One thing that the recession has made clear: the value of a college credential, whether a two-year or a four-year degree. The unemployment rates of those without anything more than a high school degree have been persistently higher, as this chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics makes clear.

That’s one reason why a recent report by the Youth Development Institute is so encouraging. In “The Best of Two Worlds: Lessons from a Community College-Community Organization Collaboration to Increase Student Success,” YDI and its partners, Jobs for the Future and Back on Track, lay out the steps it takes to engage more vulnerable youth in higher education. It also lays out a road map for how community development organizations and community colleges can partner more successfully to help young people secure their futures.

In 2004, YDI and its partners brought together six community-based organizations (CBOs) and the City University of New York (the major college placement for most New York City high school graduates), along with the New York Department of Education. The goal was to design a program to help young people who had struggled in high school, were recent immigrants, or who had dropped out and recently obtained their GED to graduate from college.  They called the program, College Access and Success initiative (CAS).

CBOs often see a one side of young people’s lives — the side that faces the daily hurdles that low incomes and under-resourced neighborhoods present. Meanwhile, community colleges see another side–the struggling student who are hanging on by a tenuous string. In CUNY city colleges, only 18% of students who began an associate’s degree program in 2003 had earned the degree six years later. Only 11% had earned a bachelor’s degree. The graduation rates are even lower for those students entering with a GED, according to the report.

CAS brought these two groups–community colleges and CBOs– together to focus their strengths and coordinate their actions to provide a set of wrap-around services for young people. More than just lip service to the idea of coordination, the initiative is truly collaborative. The CBO (the Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation) and the New York City College of Technology (“City Tech”) met monthly to review the progress of students, and share insights and ideas about what might work better for a particular student. The result was a partnership that blended the strengths of each group to improve student success.

The partnership, as the report notes, “leads to a deeper understanding of each student than would be possible if each partner acted without the insights of the other.” These tete-a-tetes help determine the courses a student should take to complete a major and minimize waste in financial aid; find internships and job opportunities that fit the academic schedules; and decide on any necessary referrals to a range of social, health, and financial services are appropriate.

As the director of programs at Cypress Hills said, “Being able to talk directly to the provost and the administration has made a huge difference. We’ve never had access to higher administration before.”

Likewise, the provost at City Tech has realized how important CBOs are to students as a safety net. “Our students face complex situations that require complex responses,” she told the authors of the report. “I worked in adult education for years. I thought I knew the story. The reality is much more complicated and serious now.”

Like one young single mother. She and her son were in and out of homeless shelters during her time in school, and although she was determined to get into a college program, she kept hitting a brick wall. She was very good in literature and reading, but her math was weak. She could pass the GED reading section, but math tripped her up every time. And she couldn’t go to college until she passed the test. It took her seven years to get the degree.

Key to successful collaboration, as former executive director of YDI and now an ongoing consultant Peter Kleinbard told us, was the intermediary–in this case YDI. “It’s difficult and takes a lot of commitment,” Kleinbard said. “The role of the intermediary was important to keep the people at the table and iron out whatever problems arise.”

To Kleinbard, the success that stemmed from the collaborative, person-centered approach was heartening. “It was encouraging,” he said, “that  when we did the things that experience and research show are effective, they actually worked. Staying close to the kids, it really helped them get through.”

Overall, the students hear the same message from both groups and they are given a plan and a pathway, a roadmap that everyone mutually supports. Together they more effectively help students overcome the unique hurdles they face in trying to get a college education.

An added bonus: The experience for the college administrators made them realize that “the lessons we were gathering were applicable more broadly to the college as a whole,” says Kleinbard— “to all the kids in the community college, not just those in the program. The college leadership definitely took that lesson from the work.”

To date, the graduation rates of the students in this program are slightly higher, at 20%, than the graduation rates at CUNY schools overall.  That’s promising. But as Kleinbard notes, one of the things he has realized over the years is that the associate’s degree is not the only outcome. “It was very tough to get to the graduations,” he said. “And there are other routes such as certificates, and students can always come back to the degree program once they have a certificate. Not everyone has to get an AA degree the first round.”

The final question, as all policymakers want to know, is: Is it “scalable”? Can it be ramped up and applied to many more community colleges?  Kleinbard thinks it is. “The costs weren’t that high,” he says, “and the codification is good enough that others can draw on it. The biggest challenge is the time it took to meet and review each student’s work. But we have protocols to make that easier.”

See also:

“Academics Launch New Efforts to Retain Community College Students” (Wall Street Journal)

Reclaiming the American Dream: Community Colleges and the Nation’s Future (American Association of Community Colleges)