Closing the Gaps: A Tale of Two Students

Presidency, The, Winter 2009 by Curtis, Stephen M

In 2007, the Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board issued a report titled A Tale of Two Cities, which used substantial research to help establish an agenda for Philadelphia's economic future. The report portrayed "a city on the rise," whose prosperity is marked by world-class educational, medical, and cultural institutions; historic assets that draw millions of domestic and international visitors; one of the largest concentrations of higher education institutions in the United States; sources of training for 20 percent of the nation's life science professionals; and a revitalized city center that, in many ways, has never been stronger.1

But the report also depicted Philadelphia as "a city on the decline," whose struggles include a public school system taken over by the state; a ranking atop the nation's 10 largest cities in the percentage of people living in poverty; a labor force participation rate that is 96th out of the nation's 100 largest cities; a college attainment rate that places Philadelphia 92nd among the 100 largest cities; and a population in which more than 60 percent of adults are considered low-literate.

This dichotomy is not limited to my city. It is replicated in places large and small across our country, and it represents one of the biggest challenges educators face as we consider the needs, aspirations, and expectations of future generations of students. That challenge recognizes that future students will not share a single pathway through postsecondary education. Just as A Tale of Two Cities identifies a bifurcation in our cities or communities, we are poised to encounter A Tale of Two Students as well.

Growing Disparities

For the prospective student who is part of a "community on the rise," the educational focus will be on framing more effective educational practices, improving student learning outcomes, utilizing technology to its fullest measure, and matching content and delivery systems to specific requirements of our student populations.

For a prospective student who is defined by inclusion in a "community in decline," however, the focus is often on survival, not on educational refinements designed to improve an individual's economic opportunity and our nation's overall economic competitiveness. When experts view third-grade reading levels as potential predictors of poverty and incarceration rates, the future gap between haves and have-nots has become unacceptable. When two-thirds of a city's residents have literacy skills so low they are precluded from applying for at least 50 percent of that city's jobs, we realize why the wide disparity in literacy and numeracy skills requires far more systemic responses than we currently have in place to answer the questions of what we teach and how we teach it.

As educators, our expectations of what both these future students will require in order to become engaged contributors to the community, the workplace, and the nation are the same, but the starting point for each student's educational journey is very different. The Educational Testing Service (ETS) observes, in America's Perfect Storm, that the literacy gap mirrors "substantial variations in employment rates, access to skilled jobs, incarceration rates, earnings, incomes, wealth, health status, degree of civic participation, and so on." ETS also notes, "The growing income disparity between those with college degrees and those without college degrees has already turned us into a nation of college-haves and college-have-nots."2

What Higher Education Can Do

We in higher education must exert far more aggressive leadership in altering the two cities/two students scenario. It will take the unified effort of elected officials, business leaders, community leaders, educators, and family members to insist that the elimination of the literacy skills gap be a top priority for all of our communities. Our advocacy should support literacy as a primary public policy priority and should advance increased resources for literacy programs at federal, state, and local levels; a comprehensive community plan for literacy among providers at the local and state levels; and formal linkages between adult education and work experiences as well as adult education and college degree tracks.

Within our own institutions, we have the benefit of an increasing amount of data to inform our educational planning for future students. The Association of American Colleges and Universities' High-Impact Educational Practices publication reports the positive impact of five such activities: learning communities, service learning, study abroad, student-faculty research, and a senior culminating experience.3 The annual NSSE and CCSSE student engagement surveys also focus us on other strategies that can result in more consistent learning outcomes. Many institutions of higher learning sustain strong articulation agreements, both within the higher education pipeline and with area secondary schools. Such agreements strengthen the likelihood of all students to move successfully through the continuum of postsecondary education.