More Undergraduate Certificates Awarded In FL Than Any Other Degree

~New report highlights the importance of certificates and encourages communities to learn more about their economic value, where they’re offered in Florida, and differences in quality~

My Service- Learning & Student Success Experience

By Lalita Llerena, Community Engagement Specialist, Florida College Access Network

When you think of succeeding in college, you often only think of grades, credits and other academic measures. But there are several other social and civic factors that contribute to someone’s ability to stick with the program and complete postsecondary education. I recently had the honor of personally witnessing one of those factors: service-learning. It’s a concept not often referenced in the higher education realm. What is common knowledge is the more engaged students are with their campus environment, the more likely they will graduate. Service-learning is one of those ways to get college students more involved. It incorporates community work into the curriculum, giving students real-world learning experiences that enhance their academic learning while benefitting the community.

As part of their service project at the retreat, Stephanie Walker, AmeriCorps VISTA & Leo Davila, College Access AmeriCorps member, helped with gardening at the DeVos-Blum Family YMCA in Boynton Beach.

Now, I can spend time detailing the proven research connecting student success with civic engagement. But, hey, I’ll leave that to our senior researcher to consider for a future policy brief. Instead, I decided to hit the road and discover first-hand what service-learning is all about.

Earlier this month, I attended the 2012 AmeriCorps & Connect2Complete Service Retreat at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. For three days, I mingled with a crowd of AmeriCorps VISTA members, College Access & Success AmeriCorps members, campus coordinators and Connect2Complete peer advocates. The retreat was hosted by our partners at Florida Campus Compact (FL|CC), a membership organization made up of more than 50 college and university presidents committed to helping students develop the values and skills of active citizenship through participation in public and community service.

Now, if you’re as lost as I was when I first arrived, let me break it down for you. VISTA stands for “Volunteers In Service To America.” FL|CC AmeriCorps VISTA members are college graduates placed with colleges, universities and community organizations to improve education and address societal needs through campus-community partnerships, applied civic education and engaged citizenship. AmeriCorps VISTA members serve full-time, year-long terms. While in service, members receive a very modest living allowance and are eligible for healthcare and other benefits. Their sole purpose is to serve and they’re not allowed to have another paying job. Talk about commitment.

Then there are the College Access & Success AmeriCorps members, college students who serve as mentors to at-risk youth and/or first generation, low-income students to help them get into college and graduate. College Access is a part-time AmeriCorps program, and students can choose to serve 300 or 900 hours.

Finally, under the Connect2Complete (C2C) pilot program, college students serve as peer advocates to first-year college students enrolled in developmental education courses. The goal is to better engage those students with their campus and community so they can achieve academic success.

All these members have “service” in common and they’re clearly driven by something deeper than just finding a job that pays the bills. They’re looking for something more meaningful. Leo Davila is a College Access AmeriCorps student with Polk State College. Growing up in a rough neighborhood himself, he is passionate about mentoring at-risk youth. “I guess I could say I was a delinquent kid but I learned at an early age where I needed to step up my game and so hopefully through my actions, through my change of heart, I can try to teach them that even though they’re still young and they don’t understand that eventually they will. Hopefully I can give back to them,” shared Davila.

As I spoke with other students like Davila, one common theme stood out; a concept many members refer to as the ‘aha’ moment. They view this as a powerful turning point they reach while volunteering. AmeriCorps and C2C members either personally shared their particular ‘aha’ moment when they discovered the role they were meant to play in life or they referenced the ‘aha’ moment as a goal they aimed for while completing their service hours. “The members that we work with sign up for a term of service which is sometimes up to a year and throughout that year, they’re learning a lot about what their role is in society and as citizens. And sometimes it takes challenges to actually achieve that ‘aha’ moment but when they do, that’s when the real learning takes place and they figure out how they can implement that in their own lives moving forward,” said Courtney Kuntz, FL|CC Director of Programs & Development.

The last day of the retreat, I got my hands a little dirty with the AmeriCorps and C2C members. All the attendees were split into groups and each performed a different service project, including beach clean-up, butterfly garden restoration, assisted living help and soup kitchen work. My group helped clean and sanitize YMCA preschool classrooms to transition from summer to fall classes. And I’m not talking about stacking books or organizing lesson plans. Our group was on our knees pulling playground weeds, scrubbing and sanitizing furniture and toys, painting walls and climbing ladders to clean hard-to-reach nooks and crannies. My favorite moment as I helped paint one of the interior walls, is hearing a group of young children repeating an upbeat chant in the next room. I peeked through the door window and saw dozens of smiling young faces cheering as loudly as they could with their instructor. I guess you can call that my mini ‘aha’ moment at the time. You see, as we scrubbed dirt and cleaned windows, it could feel like just another job. But those kids’ vibrant cheers reminded me who I was doing this for and it made it all worth it. Another meaningful moment was seeing the teachers’ reaction when they found out nearly a dozen volunteers were there to help set up their classrooms. They were extremely surprised and grateful. What our group was able to accomplish in just a few hours as a team, most likely would’ve taken the YMCA staff days to complete.

Ok, so no big deal; I volunteered for two hours out of my day. Big whoop. The people I shadowed do it on a daily basis, with very little to no pay. Most of these are college-educated folks doing manual, grueling labor all for the betterment of their community and themselves. Tuyet Nguyen, an AmeriCorps Vista with Stetson University, said, “I just have a passion to serve. It’s very rewarding to me to be able to help others out because I know what it’s like to be helped. I came here not too long ago from Vietnam, from a refugee camp, so without help I wouldn’t be here — that’s why I’m giving back. ”

One of the program’s requirements after a service project is reflection time, which can take written, verbal or artistic forms. “You have to take some time to sit back and think about what it is you’re doing and how you can have the most impact,” said Kuntz. As AmeriCorps and C2C members reflect on the project afterward, they start discovering hidden strengths and passions. It’s not uncommon for a volunteer to gravitate toward a duty that best suits an uncovered talent. For instance, one of the YMCA teachers noticed me painting during our service project and asked if I were an artist. “Not really,” I said. “Oh, just by the way you’re holding that brush, I thought maybe you painted in your spare time,” she said. Ha! You know what? I do. I enjoy painting for fun and I guess I can be creative as a journalist, but I never really considered myself an artist. I guess I subconsciously recognized this strength and eagerly reached for the paintbrush when the duties were handed out to our volunteer group. It’s funny how I didn’t put two-and-two together until it was casually pointed out to me. Little moments like this turn into bigger, deeper moments for AmeriCorps and C2C members who do this day-in and day-out. Not only do they give back to the community, they give back to themselves. They discover a passion for something, whether it’s mentoring kids or working with the elderly. They find profounder meaning in their lives and, in turn, want to complete their education so they can start their careers in that particular field.

“You can only get so much in the classroom. You need to actually go out and mingle in the community because that’s who you’re going to serve after you graduate,” said Carlene Webb, AmeriCorps VISTA member and Service Learning Coordinator for the Institute for Civic Engagement and Democracy at Miami Dade College.

So there you go. I went straight to the sources of service-learning to find out how and why it can encourage students to succeed in college. It didn’t take long to discover the strong correlation between the two. In fact, I witnessed it up-close, on my knees with a paintbrush.

~Click here to see more pictures from the 2012 AmeriCorps & Connect2Complete Service Retreat

~Follow Florida College Access Network on twitter @FloridaGoal2025

What the latest college degree attainment data for young adults means for Florida

By Troy Miller, Senior Researcher and Policy Analyst, Florida College Access Network

Last week the U.S. Department of Education released new Census data on degree attainment for young adults aged 25-34 for all states, showing a half-percentage point increase nationally from 38.8% to 39.3% from 2009 to 2010¹. During the same time, degree attainment for young adults went down one-tenth of a percentage point in Florida, from 36.3% to 36.2%. What exactly does this mean?

Degree attainment data is based on responses to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which asks its survey participants to indicate the highest level of education they have completed. To get the degree attainment rate for young adults, the number of survey respondents aged 25-34 who indicate that they earned a college degree (an associate’s degree or higher) is divided by the total population of residents who fall within that age cohort. The mathematical outcome of a decrease in the percentage of young adults with college degrees in Florida from one year to the next could be the result of several different circumstances. A closer look at the Census data suggests that both the number of young adults with and without degrees decreased from 2009 to 2010².

Table 1: Degree attainment rate for young adults (aged 25-34) in Florida: 2009-2010

Source: U.S. Department of Education

How could this happen? One hypothesis for this decrease is, as a state, Florida has produced fewer degrees. This is not the case. Table 2 shows that in 2009, degree-granting institutions in Florida conferred 171,257 degrees. In 2010, the number of degrees earned rose to 184,277 – an increase of 7.6 percent³. This rise in degree production from 2009 to 2010 is the second highest year-to-year increase Florida has seen since 2003. In addition to this recent increase, degree production levels in Florida have increased every year, with the exception of one (1998-99), since 1993⁴.

Table 2: Total postsecondary degrees conferred in Florida: 1993-2010

Source: National Center for Education Statistics via Postsecondary Education Opportunity

To put these degree completion numbers into context, let’s compare Florida to the rest of the nation. Degree production levels for Florida’s degree-granting institutions in 2010 were 98 percent higher than what they were in 1993. For the rest of the nation, degree production rose 55 percent. If, as a state, Florida is increasing its levels of degree production at higher rates than the rest of the country, then how do we explain the decrease in degree attainment levels cited by the U.S. Department of Education?

By scratching past the surface we can begin to see just how complex of an issue this really is. First, relating the NCES “degree production” data to the Census “degree attainment” data causes some problems. For example, the NCES data doesn’t tell us which of these students are earning their first degree⁵ and we also don’t know how old students are when they graduate (which makes placing students into Census-defined age-cohorts a challenge).  Second, because the Census “degree attainment” data reflects all people living in Florida, changes in population are significant.  In any given year, changes in migration (which can be influenced by a multitude of scenarios not having anything to do with higher education productivity) can affect a state’s degree attainment rate.  In other words, improvements in degree production, and its impact on a state’s degree attainment rate, can be cancelled out or masked by changes in the population. The Census “degree attainment” data also does not count certificate holders as people who have attained a postsecondary degree. This is important for Florida because our state awards the fifth most certificates (per capita) in the nation. Despite certificates being a postsecondary credential, many of which lead to demonstrable returns on employment and earnings, they aren’t counted in federal statistics and international rankings.

So what does last week’s U.S. Department of Education data mean for Florida? Due to the limitations of the data sources⁶, my conclusion is that the degree attainment rate has in essence stayed the same. This is unfortunate, because as shown in Table 2, we should be celebrating one of Florida’s most productive years in degree production in the last twenty years!  The increase in degrees we saw from 2009 to 2010 of 7.6 percent is right on pace with what we need to help our state reach widely accepted national goals.  Despite the current status of our degree attainment rate for young adults, this discussion reflects the real challenges our state faces in implementing policies that will have a substantive impact and “move the needle” on this metric. Institutions can enroll more students, but they must also improve the rate at which their students finish their degrees. And while institutions can graduate more students, Florida must also provide benefits to improve the quality of life to its residents (high paying jobs, good schools, high quality transportation system, etc.) which will compel its young graduates to stay in state (and attract others to come here).

In order to improve the level of college degree attainment among an entire age cohort, such as young adults, there is not a single lever to pull which will get us from where we are to where we need to be to meet projected workforce demands, improve our ranking among economically developed nations and make possible the kind of lifestyle and opportunities that earning a college degree can present to a broad range of people. To see discernible improvements in the future, we will need our institutions, state agencies, lawmakers, businesses, local governments and communities to work collectively around these issues to ensure that our next in line has the ability to not only access and earn a high-quality degree, but sees an incentive to stay, earn a living, and contribute to Florida’s future.

What might future data releases by the U.S. Department of Education look like?  There are reasons to be optimistic. Our public college and university systems have recently set assertive goals to increase degree production levels. The Higher Education Coordinating Council and Blue Ribbon Task Force on State Higher Education Reform will be continuing their work throughout the year to examine ways our state’s postsecondary institutions can be improved. There are a handful of efforts currently being implemented in Florida to assist young adults who left college early to help them return and complete their degrees. The college-going rates for Florida’s high school graduates have improved dramatically. All of these efforts should translate into a higher proportion of young adults with a postsecondary education in the future, but recent years should be proof that the only way to substantially increase state-wide degree attainment rates is through collective effort and collaboration among a broad range of sectors.

~Follow Troy Miller on twitter @TroyMillerFCAN

¹The Census data used by the U.S. Department of Education refers to associate’s degrees and higher and are based on population estimates.  To learn more about margins of error and how these estimates are calculated, check out this website.

²Figures provided from the U.S. Department of Education were used to calculate the total number of young adults without college degrees.

³National Center for Education Statistics data on the number of degrees conferred gathered by Postsecondary Education Opportunity.

⁴Young adults aged 35 in 2010 may have earned a degree as far back as 1993.

⁵The NCES data captures all degrees awarded while the Census data only captures the highest degree attained by each survey respondent.  If a 30 year old in Florida earned a Master’s degree in 2010, s/he would increase the number of college degrees awarded in our state for that year.   That same degree earned would not increase the degree attainment rate for young adults in Florida, because they would have already earned a bachelor’s degree.  Students earning their second college degrees (or more) do not positively impact the state’s degree attainment rate.

⁶Data obtained from the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida actually shows a 1.4% increase in the young adult population from 2009 to 2010, compared to the 2.01% decrease the Census data reflects.

Florida College Access & Success Summit Highlights in 2012

Most Florida 12th Graders Didn’t Apply for Federal Financial Aid

~A new government tracking tool shows the majority of Florida high school seniors failed to complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid before the school year ended~

High Number of Hispanics Earning Health Care Degrees in FL

FL Should Do More to Support Adults Returning to College

~New report highlights what initiatives are currently underway and offers recommendations for improving success for non-traditional students~

Join the Goal 2025 Movement

FL House Speaker Designate To Speak On Higher Education

~State Representative Will Weatherford will serve as keynote speaker at the Florida College Access & Success Summit on May 11th in Tampa~

Panelists to Discuss Education Policy Trends, Setting State Goals