Built to teach: what your alma mater could learn from Cascadia Community College.

• Author: Carey, Kevin
• Position: OUR THIRD ANNUAL COLLEGE GUIDE

In most ways, Hayley Bates is a typical American college student. She goes to a public school in the suburbs of Seattle, working part-time in a movie theater to pay tuition. Her ambitions are strong but still unfocused--she thinks she wants to run an organization helping students with disabilities someday, but she's not sure how to get from here to there. Her older brother is a college dropout, and she's determined not to make the same mistake. College is fun on some days; on others, it's a grind.

Most students can't judge how well their college is teaching them because they have no direct point of comparison. In this regard, Hayley's perspective is unusual. To fulfill her wide-ranging course requirements, she is enrolled simultaneously at two institutions of higher education. At one, a branch campus of the well-regarded University of Washington, her experiences would be familiar to most college graduates. She sits in the back of the classroom listening to lectures from professors who devote much of their time to publishing enough research to win tenure. The courses are straightforward and not that difficult--"lenient," she says. Because her professor puts all his lecture notes online, "you don't always even have to go to class."

At the other college, however, things are ... different. "Harder." First of all, her professor never seems to explain anything. Instead, he's constantly posing questions that seem deliberately vague, then he "tells you to go find the materials and figure out the answer for yourself." She can't skip class, even if it's been a long day selling popcorn, because she's part of a group of students who are all doing hands-on research and wrestling with tricky questions together; she doesn't want to let them down. She feels like she's learning a lot, sure, but she didn't realize college would be so much work.

The most surprising thing is that Hayley's other college isn't some kind of elite school that only accepts the smart students who can handle such a tough workload. It's a two year institution that hardly anyone outside of Seattle has ever heard of: Cascadia Community College.

That a two-year college could be more academically rigorous than a four-year university--one that's a "first tier" national university, according to U.S. News & World Report--would seem unlikely. It's long been an article of faith in higher education that any four-year university is better than any two-year college. Yet Hayley's experience of the comparative advantage of Cascadia (which is located next to the University of Washington) is borne out by hard data. Although its enrollees typically have less promising academic backgrounds than UW freshman, Cascadia graduates who then continue at UW earn better grades than their peers. It's hard to imagine a clearer indication that the education students receive at Cascadia is superior.

Indeed, other measures of teaching quality suggest that Cascadia is the best community college in America. Using data from a well-respected survey of educational best practices, the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, the Washington Monthly has created the first-ever list of the nation's top two-year colleges. (See "America's Best Community Colleges," page 24.) Cascadia places number two overall, and in those measures most closely correlated with high grades and graduation rates--the extent to which teaching is "active and collaborative"--Cascadia tops the list.

Cascadia's success is extraordinary. But the difference doesn't depend on funding: the money spent per pupil at Cascadia is typical among community colleges, and about half that spent at the University of Washington. Nor is the college's achievement the result of some secret formula not known to other educators. Not explaining things and making students work in teams to discover answers turn out to be precisely the kinds of teaching practices that decades of research say help students learn most. Yet the vast majority of four-year colleges and universities don't teach their undergraduates this way. Instead, they rely far too often on the same old teaching methods nobody thinks are any good.

Most four-year schools teach poorly for a simple reason: they were designed with another purpose in mind. America's dominant model for higher education was developed in the late nineteenth century...