My plan is to speak about a new initiative that my school is undertaking in response to President Obama’s recent declaration that “by the year 2020 America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” (To do so would mean turning around a disturbing trend: In the early 1980s, the United States led the world in terms of the proportion of young people it graduated from universities; since that time, the U.S. has steadily slipped in the world rankings, and we currently rank 14th, according to figures from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.)

Borrowing from President Obama’s declaration (and no doubt hoping to procure Federal funding), my school, Anne Arundel Community College, is undertaking a new initiative that we are calling “Student Success 2020.” In AY2009, AACC awarded 1,218 associate degrees, 372 credit certificates, and 2,556 workforce credentials for a total of 4,146 credentials. As part of “Student Success 2020,” we are proposing to double each of those three categories, so that by AY2020 we will grant 2,436 degrees, 744 credit certificates, and 5,112 workforce credentials a year for a total of 8,292 credentials. Rumor has it that each AACC faculty and staff member will soon be receiving an “8,292” button to pin on his or her lapel.

As you can no doubt imagine, there has been some faculty concern about the goals of “Student Success 2020” at AACC, perhaps nowhere more so than in the English department. Because every degree-seeking student must pass AACC’s Freshman Comp requirement and every certificate-seeking student must be “academically eligible” for Freshman Comp, that is to say must satisfy their developmental English requirement, the English department finds itself in an unenviable position. How are we to double the number of students who pass Freshman Comp and who complete their developmental English requirement in a time when our enrollment has been increasing at roughly 10% annually, a time when more and more of our incoming students have developmental English requirements, and a time when our full-time faculty hiring has been frozen for several years and more and more of our students are being taught by an ever-enlarging army of part-time faculty members?