Philadelphia — For-profit colleges hold several advantages over two-year public institutions in the competition for students. But community colleges also hold several key cards, including a fundamental one — their community ties.

“That community involvement is our real strength,” Joe May, president of the Louisiana Community & Technical College system, told a crowd of more than 40 community-college leaders at a morning session here today at the annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges.

In Louisiana, for example, his system has been responding to local and state needs by training construction workers to help rebuild homes in New Orleans damaged by Hurricane Katrina; by training students in engineering-technology fields to work in the increasingly important regional industry of processing liquid natural gas; and by teaching welding, machining, and other skills vital to the work force in the state’s important ship-building industry.

Investor-owned companies might do some of that as well, if they saw it as a market, he said later, in an interview. “But they’re not going to do anything that’s not profitable to them,” he said.

Mr. May has spent most of his career in community colleges but worked for about two years for a for-profit company with colleges in the United States and overseas. In the morning session, Mr. May was quick to acknowledge that several trends are creating “a real opportunity for for-profits,” including declining state support for public colleges, which is forcing some of them to raise tuition, and a general shift in societal attitudes that now values higher education more as an individual benefit than a public good.

But he said community colleges could combat those trends with strengths of their own. For one, he noted, they are more comprehensive than most for-profit colleges, and so can better serve students who may decide partway through their education that they want to shift to a different program.

Most important, he said, community colleges could and should do more to improve service to their students on matters like advising and financial-aid counseling. For-profit colleges do that well, and even though they may be doing it as part of their “sales” strategy, he noted that “from a student’s point of view, it’s service.”

All of those services need not be so costly. One place to start, said Mr. May, is the college’s Web site, where right now, a lot of key information “is often buried.” Colleges could also do more with online advising and telephone-based counseling. “Technology,” said Mr. May, “can create a more level playing field.” —Goldie Blumenstyk