The Costs of Completion:
Students Success in Community College
To improve community college success, we need to consider the lived realities of students.
Our nation's community colleges are facing a completion crisis. The college-going experience of too many students is interrupted, lengthening their time to completing a degree―or worse, causing many to drop out altogether. In The Costs of Completion, Robin G. Isserles contextualizes this crisis by placing blame on the neoliberal policies that have shaped public community colleges over the past thirty years. The disinvestment of state funding, she explains, has created austerity conditions, leading to an overreliance on contingent labor, excessive investments in advisement technologies, and a push to performance outcomes like retention and graduation rates for measuring student and institutional success…
Drawing on more than twenty years of teaching, advising, and researching largely first-generation community college students as well as an analysis of five years of student enrollment patterns, college experiences, and life narratives, Isserles takes pains to center students and their experiences. She proposes initiatives created in accordance with a care ethic, which strive to not only get students through college―quantifying credit accumulation and the like―but also enable our most precarious students to flourish in a college environment. Ultimately, The Costs of Completion offers a deeper, more complex understanding of who community college students are, why and how they enroll, and what higher education institutions can do to better support them.
And the reviews are in…..
“Isserles takes care to consider a multifaceted view to the issue, outlining the ongoing efforts to improve access to post‐secondary education while remaining cognizant of those who the system rouinely fails to support. The book provides a thorough, thought‐provoking resource for those working or studying in post‐secondary education in numerous capacities, and those interested in the broader issues of social inequities and educational policies.”
- Danielle Gardiner Milln University of Alberta
The Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education
December 2023
https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/cjsae/2023-v35-n2-cjsae09096/1109310ar.pdf
“We believe this book can support higher education practitioners, researchers, educators, and graduate students to build a student-centric, collaborative culture that cultivates meaningful student learning and lifelong success”. -Xiaodan Hu, Quortne Hutchings, Journal of College Student Development, September-October 2023
“Her insights will be useful for anyone entering the current world of undergraduate teaching or considering administrative roles within higher education. As teaching faculty engage in the time-consuming tasks of constructing completion plans, rethinking our curriculum to increase retention, developing articulation agreements between two-year with four-year institutions, in combination with pushing students to take more credits and get done quickly, we should slow down to read Isserles’s research, think about her critique of our current model, and contemplate a different path”
Michelle A. Smith, Teaching Sociology, April 2023
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0092055X231160021
“Completion initiatives often focus on increasing students’ “grit” and personal responsibility. Isserles’s qualitative data reveal how much grit these students show just by coming to campus—and how inadequate the momentum model is to address their needs.”
Anne B. McGrail, Academe, AAUP, Spring 2023
https://www.aaup.org/article/unpacking-completion-crisis-community-colleges
“As a nascent institutional endeavor as well as a set of practical recommendations, College Fluency Capacity Building may deeply benefit from the incorporation of Isserles’ student sensibility framework.”
-Craig Nielsen, March 10, 2023
https://openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu/college-fluency/2023/03/10/context-isserles/
“The question addressed by Isserles throughout her book is whether widespread reform efforts to improve completion rates are an effective way to help community colleges realize their full potential as open-access institutions of higher learning.“
~ Daniel Sparks, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, April 2022
“Isserles provides an evocative critical analysis of how neoliberal market-based policies affect community college policy.”
~ Hannah M. Kuney, Community College Journal of Research and Practice, May 2022
“When we see reforms on the horizon it is our responsibility as educators to interrogate these reforms, the research on which it is based, and the political agenda of the sponsors. The Costs of Completion does this superbly.”
~ John Fox, FACCCTS, Spring 2022
“Author Robin G. Isserles… does an excellent job
of calling out the neoliberal underpinnings of the community college completion agenda as she advances a compelling argument for why the most precarious students are ill-served by policies that make timely graduation the primary definition of student success."