Are we underestimating community college students?

The Stella and Charles Guttman Community College is different from many community colleges in the US. This is in big part because it’s located in the center of Midtown Manhattan, right by Bryant Park and the New York Public Library. Students rub shoulders with executives in $2,000 suits. 

The college’s founding president Scott Evenbeck, however, says, despite its location on some of the world’s hottest real estate, his students struggle with the same things community college-goers struggle with across the country. 

“They're the low income, first-generation, diverse students who largely define the student body at community colleges,” Evenbeck says. He, however, is the last person to underestimate them. “They're very engaged in their learning … engaged in the city from day one on campus, doing studies of the neighborhoods, and they are incredibly enthusiastic about their learning.” 

Community college is often perceived as the underdog in American higher education. Many of these colleges are plagued by treacherous drop-out rates, poor teaching standards and dismal job prospects. Evenbeck, however, thinks we need to stop taking such a negative view of community college students. 

“So often I think that, particularly with remediation, we take a deficit approach to our students: What's wrong with them and how should we fix them. And that's such an unhelpful way to proceed. We'll do so much better, and they'll do so much better if we build on their strengths and we say, ‘This is fantastic that you came from another country!’ Half of our students don't speak English at home and this is an enormous strength that they know two languages. How can we use their cultural backgrounds and their identity, and see how they learn from one another?”

The Stella and Charles Guttman Community College, for its part, tries to take advantage of its students’ backgrounds and their location in New York City. 

“It's so city-centric. The students are in and out of the city. The curriculum that they study begins with a course called City Seminar where they study a big-picture issue related to the city of New York. And their reading, writing and quantitative reasoning that they do is intertwined with the study of that big-picture topic. So low-income, first-generation, diverse community college students have a chance to jump right in and study a topic that is of interest to them, and about which they already know something,” Evenbeck says.  

The college also tries to put an emphasis on the "community" in community college. Incoming students can join a bridge program that lets them bond with their classmates before the semester begins. 

“Oftentimes the way students start community college is what can be called a cafeteria approach. Students are told to pick out the classes that they might like, they might find a major that suits them, and then they're in five distinct classes and they don't know anybody. As opposed to in this college where they come in, they're in that cohort group, beginning to learn in the bridge program and then moving right into a very integrated first-year curriculum,” Evenbeck says. 

Not only do students learn from each other, Evenbeck says he learns from them.

“For me why I'm here, and where I derive my energy is seeing the enthusiasm of the students and hearing their stories,” Evenbeck says. “It's also convincing me more than ever of what strengths that the students themselves bring.”

This story first aired as an interview on PRI's The Takeaway, a public radio program that invites you to be part of the American conversation.