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Three years ago, Eduardo Vianna, a professor at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, had a student who passed an entire semester without speaking in class. Like many others, the student, Mike Rifino, had come to LaGuardia requiring remedial instruction.

But the following semester Mr. Rifino turned up in Dr. Vianna’s developmental psychology course. This time he took a seat closer to the front of the room. Taking that as a positive sign, Dr. Vianna asked him to join a weekly discussion group for students who might want to talk about big ideas in economics, education and politics, subjects that might cultivate a sense of intellectual curiosity and self-understanding among students whose backgrounds typically left them lacking in either.

“The group met on Friday afternoons,” Dr. Vianna said, “and Mike’s friends were asking him why he was wasting his time; the students who came weren’t getting any credit.”

At the time, Mr. Rifino was working as a cashier at a Gap in a mall on Queens Boulevard, and feeling despondent about it. Dr. Vianna then introduced him to Erich Fromm’s writing on Marx, and something in Mr. Rifino ignited, as he began to examine his own sense of alienation. He quickly finished his work at LaGuardia, and transferred to Hunter College in 2012. In the fall he began a doctoral program in psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

“My skills, my abilities, I thought they were fixed and they weren’t,” he said. “We all have unlimited potential, I think.” — Mike Rifino

Among trajectories for community college students, Mr. Rifino’s path is decidedly out of the ordinary. Of the full-time students who started at LaGuardia in 2008, as he did, less than 17 percent graduated within three years. Only a quarter of LaGuardia students complete their associate degree in six years, a figure that is high for urban community colleges.

Five years ago, with Detroit’s deadened factories as a backdrop, President Obama announced an initiative to mint five million more community college graduates by 2020. The announcement coincided with a report from the Council of Economic Advisers anticipating a significantly greater demand for jobs requiring analytic skills. Two-year colleges enroll nearly half of all undergraduates in this country, the majority coming from the lower half of the income distribution. In the case of LaGuardia, more than two-thirds of its students come from families making $25,000 a year or less. It is hard to see how economic mobility might regain momentum, or how an educated citizenry might be maintained, without community colleges accomplishing their mission of graduating the poor and struggling.

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By: Contributing Author

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