Washington—On Thursday afternoon, nobody was allowed to say the word “Harvard.” That’s what Paul Osterman told his audience here at a conference hosted by the American Enterprise Institute. After all, Mr. Osterman, a professor of human resources and management at M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management, came to discuss community colleges, which serve a much larger proportion of American students than elite, four-year colleges do.
Mr. Osterman discussed findings from a new paper, in which he concludes that “mission creep” hinders community colleges from improving student outcomes. In short, he argued that many community colleges try to do too much, a tendency that perhaps stems from a strength of two-year institutions—their ability to innovate.
Moreover, Mr. Osterman lamented that public discussion about such institutions tends to focus disproportionately on work-force development. Roughly a third of community-college students enroll after completing high school. “Please think of community college not simply as vocational training schools,” he said.
Besides better financial support, what do community colleges need? Mr. Osterman’s paper offers several recommendations, but he suggested that what’s lacking above all is a sense of national urgency. “There is not a political movement around community colleges like there is in the K-12 reform community,” he said. “We know good practice, it’s really a political [and] administrative problem to improve these institutions, not a what-should-we-do problem.”
Charlene R. Nunley, a former president of Montgomery College, in Maryland, said the needs of two-year institutions will become more urgent as more and more students enroll after completing high school, hoping to transfer to four-year colleges. Ms. Nunley also described the challenge of reaching adult students who lack the time and interest to devote to on-campus activities, such as learning communities, that may help them stay engaged. “About community-college students, one thing we know is that they don’t do ‘optional,’” she said.
For that reason, Ms. Nunley suggested that community colleges must consider making more of their programs and services mandatory, even if adopting more-stringent requirements costs institutions some students. “If we don’t put the right programs in place,” she said, “we’re going to lose them anyway.”