Keeping the gateway to college open
Imagine a school dedicated to helping the “have-nots” catch up to the “haves.”
A place where first-generation college students could learn how to navigate university bureaucracy. A place where young people who “blow” their first chance at a college education can try again. A place where a working parent with a stalled career can get a fresh start.
Linda Serra Hagedorn has found that place, and it’s closer than you might think—at your nearby community college.
“The community college is really one of the most amazing institutions in America,” said Hagedorn, professor and chair of UF’s Department of Educational Administration and Policy. “This system has opened up higher education to millions of people who didn’t have access to it before, and that’s an astounding success story.”
As head of the educational administration program at a top-tier college of education, Hagedorn has a hand in the education of leaders at all levels of the school system – from K-12 schools to four-year colleges.
Her own research, however, is focused on that distinctly American, and often underrated institution – the system of community colleges that places an affordable postsecondary education within driving distance of almost everyone.
Hagedorn, who came to UF in 2005 from the University of Southern California education faculty, is principal investigator on the Transfer and Retention of Urban Community College Students Project (or TRUCCS), a longitudinal study of 5,000 Los Angeles community college students. One of the goals of TRUCCS is to find out why the students who most stand to gain from attending community college – first-generation, urban and minority students – often seem to drop out of school after a couple of semesters.
“Community college students are very different from students at a four-year university,” Hagedorn said. “They don’t leave their former identities – or their responsibilities – behind. They’re often working or raising children, and may not think of themselves primarily as students.”
The good news is that not everyone who leaves community college is a “dropout.”
“One of the things we’ve found is that the idea of community colleges as ‘two-year colleges’ is a misnomer,” Hagedorn said. “It doesn’t reflect the way students actually use the system. Students will leave and come back as their life situations permit, and they aren’t failures just because they don’t transfer to a university in two years.”
Hagedorn knows, from personal experience, that there is more than one path to educational success. She is herself a first-generation college graduate, and acquired her master’s degree while teaching elementary school full-time and raising children.
After using that master’s degree to teach at the community college level, Hagedorn decided she wanted to pursue a Ph.D. and a career in community college administration. As a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she discovered that she had a knack for quantitative research. Soon she was working under respected scholars such as Ernest Pascarella, a well-known leader in higher education circles.
Today, Hagedorn is herself a respected name in the field, and is sought out by organizations nationwide to speak on the topic of student retention. She has traveled to Vietnam as a Fulbright scholar, where she studied and advised that country’s provincial colleges, which share some similarities with American community colleges. She served on the board of trustees of Sias International University, the first private college in the People’s Republic of China. She also was invited to speak in Moscow by the Russian Federation to address how they might increase college access and adapt the American community college model.
Hagedorn’s reputation for premier research has helped bring promising new research projects to UF. In late 2006, UF’s Institute of Higher Education, a community college research institute now headed by Hagedorn, was awarded $1.6 million by the Lumina Foundation to begin a program that could change the way community colleges use data to make important administrative and instructional decisions.
Under the project, UF will teach institutional research officers – the people responsible for collecting data on student achievement – how to use the numbers to spot students who are at risk of dropping out. Once struggling students are spotted, colleges can tailor their programs to meet their needs.
“With the right interventions – mentoring programs and other initiatives – we can help these bright students go on to transfer to a four year institution,” she said. “That’s an exciting thought.”
