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.

Bachus is a clear-eyed and likable protagonist and his hard-earned reflections on the way humans learn from one another are worth a read. A valuable and thoughtful work from a professor at the end of his teaching career.

--Kirkus

I loved this book. Ned Bachus can really write. This memoir is brilliant, engaging, and instructive. Open Admissions is both moving and personal; it is serious without being sanctimonious. Bachus is never pious and he is always inspiring, whether he's talking about the students he's teaching or about his own experiences and family life. A must read, not only for those who teach at community colleges or at public institutions, but for all teachers and all administrators. I recommend Open Admissions with a full heart.

-- Gina Barreca, Professor of English, University of Connecticut, contributor to Chronicle of Higher Education, and author of Babes in Boyland: A Personal History of Coeducation in the Ivy League

In a time of crumbling infrastructure, education budget cuts, and spiraling college debt, Ned Bachus finds hope and possibility in our country's community colleges. Open Admissions is a love song to the promise and accessibility of affordable higher education. Weaving a narrative tapestry from the threads of his own search within and abroad, Bachus discovers that while he thought he taught writing to nontraditional students, what he really was teaching was independence.

-- Roger LaMay, General Manager, WXPN

With humor and compassion, Bachus reveals the transformational work that occurs in community colleges in helping students reach their educational goals. He intertwines his own mishaps in a foreign culture with the challenges that students face as they enter the new world of academia. Teaching and learning occurs by both faculty and students in this must-read book for anyone employed at a community college.

-- Kathleen Hetherington, President, Howard Community College