Open Admissions: What Teaching at Community College Taught Me About Learning

For the children of our elites, attending college is an expected part of late adolescence, an experience for which they have been groomed since birth. First generation or nontraditional students also enroll in college but generally with far less preparation and support. Award-winning writer and teacher Ned Bachus argues that for our greater society their outcomes matter more.

Bachus began the fall 2011 semester knowing that before the year's end, he must decide if he will take early retirement or remain indefinitely in his dream job at Community College of Philadelphia-where he began his own college studies as a bad student from a working-class single-parent family. Open Admissions interweaves the story of this decision-making semester with the month-long sabbatical residency the following spring when, on a cliff-hugging cottage on the coast of Ireland, he begins to make sense of the previous fall and of a life measured in semesters.

Open Admissions offers an important window into the real lives of community college students and their professors. The memoir sheds much needed light on the barely known and often disrespected institution that serves as a launching pad for people who make a positive difference, from doctors, nurses, and researchers to engineers, entrepreneurs, and creative artists on the world stage. Bachus offers story after story about teaching and learning practices that transform lives. Including his own.