfer in major. But motivation is also intrinsic by connecting with the drone nerds that Professor Alssid is heading. Connection, give an experiential learning. Students hate it. And we can all think of a challenging learning experience we had, we hated at the time, thought the professor was too hard, but iit was transformative. For students who've been through education where they haven't been, you know, it's been based on a, you know, rote and lots of standardized tests, it again, it's hard, it's novel, but this is what employers are looking for. People can learn in those ways and you can do it if you believe in these students and it's not easy, but you teach in an active way, especially in these foundation courses. We don't think enough about students' intrinsic motivation.

Kaitlin: Davis, you know, it's been fascinating to hear you dive more into your projects and the research that has been most current for you. How can listeners continue to learn more about your work? Where can they read more, listen more, etc.?

Davis: The work that I do is mostly capsulated under the Guided Pathways, CCRC's website, Community College Research Center. Guided Pathways and then this transitions which is sort of extending the pathway down into the schools. Building transfer pathways for baccalaureate opportunities.

Julian: And we'll include that information in the podcast notes. Great conversation, great to hear your words of wisdom. All listen to Davis and our educational system and our community college students will thrive like never before. Thank you so much.

Kaitlin: That's all we have for you today. Thank you for listening to Workforces. We hope that you take away nuggets that you can use in your own work. Thank you to our producer, Dustin Ramsdell. Workforces is available on Apple, Amazon, Google, and Spotify. We hope you will subscribe, like, and share the podcast with your colleagues and friends. If you have interest in sponsoring this podcast, please contact us through the podcast notes.