While I didn’t attend yesterday’s White House community-college summit, having not been invited other pressing engagements, I’m told by those who were there that it featured many genuinely substantive discussions about access, cost, and quality in the two-year sector. That’s a good thing. While I don’t think one can honestly say that the Obama administration has come up with a legitimate Plan B since the American Graduation Initiative went down in flames earlier this year, presidential time matters and this will help community colleges emerge from their perpetual status as under-resourced, under-researched, and under-recognized.
One concrete effort announced yesterday was the new $1 million Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence. To me this an example of philanthropic money wisely spent. Higher education is a mammoth, diverse, and largely autonomous sector of society. Nobody, not even the federal government, has enough money to bribe it into changing fundamentally. (Nor would it work very well even if they did.) College leaders and educators have to want to be different. The best way to do that is to appeal to what matters to them: status and prestige. Prestige in the four-year sector is based on wealth, fame, and exclusivity. Not having any of those things, prestige in the two-year sector basically doesn’t exist. That’s what a Prize for Excellence can change, creating student-centered terms of excellence to which institutions can aspire.
3 Responses to The New $1-Million Community-College Prize
jffoster - October 6, 2010 at 5:27 pm
But won’t that only convey status and prestige (and money) AMONG COMMUNITY COLLEGES? A prestigious community college is still a community college.
betterschools - October 7, 2010 at 10:16 am
There are so many ways to look at the “prestige” factor. To me, if you look at contribution to margin — using this concept as a metaphor for the lives, including the social and economic lives, of community and career college students — two-year institutions are the real heroes in higher education. We joke about the fact that our elite universities are credited with the success of individuals most of whom would have been a success without them. Community colleges are at the other end of the spectrum, adding value for which comparable contributions to margin are not readily or sometimes ever available.Perhaps someone who agrees with this perspective will find a way to position community colleges in the public’s eye and, especially, in higher education’s eye that accords them the credit they deserve for changing lives. Too many community college leaders I know see “progress” as developing bridge programs and four-year degrees. This is a mistake.
deepwater - October 7, 2010 at 6:34 pm
you say, “not even the federal government has enough money to bribe it (higher education) into changing fundamentally.” Does that mean the federal government knows what those fundamental changes should be? Government may think they know the “what” (perhaps in some economic terms) but I didn’t know they knew the “how.”