Community Colleges as

Gateways and Gatekeepers:

Moving beyond the Access ‘Saga’
toward Outcome Equity

alicia C. DowD
University of Southern California

Harvard Educational Review

Winter 2007, Volume 77:4
symposium
Equity and Access in
Higher Education

Community Colleges as Gateways and Gatekeepers:

Moving beyond the Access “Saga” toward
Outcome Equity
ALICIA C. DOW D
University of Southern California

Community colleges are essential – though often overlooked – institutions of higher

education. In this essay, Alicia C. Dowd draws attention to the challenges facing
community colleges as they seek to balance their roles as both gateways and gatekeep-
ers with their multiple missions, which include meeting the diverse needs of students
at the postsecondary level and responding to the changing educational and eco-
nomic needs of U.S. society. Using research from the California Benchmarking Proj-
ect, Enhancing Institutional Effectiveness and Equity, Dowd offers insights about
the ways community college leaders, staff, and partners might navigate these dual
and often divergent roles. Her essay raises important questions about the nature of
higher education accountability in the context of community colleges and the way
these institutions are used, managed, and evaluated.

Community colleges are sometimes overlooked when we talk about issues of

equity and college admissions. After all, aren’t they free (almost) and open
to everyone? The answer is yes . . . and no. In this paper I outline the state
of equity in community colleges by describing the historical role of the com-
munity college and presenting current statistics about student outcomes. I
observe that the uses of transfer and remediation at community colleges are
stratified by students’ racial/ethnic and socioeconomic characteristics. Given
this context, I argue that the mission and identity of community colleges

Harvard Educational Review Vol. 77 No. 4 Winter 2007

Copyright © by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

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Harvard Educational Review

must shift from the “saga” of access to a focus on outcome equity. I then draw
on my work with colleagues at the University of Southern California’s Cen-
ter for Urban Education to illustrate strategies for making progress toward
that goal. These strategies embrace the goals of accountability, including that
of improved institutional performance, while also emphasizing the need for
on-campus assessments rooted in critical perspectives on inequity in order to
develop the capacity for improved performance.

The Community College as Gateway and Gatekeeper

Community colleges are both the gateways and gatekeepers of American
higher education. As gateways, they are open-access colleges with minimal
enrollment requirements and low tuition. They offer a “something for every-
one” curriculum, including occupational certificate programs, general educa-
tion credits toward the completion of an associate’s degree and for transfer to
four-year colleges, developmental (or remedial) education, English-language
instruction, and noncredit short courses for business training, self-improve-
ment, or leisure (Bragg, 2001; Dougherty, 2002). During their widespread
establishment in the 1960s and early 1970s, community colleges grew dra-
matically (Breneman & Nelson, 1981). Today they enroll nearly eight million
students and about 40 percent of all undergraduates (Horn & Nevill, 2006,
p. 1).1 As gateways to higher education, community colleges have provided
access to groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in and under-
served by four-year colleges and universities.
By enrolling the lion’s share of new entrants to higher education, commu-
nity colleges have also acted as gatekeepers, reducing the pressure on four-
year colleges and universities to expand by enrolling larger numbers of stu-
dents (Turner, 2004). As community colleges have responded to the growing
demand for higher education by enrolling greater numbers of students, the
share of students enrolled in public and private research universities and in
private liberal arts colleges has declined. These institutions, instead of expand-
ing, have become more focused on increasing their selectivity and other indi-
cators as markers of quality (Hoxby, 2000). As a result of these trends, the col-
legiate student body has become more stratified by ability and socioeconomic
status (Astin & Oseguera, 2004; Bowen, Kurzweil, & Tobin, 2005), with the
most capable students increasingly concentrated at a smaller number of the
more elite colleges (Hoxby, 2000).
The use of the community college as a point of access in a stratified higher
education system appeals to ideological principles across the political spec-
trum. The gateway function, through its universalism, appeals to principles
of democratic education. By offering the prospect, even for poor and immi-
grant students, of movement from the lowest rung of the educational ladder
to the highest, it also appeals to the principles of meritocracy, equal opportu-
nity, and social mobility. On the other hand, for fiscal conservatives the gate-

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 Symposium: Equity and Access in Higher Education

keeper function is desirable. From this view, it makes sense for less academi-
cally prepared students to enroll in the lowest-cost higher education sector.
Funneling some students into workforce training creates economic efficiency
(promoting economic development) and social efficiency (creating a supply
of workers for clerical, service, and nonprofessional technical occupations)
(Labaree, 1997).
The socioeconomic and academic stratification of higher education is put-
ting pressure on community colleges in two ways. One set of pressures, in
the form of articulation and transfer policies, is intended to improve trans-
fer rates to four-year colleges (Anderson, Alfonso, & Sun, 2006; U.S. Depart-
ment of Education, 2005). These policies have arisen out of a need to meet
the growing demand for bachelor’s degrees without expanding the supply
of seats in the more expensive four-year sector. The other set of pressures,
in the form of remedial education policies, is solidifying the role of commu-
nity colleges as gatekeepers by imposing restrictions on access to four-year
colleges for students who require remediation (Attewell, Lavin, Domina, &
Levey, 2006; Merisotis & Phipps, 2000; Shaw, 1997).
Policies establishing remedial education as the sole purview of the commu-
nity colleges have been particularly contentious, in part because the comple-
tion and graduation rates for remedial students are low and the magnitude
of the remedial education challenge is large. It appears that on a national
basis only one in four students who take remedial courses at community col-
leges ultimately graduate (Attewell et al., 2006). Recent national data indicate
that, on average, 42 percent of students entering community colleges will
enroll in “developmental” or “basic skills” courses (Parsad & Lewis, 2003, p.
iv). However, the range of estimates is quite substantial, extending upward to
60 percent (Adelman, 2004; Kirst, 2007). Notwithstanding the difficulties in
estimating the prevalence of remedial education, it is clear that the majority
of students enrolled in remedial courses are at community colleges, and that
the burden on community colleges for remediation has increased in recent
years (Parsad & Lewis, 2003).

Contradictions of Accountability and the Access “Saga”

Transfer, remedial education, and other “accountability” policies have placed
the performance of community colleges under scrutiny. Accountability indi-
cators and performance reporting requirements have been established in
many states to track transfer rates, student persistence from term to term,
degree completion, and workforce readiness (Burke & Associates, 2005).
These requirements have generally been regarded as onerous by adminis-
trators of community colleges because they hardly take into account the col-
leges’ multiple missions and diverse student bodies (Dowd & Tong, 2007).
In particular, the calculation of performance indicators can be a source of
tension. For example, transfer rates are infamously difficult to calculate in a

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Harvard Educational Review

manner satisfactory to all stakeholders. They are often reported along with
a primer explaining the effects of including or excluding students with cer-
tain characteristics from the calculations (see, e.g., Clearing Paths to Degrees,
2007; Horn & Lew, n.d.; Moore & Shulock, 2007; Wellman, 2002). As a way
of arriving at more acceptable measures of institutional effectiveness, recent
studies have sought to empirically parse out indicators of student commit-
ment to transfer to a four-year institution or to attain a specific degree based
on students’ enrollment behavior (Adelman, 2005; Horn & Lew, n.d.; Horn
& Nevill, 2006). Perhaps because community colleges have long been subject
to the charge that they “cool out” students’ aspirations of degree completion
(Anderson et al., 2006; Clark, 1960, 1980), a perennial debate concerns the
inclusion in transfer indicators of students who potentially had no intention
of transferring. Similarly, the question of whether colleges are responsible
for increasing students’ aspirations to transfer continually arises. Due to the
difficulty of collecting faithful measures of students’ academic aspirations,
community college administrators and policy makers alike have struggled in
deciding how to include students who do not have clear educational goals in
measures of institutional effectiveness.
Beyond the challenges of accurately measuring student aspirations in com-
munity colleges, more generally accountability for student outcomes is con-
tradictory to the culture of community colleges because, as many scholars
have noted, it is open access enrollment (not outcomes) that defines the
community college mission and identity (Bailey & Smith Morest, 2006; Bragg,
2001; Breneman & Nelson, 1981; Levin, 2001; Rhoads & Valadez, 1996; Shaw,
2001). Yet with access to college more assured today than student success in
achieving educational goals or earning a degree, there have been many calls
for higher education to shift its focus to when, where, and how successfully
students of different academic and socioeconomic characteristics navigate
educational opportunities (see, e.g., Bastedo & Gumport, 2003; Goldrick-
Rab, 2006; Hoxby, 2004; Moore & Shulock, 2007; Vaughan, 2005).
In this respect, the accountability movement, with its focus on outcomes
rather than “inputs,” is aligned with the goals of “outcome equity” (Dowd,
2003; Dowd & Tong, 2007). The concept of outcome equity arose from con-
tentious legislative and judicial battles in K–12 education finance to provide
greater levels of resources to students with greater educational need. The
fundamental argument is that the provision of equal resources is not equi-
table when educational achievement gaps are so strongly correlated with fam-
ily wealth and race/ethnicity (Levin, 1994; Verstegen, 1998). Students with
greater educational needs require greater resources in order to achieve at
rates equal to those with fewer needs.
However, because it is so difficult to measure inequities in funding or gen-
erate legislation to address finance inequities (Dowd & Grant, 2006), com-
munity colleges are being asked today to take on a new identity and mission.
Resistance to this idea can be deep-seated, because it requires grafting out-

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 Symposium: Equity and Access in Higher Education

come equity to the “gateway” role of open access. What might be perceived
as a general reluctance to take responsibility for students’ aspirations and
outcomes reflects the true depth of the challenges facing open access institu-
tions in educating a diverse student body. It also reflects what Ernest House
(1974) might have referred to as the “ideology” and “saga” of the commu-
nity college. House used these terms, borrowing the notion of a “saga” from
Burton Clark, to describe how important it is to understand belief systems
when conducting any evaluation of higher education. Ideology, as he defines
it, is a “unified, coherent, and shared-belief system that is used to appeal to
important audiences,” and a saga is “a collective understanding, a story, of
the unique accomplishment of the group” (p. 619). In House’s application, a
saga is a positive motivating force, mythical in proportion, and an important
rallying point for action among people who subscribe to it.
The community college saga that motivates commitment to open access
celebrates the small positive steps that many individuals make by completing
just one course at the community college level (such as in English-language
learning, occupational skills training, and adult basic education). While it is
important to acknowledge that indicators of degree completion and transfer
can mask small successes, it is notable too that their significance at times takes
on “mythical” proportions, perhaps as an antidote to the low rates of student
success that accountability data reveal. The belief system of the saga, House
(1974) argues, becomes “nearly impermeable to conflicting data” (p. 619)
and is challenged to incorporate contradictory information.

Stratified Uses of the Community College

Often lost in accountability debates is the fact that a student’s chance of suc-
cess depends considerably on their racial/ethnic background and the wealth
of their community. Transfer and remediation policies may be good for White,
middle-class, or affluent students at the same time that they are harmful to
African Americans, Latinos, and poor students. As Tara Parker and Leticia
Bustillos (2007, p. 26) have argued, in light of the bifurcated experience of
these different groups of students, the community college acts and is treated
by policymakers simultaneously as a “redeemer” and “dumping ground.”
My studies, with colleagues John Cheslock and Tatiana Melguizo, of the
socioeconomic stratification of transfer access — or how economic class
affects the opportunity to transfer to four-year colleges and universities —
indicate that as a route from the lowest rung to the highest rungs of higher
education, transfer primarily serves students of middle and high socioeco-
nomic status (SES) (Dowd et al., 2006; Dowd, Cheslock, & Melguizo, in press;
Dowd & Melguizo, in press). In the data we studied, which reflected the edu-
cational outcomes of traditional-age students from the high school graduat-
ing class of 1992, only a very small proportion (7%) of community college
students who transferred to highly selective institutions were students from

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Harvard Educational Review

families in the lowest two SES quintiles. Fully half of transfers to elite institu-
tions were from the top SES quintile. Surprisingly, students from the two low-
est SES quartiles were also substantially underrepresented (at 22%) among
transfers to less-selective colleges.
The experience of remediation is also stratified by socioeconomic charac-
teristics and “socially constructed” in negative or positive ways, depending on
a student’s race (Parker & Bustillos, 2007). Students from across the racial/
ethnic and geographic spectrum — urban, rural, and suburban — who leave
high school with a wide range of academic preparedness find themselves in
remedial classes at two- and four-year colleges. Most of them successfully pass
these courses in the first semester of college. Yet, the public sector has “cre-
ated higher hurdles than the private sector” (Attewell et al., 2006, p. 914)
for equivalently prepared students. Urban students, African Americans and
Latinos, and the lowest-SES students are most likely to be found in remedial
education (Attewell et al., 2006). This stems in part from their lower levels of
academic preparedness, and in part from public policies that have relegated
remedial education to community colleges. As a consequence, Attewell et al.
(2006) show that, even after controlling for high school academic perfor-
mance, students in the public sector and in community colleges are more
likely to be enrolled in remedial courses, as are Black students in comparison
to their equivalently prepared White peers.
These statistics illustrate that the uses of the community college are strati-
fied by students’ racial/ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Accountabil-
ity policies have not been particularly attentive to these inequities. For exam-
ple, accountability indicators often are not disaggregated by race and ethnicity,
and aggregated statistics hide disparities in student outcomes. If the problem
of outcome inequity is not revealed, it is unlikely it will be addressed.

Integrating Accountability, Equity, and Assessment through

“Critical Assessment”
In this section, I describe work that my colleagues and I at the University
of Southern California’s Center for Urban Education (CUE) are doing to
address the equity issues discussed above. The California Benchmarking Proj-
ect grows out of the efforts of Estela Mara Bensimon to bring attention to the
problem of racial/ethnic inequities in higher education (Bensimon, 2004,
2005a, 2005b, 2007) and my own studies of community college finance equity
(Dowd, 2003, 2004; Dowd & Grant, 2006, 2007) and accountability (Dowd,
2005; Dowd & Tong, 2007).2 A central premise of our work is that colleges
can become more equitable and effective by developing the capacity for orga-
nizational learning. Developing this capacity requires the active participation
of community college practitioners as researchers into their own culture and
practices (Bensimon, Polkinghorne, Bauman, & Vallejo, 2004). Our work

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 Symposium: Equity and Access in Higher Education

illustrates that there is a key role for academic researchers to develop equi-
ty-based inquiry3 strategies, drawing on theories of practitioner knowledge,
expertise, and equity (Bensimon, 2007; Polkinghorne, 2004).
The project’s theory of change (Dowd & Tong, 2007) — and the moti-
vation for engaging practitioners in research — derives from the concept
of “phronesis,” which can be loosely translated from Aristotle’s writings to
mean practical wisdom (Bensimon, 2007; Polkinghorne, 2004). Such wisdom
is required to answer what may be the million-dollar question in education
reform: “What works?” Studies correlating inputs and outputs without get-
ting inside the “black box” of schooling have not yielded satisfactory answers.
As Cohen, Raudenbush, and Ball (2003) have pointed out, this is because
resources are not “self-acting” in the black box. The ways instructors and stu-
dents interact and put resources to use matter. Therefore, an input that is
effective in one school or context may not be as effective in others. It is nec-
essary for practitioners to have independent capacity and expertise in order
to knowledgably implement reforms and improve institutional effectiveness.
Without promoting practitioner inquiry and knowledge, accountability is
likely to continue to have a weak effect on institutional performance (Dough-
erty & Hong, 2006).
Three community colleges in the Los Angeles area — Long Beach City
College, Los Angeles Southwest College, and Rio Hondo College — are the
lead colleges in the California Benchmarking Project, which is putting these
theories of change into practice. At each one of these lead colleges, we have
convened “inquiry teams” of practitioners (Bensimon, 2007; Dowd, 2005)
comprising faculty, administrators, and counselors, who do action research
on their own campuses using a variety of assessment methods. They will be
joined in the project by twenty or so community colleges, which will form a
peer group for benchmarking equitable and effective practices for improving
student success. Liaisons from eight campuses of the California State Univer-
sity and University of California systems will also participate to improve coor-
dination with the four-year sector. We are focusing on increasing the success-
ful completion of “transfer-eligible” courses by students who started college
in basic skills courses. Transfer-eligible courses carry course credits eligible
for transfer to California State Universities and the University of California.
We have chosen this focus due to the fact that so many Latinos and African
Americans experience low rates of success in basic skills courses and, conse-
quently, low rates of transfer to four-year colleges.4
Benchmarking is a process of comparing educational practices in one
locale — here a community college — to established standards, to prior per-
formance, and to the practices and outcomes of peer colleges (Dowd & Tong,
2007). In the California Benchmarking Project, we use three benchmarking
strategies to create structured opportunities for learning, innovation, and
change. Briefly, these are:

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Harvard Educational Review

1. Performance benchmarking — used to improve performance and pro-

mote equity in student outcomes. The inquiry team reviews baseline data,
disaggregated by racial/ethnic and gender categories, and reports the
successful course-completion rates of students who enroll in key trans-
fer-level “gateway” courses from basic skills courses. The teams also set
benchmark goals for increasing successful course-completion rates and
for closing equity gaps in achievement.
2. Effective practices benchmarking — used to identify practices that prac-
titioners on other campuses, and/or the research and policy literature,
consider effective. CUE researchers conduct literature reviews and exam-
ine reports from colleges and professional organizations in order to
identify practices thought to be exemplary or worthy of adoption in new
settings. The inquiry team compares their “instructional” practices —
broadly defined to include teaching, academic administration, counsel-
ing, and student services — against documented standards of effective
practice for basic skills education and for supporting student transfer to
four-year colleges.
3. Process benchmarking — used to contextualize problems and possible
solutions. The inquiry teams conduct action research using a variety of
assessment methods, such as observations, peer interviews, and docu-
ment analyses. CUE researchers support these inquiry activities by devel-
oping research protocols designed to call attention to the use (or lack) of
equitable and effective practices. These inquiry activities generate a rich
description of campus culture and instructional practices. From these
descriptions, the inquiry team characterizes and prioritizes problems of
instruction on their campus. A similar set of inquiry activities is then car-
ried out during a site visit at a peer college. This site visit enables the
inquiry team to explore the use of practices identified as exemplary in
another setting in order to determine how, when, and why such practices
may be effective. Process benchmarking provides a point of comparison
for the inquiry team’s own campus culture, while serving to stimulate
thinking about innovation and change.
As a result of these inquiry activities, the team then adopts and dissemi-
nates changes in practice across a variety of areas, including, for example,
curriculum, pedagogy, counseling, student assessment, and matriculation ser-
vices. Through written reports and presentations, they will ultimately recom-
mend larger programmatic changes to their campus presidents, administra-
tive bodies, faculty governance bodies, and boards of trustees.
The California Benchmarking Project is designed to integrate aspects of
accountability (through the expectation and benchmarking of improved per-
formance), assessment (through campus-based research into local practices
and culture), and equity (by benchmarking improvement goals to reduce
inequities in student outcomes). By integrating these elements, the project

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 Symposium: Equity and Access in Higher Education

demonstrates a form of assessment that I think of as “critical assessment” —

in that it attends to issues of power, authority, race, ideology, and socioeco-
nomic inequities.
Critical assessment differs from mainstream assessment (see, e.g., Boud-
ett, City, & Murnane, 2005; Ewell, 1991; Maki, 2004; Peterson & Einarson,
2001) through a commitment to reducing the inequities of stratified resource
distribution within and across higher education sectors. Critical assessment,
as I envision it, also improves on current accountability strategies in order
to spur increased institutional performance. Typical accountability indica-
tors often are too highly aggregated to inform practitioners’ views of their
own effectiveness. For that reason, practitioners often reject them as invalid.
By selecting student course-completion rates as a performance indicator, the
California Benchmarking Project models the use of an accountability mea-
sure that can be immediately improved by changes in instructional practices.
By disaggregating student success by race and ethnicity, differences in student
outcomes are uncovered. Practitioners are therefore called upon to address
whether teaching and learning is organized in their classrooms and colleges
in ways that are culturally relevant to students and that invite active learn-
ing. (See Nasir and Hand, 2006, for a discussion of the relationship between
active learning and cultural diversity.)

Conclusion
Despite the symbolic and structural emphasis on the gateway role of commu-
nity colleges, some scholars have argued that the real function of the commu-
nity college is to act as a gatekeeper. Brint and Karabel (1989) wrote of the
“diverted dreams” of community college students, setting in motion decades
of research to determine whether community colleges have predominantly a
“democratization effect” (enabling more students to enroll in college) or a
“diversion effect” (reducing degree completion among students who would
have otherwise enrolled in and earned a bachelor’s degree from a four-year
college; for a review of this literature, see Dowd & Melguizo, in press). The
tensions of the community college role as both gateway and gatekeeper are
particularly salient today. It is becoming clear that community colleges have
both a democratization effect and a diversion effect, but that these effects are
experienced inequitably by students of different backgrounds.
Demand for higher education will grow, while the share of tax dollars
invested in colleges and universities is likely to shrink or stagnate (Archibald
& Feldman, 2006). Policymakers at the state and federal levels have empha-
sized the importance of improving transfer rates as a way to ensure access
to the baccalaureate, while at the same time reducing college costs for tax-
payers and for individual students and families. They have emphasized the
cost-effectiveness of pushing remedial education out of four-year colleges
and into community colleges. However, these policies do not appear to have

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Harvard Educational Review

been successful in bringing about improvements in the equity or effectiveness

of public higher education. In my mind, the adoption of critical assessment
practices, such as those used by the California Benchmarking Project, is the
necessary evolution and integration of the accountability, assessment, and
equity movements to bring about the desired improvements in institutional
performance.

Notes
1. Slightly less than half of community college students were younger than twenty-four
years old (Horn & Nevill, 2006). In comparison to other undergraduates, commu-
nity college students tend to be older, financially independent of their parents, and
enrolled part-time while working. They are also more likely to be Black or Latino, from
low-income families, and female (Horn & Nevill, 2006).
2. This project is funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Ford
Foundation.
3. The notion of “inquiry” refers to the use of research, assessment, and evaluation strate-
gies for the purpose of self-assessment and reflective practice.
4. About one-third to one-half of Latina/o and African American students in California
community colleges are successful in basic skills courses (Brown & Niemi, 2007, p.
8), and approximately 10 percent ultimately transfer to four-year colleges (Moore &
Shulock, 2007, p. 11).

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This article was originally published as part of the symposium, Equity and Access in
Higher Education. The citation is Alicia C. Dowd, “Community Colleges as Gateways and
Gatekeepers: Moving beyond the Access ‘Saga’ toward Outcome Equity,” Harvard Educa-
tional Review, volume 77:4 (Winter 2007), pp. 407–419.

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