Some of those figures are not surprising, considering many community colleges in the US are High School 2.0 / holding tanks for people who have no business going to college and should have been presented many vocational training options in high school.
Community colleges ARE vocational schools; those are exactly the kinds of curriculums most of their students are working towards associate's degrees or tech certificates in. The days when you could take a shop or business track in high school and graduate well-placed to secure a steady job adequate to support a family are long-gone. Some municipalities, most notably NYC, are experimenting with retooled vocational high schools tailored towards the contemporary job market, and in fact those projects are working towards a kind of combined high school-community college model which takes 5-6 years minimum to complete. These schools are, of course, still bound by standards-based education reform requirements just like all other US high schools.
i'd be very interested to know why community college students don't finish their degree.
Inadequate advising and mentoring (both career and academic), inadequate highschool preparation, and inability to pay for the full course of study are the main reasons, according to the report.
There will always be a higher dropout rate compared to 4-years, simply because a higher proportion of these students enroll without clear goals (again, whether career or academic) and are therefore more likely to wind up concluding "Eh this isn't for me" and leaving. But at the same time it should be noted that, given the weakness of these schools' advising and mentoring systems as noted in the report, many of those students would likely have fared better given better advising. The way things are now, the students who get the best advising, direction and mentoring lavished on them are those at elite private colleges (who least need it), while those who get the least are those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. It doesn't help that the entire teaching faculty at most of these schools is composed solely of adjuncts who are being paid per credit hour, so that all departmental development (curriculum, internships, interdisciplinary ventures, advising etc.) is left up to administrators, who are typically running several departments at once, so no one has a longterm stake in the programs. Add to all that poorly prepared students (I'm at a public university, and believe me it's depressing how many of
our freshmen can't write a coherently structured paragraph, can't summarize the argument of a simply worded article they've just read, etc)...honestly it's probably kind of impressive that as many of these students manage to complete their degrees as do.