Community colleges can no longer fly under the radar. Too many people have been paying too much attention to us lately, including the President of the United States.
On balance, that’s a good thing. Those of us who labor in the trenches at “democracy’s colleges” have been waiting a long time for people to pay attention to us. We’re rightfully proud of the work we do and pleased that our vital contributions to society are finally getting the recognition they deserve.
Still, because most of the attention is coming from politicians, I worry about a few things.
One is that increased recognition is bound to bring additional scrutiny and calls for accountability. Of course we don’t object to people looking closely at what we do. I’d be happy to have a gaggle of state legislators sit in on my classes, provided they keep their cell phones turned off. Nor do we fear being held accountable for our stewardship of the public money we receive. I dare say we do more with less than any other sector of education in the country.
We just want to be judged fairly, which means not being held to the same standard as four-year colleges. An institution with an open-door policy, accepting high-school dropouts with GED’s, students returning to school after 20 years, and nonnative speakers, is simply not going to have the same output as an institution with highly selective admissions.
Those who judge us also have to recognize that, for community colleges, graduation rates are not the sole indicators of success. Many of our students just take a course or two, or transfer after a year. Even those who do stay two years sometimes leave without bothering to pick up an associate’s degree.
I’m not saying that graduation rates aren’t important or that two-year colleges can’t do a better job of prodding students to walk across the stage. I’m just saying that anyone who wishes to evaluate our effectiveness has to understand the inherent differences between community colleges and four-year universities.
Another thing I worry about is that all of the clamor for “accountability” will lead to some sort of nationalized curriculum. Some might think that would be a good thing, but I disagree. A distinguishing feature of the community college is that it exists to serve the specific needs of its community. And because community needs vary widely, the way colleges serve their communities is bound to differ.
At the recent American Association of Community Colleges convention, I met a colleague from the United Kingdom’s “further education” sector who was lamenting his country’s nationalized curriculum and course-approval process. Further-education institutions (as opposed to “higher education” institutions) primarily offer vocational training, and, thus, are roughly analogous to (but not exactly like) our community colleges.
“The problem,” he said, “is that you might have a college located in an area where there’s a large plant that builds helicopters, and so there’s a need for workers with those specific skills. But the national aeronautical curriculum might only address airplane-building. It might take years to get the curriculum changed to meet that local need.”
Years to get the curriculum changed. Imagine that.
Finally, I worry that so much of the attention paid to community colleges has focused on “workforce development” — to the exclusion, I fear, of the liberal arts. Yet more than half of community-college students nationwide come to us with the intention of transferring to a four-year institution, which means that teaching the core curriculum — essentially, the liberal arts — is one of our primary missions.
For that matter, a strong foundation in the liberal arts may be even more important for those students who plan to earn degrees or certificates and then immediately enter the workforce. If they spend only two years (or less) on our campuses, then whatever exposure they get to the humanities and social sciences while there will likely be their only exposure.
In his speech to open the convention, new AACC President Walter G. Bumphus called for his audience to become stronger advocates for community colleges. I second the motion. But as a two-year college humanist, I’d also like to add another challenge: Those of us who teach liberal-arts courses on two-year campuses must become stronger and more vocal advocates for the importance of what we do. We must make it clear that community colleges exist to educate the whole student, not just to crank out human widgets for the economic machine.
Otherwise we may find that, although our beloved colleges have finally taken off, we’ve been left standing in the terminal.
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