It turns out that City College of San Francisco is actually better than average among California's two-year colleges at graduating its students and getting them into the UC system. So reports demographer Hans Johnson, Co-Director of Research for the Public Policy Institute of California.
CCSF apparently ranks below average in math remediation -- I assume that means teaching math to students who didn't get properly prepared in high school. But given the number of English learners CCSF attracts, another measure is amazing:By most measures, City College fares well relative to other community colleges in the state. The share of students who complete college by earning a degree or certificate, or by transferring to a four-year college, is higher at CCSF than in the rest of the state. This advantage holds even when we limit our analysis to students who are initially unprepared for college-level work, which suggests that it is not simply the mix of students drawn to City College that drives its outcomes.
Yet the accrediting commission is still threatening to close this San Francisco institution in July. It's got to be that something about an institution with strong unions and strong faculty governance produces revulsion among education bureaucrats.... the share of students who successfully complete remediation in English is higher than the statewide average, as is the share of students who successfully complete ESL courses.
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I went to CCSF for a year after flucking out of Cal. So many of us underprepared freshmen did. And so many of us went on to get fine educations anyway, even professorships and medical and dental professions.
At the time I was angry that UCB would not re-admit me after I had made up my grade point deficit, but in retrospect I think this was a good thing. I got a good grounding in what it means to be a worker and later a housewife and mother if you don't have a college education. And it's nice now to have an M.A. and to have done some good teaching in ESL and basic adult education.
But now my clerical and other office skills as well as my nursing skills (learned as a nursing assistant) are coming to the fore and are proving extremely useful!
What I particularly admired about CCSF back then is that they hired professors who had to leave UC because they refused to sign the loyalty oath.
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