When Pedro Hinojosa dreams about the future, he knows he wants something different from the hand-blistering digging and chopping he does to help out on his father's gardening route. He is drawn to a medical career, possibly as an emergency room technician, a nurse or even a doctor.
First, he has to get through freshman year at Pasadena City College.
That hasn't been easy, even though Hinojosa is among the PCC students who enrolled in a special support program that provides extra counseling and tutoring. They also take their classes together to help motivate them, but some have already dropped out.
"Juggling everything is really hard," said Hinojosa, a lanky 19-year-old from Pasadena who works long hours at a sporting goods store. But he appreciates the program's helping hand: "Most people don't get that in college," he said.
Twenty-eight students began the program last fall after placement tests showed they needed remedial English or math. Known as learning communities, the programs are increasingly popular as community colleges nationwide try to reduce staggeringly high dropout rates.
In California, barely half of all community college students who intend to transfer to a four-year college or earn an associate's degree or vocational certificate actually do so over six years, according to the state. Other researchers say the rate is lower, about 24%.
The support programs aim to boost those numbers by easing the isolation that often leads underprepared students to drop out in the first year, said Katherine Hughes, an assistant director of the National Center for Postsecondary Research at Columbia University. Early research shows that the groups help keep students in college a second semester, Hughes said, although the longer-term benefits are not yet clear. A detailed national evaluation is underway.
At PCC, officials say students enrolled in the programs generally do better academically than similar students outside. They cannot, however, always overcome poor high school preparation and personal problems.
That assessment matched the observations of a Times reporter who has followed one Pasadena learning group known as Career Pathways since the fall. Some students excelled from the start, while others slowly improved. A few, however, plummeted like sky divers whose parachutes never opened. A quarter of the group had dropped out by February; a handful more remain in danger of failing grades as the spring semester ends.
