Thanks everyone for the advise.
I think community college would be a good fit for the level I would like to teach. Most biology positions I see posted for liberal arts colleges still want to see undergraduate research along with almost as big of a teaching load as a CC. Plus, I really like the idea of offering higher education to anyone who wants it. Frankly, I am getting tired of these over-achieving pre-med students at the high tier private institution where I am working on my post-doc. What I like about teaching is the challenge I get from students that are struggling and the rewards from getting them to understand the material. I did not personally attend a CC, but my mother did after having children, taking her GED, and has gone on to earn a terminal degree from a prestigious university. I will look into teaching a class at a CC if I cannot find a full time position.
There are other liberal arts colleges besides the elite ones everyone hears about, and many of them serve students from disadvantaged backgrounds. For example, my small LAC in the South was an HBCU with a very high percentage of Pell grant recipients, and most of us were first-generation college students. I am biased (of course) but many of us were hard-working and intellectually curious, and 30% of my department went on to graduate study in my field after they completed their BAs there. (And our college was second in the nation for sending African American women to medical school; our biology department was notoriously rigorous, and many would-be pre-med majors were weeded out. I think someone told me that they often started with 100-150 majors freshman year but often only graduated 10-20 4 years later).
There are many small LACs like my school, that serve lower-income students, or serve students who would never get into the Swarthmore/Amherst/Williams type places. They are still places that require faculty research programs that would include undergraduates. Then there are liberal arts colleges that don't
look like liberal arts colleges on paper - maybe they have the name "university" in the title, but are really small colleges for undergraduates that service a lot of low-income, first-generation, or minority students. A lot of regional state universities are like this too - my younger sister has, since high school, attended two small regional publics that are mostly undergraduate focused. Both are primarily undergraduate focused institutions - the second doesn't offer graduate degrees - both host diverse student bodies with lots of disadvantaged students and older learners trying to get a degree on the very cheap tuition ($3,000 a year). Both are about 30 minutes away from Atlanta.
There is a vast world of colleges between top elite tier-one colleges and universities and community colleges, and you don't have to teach only at community colleges to do little to no research and focus on teaching disadvantaged students, if that's what you want.
