After 6 years of enrolling, 70% don't make it out of Community College

An article about community college and being what the famous student activist and current SPACE Director JP Bareng Schumacher calls, "transfer-stuck"

San Gabriel Valley Tribune

Six years after they started college, more than 70 percent of community college students are failing to earn an associate's degree, get a certificate, or transfer to a four-year school, according to a study released Tuesday.

It also found that black and Latino students fare even worse than the general population, with only 22 percent of Latino students and 26 percent of black students reaching their academic goals within six years.

I felt mighty uncomfortable adhering so strictly to the "Pilipino" in Pilipino Transfer Student Partnership while outreaching. I don't think were all balling or anything, but I think the word tended to obstruct any initial access. I used to say we were "based" on Pilipino groups, and would emphasize in the next sentence how we outreached to whoever.

"Sometimes I feel like school is making me more stupid because I'm wasting time learning obsolete information I'll never use," said Sam Wouters, 22, of Azusa, who is in his fourth year at Citrus College.

That's what my Anthro degree feels like at times with so much of the UCLA focus on theory and reading. I wish I learned SPSS, GIS, some kind of computer application something to get me in the door of fitting the research demands.

So I'm in Grad School Now

And looking at the Decisionmaking-tracking thing, wow, I am a total fucking idiot.

I was totally aiming to go to the Rutgers program because any topic I'm interested in they have there, but I was in a relationship that I thought was the greatest fucking thing in the world, and ended up not applying.

Now that relationship is done, I'm at Cal State Long Beach's Anthro program, which isn't bad and is local, but...oh well, I think it's an opportunity. I'm still connected to UCLA and can use their libraries.

I think I needed an M.A. program to get my feet wet for this whole academia and research thing. One grad student with an MA already told me that you shouldn't even go to grad school if you don't get funded 3/4s of the way. Thank god Long Beach is dirt-fucking cheap. Plus, I got grants to pay for this year!

As to the actual content of this program, the Department head said something to the effect of "you come in, you do your thesis, you're done." Accordingly this experience as a springboard onto something.

Keywords to my topic at this juncture: cops, cognition, decisionmaking, episodic memories, public engagement, justifications, argumentation, the metaphor of ownership.

So I'm interested in two topics: either message boards and police and community relations. I got interested in message boards because I post on basketball ones all the time, and police and community relations.

What kind of job am I going to get? I still don't know. Adjunct professor, researcher? Professional blogger?

I'm just hoping that the Census calls me again sometime within the next 2 years and asks me to interview people full time.

Scholarship Researching Woes

So when my cheerios got pissed on and remembering what the non-traditional student mom was posting about, I decided that I was going to look up ways to fund another round of edumacation without taking more loans.

I stumbled upon the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation's scholarship for undergraduate transfer students. This would be incredibly good stuff to know for Bayanihan students.

Then I look at the Sallie Mae website, and it has scholarships for black and Latino students exclusively but none for the middling Model Minorities who are yellow and brown, including another Community College Scholarship Fund. I think it's really important that black and Latino students have those sources of support, but what are the networks that help other students?

Right Down Our Alley: The UCR California Community College Collaborative

UCR Via SoCal Minds

UCR's Community College collaborative holding a forum about the Critical Issues facing Community Colleges on June 10th. See here for details.

I didn't know about UCR's Community College Collaborative before 8:00 AM this morning, and now I know and what they do sounds like its right down our alley, except supported by older people with suits and all kinds of brag sheets. They've got some interesting current projects including an investigation of under-represented graduate students and promising practices for transferring.

We should keep a CBS eyeball on them.

In context of promoting the event, they brought up an interesting stat about community colleges:

Dropout rate of the California community college is 75%. ! ? Had never seen a stat like that before.

Perhaps a bit over-inflated to me, but still, given the fact that only 25% of people actually do transfer, and the reality that I almost expect some Filipino, black, or Latino dude that I might meet randomly by the unity that is basketball to be dabbling in some job they hate, it's probably not that far off.

But on the other hand, maybe it's not so grave as these academicians want you to think. There are probably lots of reasons why people drop out and sometimes maybe it's for the better? What good is all this education and degree-achieving if you can haul in some money more quickly and sustainably via other means?

Pissing on My Cheerios

Running through my head is an ongoing war between two types of quotes:

The concept of school seems so secure. - Kanye West

vs.

If there's a will there's a way - Somebody

You can pay for grad school if they really want to. - Anybody

Do what you love and the money will follow. - Everybody, especially those tasked to give commencement speeches

Ya'll just saw how giggidy I got when I posted about graduate school.

Well, that was temporary and I am considerably more tempered.

I'm in the middle of reading this.

20 pages+ of people getting strangled in college loan debt. Failed marriages, money, and all kinds of identity crises of people who went THROUGH grad school.

Ouch, Charlie, that rilly huwt.

I'd been sure since I transferred that I wanted to do some kind of grad school, but I also kinda like to save money and NOT waste my exchange medium on stuff I could learn at home.

Grad School Decisionmaking Tracking

I posted this on my site dedicated to talking about my general academic interests, and I think it's kind of relevant here.

I'm coming at full force...at one of you. Maybe all of you some day. You, meaning you, higher institutions of learning.

So its that time of the year where everyone's graduating and/or moving up and catching up. My mom keeps talking about how old everyone is getting and how accomplished (or not accomplished) people are becoming. She mentions my cousins in the Philippines who are doctors, little cousins becoming nurses, how she moved to the United States at age 24...how everyone's becoming a nurse...hmmmmm...

Meanwhile, I'm at age 25 still sitting in the purgatory of the demography known as "unemployment and post-bachelor's."

I've got an aversion to the GRE, mainly because part of it requires fooling around with the Arabic symbol system we call numbers and I'm hoping I'm not to get badly mangled by that. If I eff up there, I'm going to pretend I never took it boost up my profile at a grad school with no such GRE reqs at a History or American Studies program and try again the next year.

I've got my eye on the big picture while simultaneously zero-ing in on what I think I might want to write for a dissertation some day. Something to do with the narrow topic of memory, learning, culture, networks, spaces, ecology, and expertises.

OK, well something to do with how societies remember things, everyday people's knowledges and memories, reasonings, logics, indigenous people's knowledges and memories, metaphors, reasonings, and logics.

But who the fuck would pay for that outside of people in academia? How the hell is that relevant to really making a difference and getting mine?

I've been reading a ton of books and my decisions have been swayed accordingly.

One of my favorite books of all time is James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me. This makes me think I should just settle down, become an American History teacher.

Oliver Sacks' books have me thinkng that I want to work at a clinic as a medical anthropologist either domestic or abroad. His stories are the stories I want to encounter and those that I myself want to find and tell. Strikes me in the same T.Kuhn revolutionary way that Guns, Germs, and Steel moved my perceptions.

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes is making me guilty of all this armchair academia and is inspiring me to learn a whole different lifestyle.

Metaphors We Live By is giving me the vague nudge to become a linguistic anthropologist.

Cognitive Justice in a Global World is making me believe that I too can be a fuckin' warrior in the "science wars" and help towards a more critical inspection of knowledge and epistemology. I believe that health, medicine, science, technology are far too important to leave to scientists from the West.

My mind's been scattered, but here are the four most recurring programs I keep looking at.

Rutgers Sociology Culture and Cognition Program: Not really a fan of the exclusively sociological approach, but I love the work on time and memory from this department. Best fit because I actually read some of the works from people at this school. One of the works inspired a post here.

University of Connecticut, Cognitive Anthropology: Sounds like every subject I could want to study in is in place there from talking about evolution, cognition, and culture to medical anthropology to do what I need to do. Far away and different from LA. Encourages brown people to apply to university!

UCSD, Psychological and Cognitive Anthropology: Sort of like UConn, possibly the most well-rounded college and also much much closer than UConn. Also I love the work on metaphors by some of the cognitive scientists there. Raph Nunez of Where Mathematics Comes From, mother-effer. Already familiar with the UC system, perhaps that'll give me a boost in this school?

Cal State Fullerton, American Studies: Convenient, would give me the opportunity to work on a Master's and see if I like things enough to do a Ph.D. I go to a lot of the California Studies stuff and there's a lot of representation from CSUF. Probably would be my best bet to study both the development of science and urban demography in California.

MIT, History Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society: I always thought they were cutting edge and I'd like to be part of that cutting edginess some day. And perhaps play some black jack along the way. Would probably give me the best education in the war against the hegemonies of the infallibility of science.

I'm quite satisfied that I only need be concerned about this. On to crackin'.

Help me pick a program!

Eerily Similar?

I see Ivan Penetrante and I see Mike Brown, but I've never seen them in the same room at the same time. Could they be...ONE AND THE SAME?!

Ivan Penetrante says he's always busy in San Diego doing community work...



Mike Brown says he's always busy coaching professional basketball...



In addition to their strikingly similar physical appearances, both share the same noticeably vague responses when probed about their whereabouts on various occasions.

Something is eerily similar about these two...there seem to be more than a few "coincidences" linking them

Both of them have the virtually the same physical characteristics as evidenced in the photos above, but the Ivan Penetrante identity bears a much lighter skin pigmentation and stands a conspicuous 5 foot 4. They wear glasses styled from Versace, though the Mike Brown character tends to diversify his selection which is coherent with his identity as a multi-million dollar professional basketball coach while Ivan Penetrante, a self-styled community organizer, holds steadfastly to his brand of Versace glasses. Both claim to have attended Mesa Community College in San Diego, with Ivan Penetrante attending almost exactly 15 years before Mike Brown. The most striking similarity however resides in the both over-explanatory San Diegan dialect, also witnessed in Tony Gwynn.

Both of their identities could not seem more divergent, but this is exactly what Mike Brown/Ivan Penetrante wants you to think. There is a mountain of evidence with a multitude of underlying threads that proves that Ivan Penetrante and Mike Brown are...ONE AND THE SAME!

Let's review the facts shall we:

-Mike Brown, previously an unknown scout in the NBA, assumed the position as NBA Head Coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers on June 2, 2005

-Nine days later, a previously unknown student at UCLA, surfaced at the UCLA PTSP Debut on June 11, 2005 to the surprise of many PTSP members. His name was Ivan Penetrante, introduced as one of the PTSP Bayanihan Project's Peer Advisors. Why was he unknown until then?

-In a chance meeting on Janss steps on the afternoon of June 27th, PTSP Bayanihan Project Director Brian J. Delas Armas encounters his new mysterious Peer Advisor Ivan Penetrante. Ivan Penetrante seems evasive in answering questions strenuously attempting to avoid eye contact with said project director.

-After 2 months, extensive talks, and teeth-pulling Ivan Penetrante finally became Assistant Director of the first full-year of the PTSP Bayanihan in August 2005. Could it be that his coaching job as Mike Brown was holding him back?

-On June 2, 2007, Mike Brown, coach of the Cavaliers leads his team to the NBA Finals

-Having mysteriously "graduated" a quarter before everyone else, Ivan Penetrante resurfaces for the 2006-2007 PTSP debut on June 3, 2007 in decidedly "happier" spirits than usual, even managing to wear a shirt and tie, which he normally does not do. Or does he? Perhaps he was just too drained from travelling to Los Angeles to change from his suit?





Mere coincidences?

I think not.

We have not heard from the likes of Ivan Penetrante nor Mike Brown, but were hoping one of these characters will make an appearance at the 2009 PTSP Debut.