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.
The prevailing theory at the root of the community college completion crisis―academic momentum―suggests that students need to build momentum in their first year by becoming academically integrated, thereby increasing their chances of graduating in a timely fashion. A host of what Isserles terms "innovative disruptions" have been implemented as a way to improve on community college completion, but because disruptions are primarily driven by degree attainment, Isserles argues that they place learning and developing as afterthoughts while ignoring the complex lives that define so many community college students.
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.
Current Projects
“The Unanticipated Challenges and Rewards of Carework: Remote Teaching & Student Precarity During COVID-19,” (co-author with Paoyi Huang) to Transcending Crisis: Emotions, Carework, and Human Flourishing (eds. Marci Cottingham, Rebecca Erickson, and Matthew Lee) Routledge Press, forthcoming.
Selected Scholarly Works
Co-editor (along with David Levinson), online series on community colleges, Teachers College Record Commentary Series. (January-March 2022)
“Cultivating Engagement and Deepening Understanding While Leaving the Textbook Behind”, in Learning from Each Other: Refining the Practice of Teaching in Higher Education (Jeffrey Chin and Michele Kozimer-King, eds.), University of California Press. pp. 258-274. (2018)
“Caring”. The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory, (Bryan S. Turner, Chang Kyung-Sup, Cynthia F. Epstein, Peter Kivisto, William Outhwaite, and J. Michael Ryan editors), Wiley Blackwell. (November 2018)
“Fostering Student Engagement: Creating a Culture Online”, Constructivists Online: Reimagining Progressive Practice, Bank Street Occasional Paper Series 34 (Helen Freidus, Mollie Welsh Kruger, Steven Goss, editors) (2015)
“Creating Community at the Graduate Center”, in Women on the Role of Public Higher Education: Personal Reflections from CUNY’s Graduate Center (Rose Kim and Deborah Gambs, eds). Palgrave Macmillan. (2015)
Book Review: Care Between Work and Welfare in European Societies edited by Birgit Pfau-Effinger and Tine Rostgaard. Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan 2011. Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, (Volume 42, 2 March): pp. 266-268. (2013)
“Challenges Facing Community Colleges”, co-authored with Paul Attewell. Re-Imagining Community Colleges: Reflective Essays. CUNY Publication, April. pp. 17-27. (2012)