Community colleges are a vital part of America’s opportunity structure, not least because they often provide a way into higher education for adults from less advantaged backgrounds. Each year there are around 10 million undergraduates enrolled at public, two-year colleges. Among first-generation students, nearly 38 percent attend community colleges, compared to 20 percent of students with college-educated parents.

Credentials from community colleges—whether short vocational courses or two-year associate degrees—can be valuable in the labor market. In theory, community colleges also provide an on-ramp for those seeking a bachelor’s degree; in fact, four out of five students enrolling intend to get a 4-year degree.

But the potential of community college is often unrealized. Many students are not ready. Quality varies. Pathways are often unclear and/or complex. Only about 40 percent of those enrolling earn a degree within six years. Just 15 percent acquire a 4-year degree, according to analyses by Doug Shapiro and Afet Dundar at the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Transfers rates from community college vary dramatically by state

The degree of alignment and integration between community and four-year colleges is much greater in some states than others. Some use common course numbering for 2- and 4-year institutions, which helps students find the classes they need without racking up costly excess credits. In others, universities and community colleges have tried to align their curriculum to ensure that students’ transfer credits will be accepted.

Individual institutions like Queensborough College (part of the CUNY system) and Miami-Dade College have streamlined course sequences to help their students stay on track to transfer into 4-year schools, as Thomas Bailey, Shanna Jaggers, and Davis Jenkins describe in their book, Redesigning America’s Community Colleges. There’s some indirect evidence that these initiatives increased retention and graduation rates.

These policy differences help to explain the very different stories of transfer rates in different states, revealed in a recent study by Davis Jenkins and John Fink. One important measure is the proportion of students transferring out of community college with a certificate or associate degree already in hand:

Florida tops the list, partly because of state legislation requiring that community colleges grant eligible transfer students degrees—but also because of concerted investments at the state and institutional levels to improve 2-year institutions.

Another measure of success is the proportion of those who transfer ending up with a four-year degree. Again, there are significant variations between states:

Since community colleges serve so many more students from poor backgrounds, the importance of the transfer pathway for social mobility is clear. Many who struggle at high school may begin to flourish in the first year or two of post-secondary education. As their skills are upgraded, so their opportunities should widen. But too often they become trapped in the silos of post-secondary education. We should continue to support efforts like pathway programs that explicitly attempt to build bridges between community colleges and high-quality four year institutions through the creation of clear and consistent major-specific program maps. Such programs allow students starting out at community colleges to easily chart out the specific, clear, and coherent set of steps needed to eventually finish their post-secondary education with a four-year degree.

Tuning an American engine of social mobility

The mission of community colleges since their inception a century ago has been to broaden access to education. Today that means providing a solid education to all students, but also providing opportunities to move on to other institutions.

Event Information

For decades Chinese companies focused their international investment on unearthing natural resources in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In recent years, Chinese money has spread across the globe into diverse sectors including the real estate, energy, hospitality, and transportation industries. So far in 2016, Chinese investment in offshore mergers and acquisitions has already reached $101 billion, on track to surpass its $109 billion total for all of 2015. What do these investments reveal about China’s intentions in the West? How is China’s image being shaped by its muscular international investments? Should the West respond to this new wave, and if so, how?

On April 25, 2016, the Center on the United States and Europe and the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings hosted the launch of "China’s Offensive in Europe" (Brookings Institution Press, 2016), the newly-published, revised book co-authored by Visiting Fellow Philippe Le Corre (with Alain Sepulchre). During the event, Le Corre offered an assessment of the trends, sectors, and target countries of Chinese investments on the Continent. Following the presentation, Senior Fellow Mireya Solis moderated a discussion with Le Corre and Senior Fellows Constanze Stelzenmüller and David Dollar.

 Join the conversation on Twitter using #ChinaEurope

Audio

• China’s overseas investments in Europe and beyond

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• 20160425_china_overseas_transcript

Published version of the CSED October 2007 Working Paper

ABSTRACT

Background

In classical mathematical epidemiology, individuals do not adapt their contact behavior during epidemics. They do not endogenously engage, for example, in social distancing based on fear. Yet, adaptive behavior is well-documented in true epidemics. We explore the effect of including such behavior in models of epidemic dynamics.

Methodology/Principal Findings

Using both nonlinear dynamical systems and agent-based computation, we model two interacting contagion processes: one of disease and one of fear of the disease. Individuals can “contract” fear through contact with individuals who are infected with the disease (the sick), infected with fear only (the scared), and infected with both fear and disease (the sick and scared). Scared individuals–whether sick or not–may remove themselves from circulation with some probability, which affects the contact dynamic, and thus the disease epidemic proper. If we allow individuals to recover from fear and return to circulation, the coupled dynamics become quite rich, and can include multiple waves of infection. We also study flight as a behavioral response.

Conclusions/Significance

In a spatially extended setting, even relatively small levels of fear-inspired flight can have a dramatic impact on spatio-temporal epidemic dynamics. Self-isolation and spatial flight are only two of many possible actions that fear-infected individuals may take. Our main point is that behavioral adaptation of some sort must be considered.”

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