The Costs of Completion: Student Success in Community College by Robin G. Isserles (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Costs of Completion: Student Success in Community College by Robin G. Isserles Xiaodan Hu and Quortne Hutchings The Costs of Completion: Student Success in Community College Robin G. Isserles Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021, 352 pages, $32.95 (Hardcover) In The Costs of Completion: Student Success in Community College, Robin Isserles reflects upon her role as a faculty member in sociology at the City University of New York and on her research on community college student success. In doing so, she introduces the concept of student sensibility and calls on community colleges to become authentic caring institutions. With broad audiences in mind, Isserles presents both empirical evidence and her personal experiences working directly with community college students. She argues that the narrow focus on completion measures as indicators of community college student success can further marginalize students who are in precarious situations. Rather, Isserles suggests that community college practitioners and researchers contextualize the student-centered experience within neoliberalism, “an economic, social, and political strand of capitalism characterized by a pro-business, limited government ideology” (Winslow, 2015, p. 204–205), and create learning environments in which students feel respected and cared for. The first section of the book presents how the prevalence of neoliberal policies and practices within community colleges enforces market pressures that push public colleges to increase revenues, improve quality, and cut costs (Cannella & Koro-Ljungberg, 2017). Isserles’ observation closely aligns with current research on how the neoliberalization of the US higher education has a detrimental impact on the affordability, accessibility, and public image of higher education (e.g., Mintz, 2021; Winslow, 2015). Isserles explains the complex concept of neoliberalism using plain language and personal stories and illustrates how academic momentum-style initiatives and quantitative-driven data approaches unfairly define the goal of community college education as credential completion. Historically, community colleges have been underfunded despite disproportionately serving students who are racially minoritized and financially needy (Dowd et al., 2020). Under neoliberal policies and practices (e.g., enrollment management, return on investment calculation, consumerism in teaching and learning), underfunded community colleges are thus pressured to follow low-risk best practices to push for faster credential completion as the goal. The unpleasant reality is that, in both community college research and practices, the focus on serving students as consumers widgetizes students and shapes their community college experience to be “substandard” (p. 33). Isserles emphasizes the core mission of community colleges as engaging and supporting students through meaningful student–institution interactions rather than reducing the student experience to completion rates. She also expresses concerns over “the making of a crisis” (p. 51) where philanthropies, researchers, and community college leaders are “singing out the same hymnbook” (p. 76), identifying retention and completion as the aspects to be addressed through student success interventions. In reality, she notes that student success interventions are often implemented [End Page 606] despite inconsistent empirical evidence and the lack of faculty input. This section is especially powerful in highlighting how student-centered higher education requires student affairs practitioners, faculty, and researchers to collaborate based on mutual trust and to advocate for their students. Community college leaders often walk a tightrope between securing sufficient financial resources and meeting the diverse demands of students and other stakeholders (Nevarez & Wood, 2010). Isserles acknowledges the resource constraints community colleges face and explores how structural factors force these institutions to balance financial health and an open-access mission. This book does not explicitly discuss how neoliberal policies and practices can legitimize racist practices in community colleges as racialized organizations (Ray, 2019) or crowd out space for racially minoritized students on community college campuses. Yet, Isserles discusses how performance-based funding as a neoliberal state funding mechanism relies on meritocracy to allocate resources and can financially penalize minority-serving community colleges, exacerbating racial inequity (Jones et al., 2017). In this way, she provides a starting point for community college practitioners and researchers to be aware of the structural context of these institutions so they can advocate for equity-based resource distribution. As community colleges reimagine their identity and multiple missions (Culp & O’Banion, 2021), Isserles interrogates the assumptions of the college completion crisis and proposes interventions and solutions. In...