Today’s announcement by President Obama to create an $8-billion Community College to Career Fund to train 2 million workers is very welcome news. For years, community colleges have been asked to educate with the fewest funds those students with the greatest needs. According to a report of the Delta Cost Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, in 2009, the average community college spent roughly $10,000 per student, compared with almost $19,000 a year at public research universities and $41,000 a year at private research universities. Excluding research funding and other expenses and focusing exclusively on instruction, community colleges spent about $5,000 per pupil compared with $10,000 at public research universities and $20,000 at private research universities.
The president is politically smart to connect community-college funding directly to the nation’s need to boost employment, an important priority for Americans. But skeptics rightly wonder whether the political will exists to support this initiative and others like it to level the playing field for two-year institutions. The president’s 2009 American Graduation Initiative, which called for $10-billion in new funding, ended up with just $2-billion for job training. And his 2011 proposal for $5-billion in infrastructure for community colleges has not seen Congressional action.
The failure of our political system to provide the resources necessary to the two-year sector may well be connected to a larger issue of changing demographics. Whereas community colleges used to educate a broad cross section of the American public, in recent decades, that has changed. According to a study by Georgetown University researchers Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, in 1982, students from the top socioeconomic quarter of the population made up 24 percent of the students at community colleges; by 2006, that had dropped to 16 percent. Conversely, the representation of the poorest quarter of the population has grown at community colleges from 21 percent to 28 percent in the same time period. (By comparison, in 2006, 70 percent of students from the most selective four-year institutions were from the richest quarter, and 5 percent from the poorest quarter of the population.) In the years since 2007, Sallie Mae reports that tough economic times have brought an influx of students from all economic groups to community colleges, but low-income students have increased at a far faster pace than either middle-income or high-income students.
Just as Medicare for the elderly receives more sustained resources than Medicaid for low-income families, so community colleges need to worry about future political support as wealthier families leave the two-year sector. To be sure, there are other reasons to want community colleges to draw students of all economic backgrounds, a topic that the Century Foundation’s Task Force on Preventing Community Colleges from Becoming Separate and Unequal is seeking to address. The group, which is co-chaired by Eduardo Padron, president of Miami Dade College, and Anthony Marx, president of the New York Public Library, is looking into related questions about how the growing economic divide between two- and four-year institutions affects peer influences, curriculum and expectations, and, ultimately, graduation rates.
The president deserves considerable credit for proposing to invest greater resources in community colleges. And the symbolism of announcing the entire U.S. budget at a community-college setting is powerful. But if we want to make progress in strengthening community colleges, the reality is that we also have to begin thinking creatively about addressing the growing economic chasm between two- and four-year colleges as a whole.
