Book Review: Redesigning America’s community colleges: A clearer path to student success by Bailey, T. R., Jaggars, S. S., & Jenkins, D. (2015)

Bailey, T. R., Jaggars, S. S., & Jenkins, D. (2015). Redesigning America's community colleges: A clearer path to student success. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 304 pp. US$35.00 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-674-36828-6.How would we design the open-access community college to maximize the probability of student completion? Certainly not in the way most community colleges are organized today, according to Thomas R. Bailey, Shanna Smith Jaggars, and Davis Jenkins in Redesigning America s Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success. Drawing on a thorough review of research, including many studies from Columbia University's Community College Research Center, they argue that the colleges are highly efficient at providing access to courses in a self-service or "cafeteria" style that increased opportunity for postsecondary study after World War II, but that thwarts the ambitions of students today and leaves the colleges ill prepared to meet contemporary demands for increased degree completion. And although many wellintended initiatives, notably those undertaken through Achieving the Dream, have attempted to increase completion rates, the authors point to evidence that these projects have not substantially enhanced outcomes or-more significantly-altered the colleges' underlying organizational structures or cultures.Thus, the book's intent: to provide a framework for the wholesale redesign of the community college, freeing it from structures and practices of the "cafeteria college" that fix the institution's gaze on enrollment and divert institutional attention from the goal of student development and success over the long term. At the heart of this redesign is a revised curriculum, structured as a parsimonious and easily understood set of "guided pathways," rather than an overwhelming array of course offerings from which students, with minimal help from overworked advisers, must construct a route to the achievement of their educational goals. These guided pathways, described in Chapter 1, are not merely plans of study detailing course requirements for transfer or a degree. They are coherent, prescribed curricula developed by teams of faculty members and student affairs professionals. For students with definite career or transfer goals, these pathways consist of "a default sequence of courses, each with clear learning outcomes that build across the curriculum into a coherent set of skills, which in turn are aligned with requirements for successful transfer or career advancement" (p. 22). For undecided students, the pathways are equally prescribed and rigorously thought out, but they are exploratory in nature, exposing students "to educational and career options within broad fields" or "meta-majors" (p. 22). Asking students to select a pathway puts them immediately on a well-defined curricular sequence without overwhelming them with numerous course options.The authors also focus on "complementary changes to other college practices" (p. 50) in student guidance, instruction, and remediation (detailed in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively). Here, Bailey and his colleagues show how each of these critical functions has been shaped by the self-service cafeteria framework in ways that impede completion. Student "intake" services such as orientation, in-person and online advising, and student success courses are "well-meaning" but "disconnected from students' academic programs of study" (p. 67), offered in many cases on an optional, self-service basis, and focused primarily on providing information without teaching students to selfadvise over time. Instruction is undertaken by faculty members who work in isolation from others and simply transmit knowledge with the occasional support of professional development programs that emphasize instructional techniques rather than the instructor's growth as an educator. And remediation has, in most cases, served as an "off ramp" from college programs (p. 51), at best delaying entry into college-level programs and, in many cases, simply diverting "them from those programs entirely" (p. …