I could be projecting here, but it seems to me that 2-year colleges are getting a lot more media attention these days. The coverage brings bad news or good news by the day, depending on how you see the role of higher ed in America.
On the worrying side of things for me is a growing conservative enthusiasm for sub-baccalaureate education. These are voices that tell us that “too many” people are going to college these days…these students are apparently wasting their own time and money, and tax dollars that go to colleges and universities, since they are destined to become blue-collar or service workers unlikely to “make use” of costly bachelor’s degrees.
When I first heard Charles Murray’s claims along these lines a couple of years ago (particularly a talk called “Education Myths,” hosted by the Cato Institute), I blanched but figured he was just going about his usual essentialist and terribly elitist business (after all, in The Bell Curve he and Richard Herrnstein famously made this kind of deeply discriminatory argument many times over).
But other voices are now joining Murray’s. The New York Times offered us “Plan B: Skip College” by Jacques Steinberg yesterday, about educators and analysts who share Murray’s distaste for the expenditure of higher-ed resources on citizens they deem to be lesser lights.
Apparently, we can predict that certain folks won’t get much out of a university education, even before they enroll, and we should stop them in their tracks. Plus, America ostensibly needs workers with the less sophisticated, pared down skill sets that efficiently designed, short, vocational training courses of study might provide…Now that’s a nation aiming high!
Steinberg’s piece did acknowledge that those making such arguments are “touching a third rail of the education system” (a choice of words that unfortunately makes anyone who disagrees with the conservatives sound dangerous and shocking, but still…). The real good news is that innovative educators are today creating community colleges programs motivated precisely by inclusion. InsideHigherEd.com offers us “Taking the Long View,” by David Moltz, describing transfer-oriented technical programs at 2-year colleges.
I am quoted in that piece, but the valuable lessons it holds are provided by faculty and administrators from Greenfield Community College, in Massachusetts. That school aims to maximize, not minimize, students’ prospects in technical occupations, by gearing them almost exclusively towards preparation for transfer to 4-year engineering programs.
Requiring more courses, instructors and facilities, this is a more costly route, indeed, than limiting opportunities of certain demographic groups to trades training or terminal sub-baccalaureate curricula. But only in a very short-term fiscal sense. Simply put, transfer-focused agendas at community colleges promise America a workforce of greater productive potential, not to mention diversity, than we have ever achieved in this country.
Alas, now back to the bad news: Inside Higher Ed reports this morning that community colleges are facing severe cuts in state and local funding, perhaps an unsurprising byproduct of federal reductions in support for education and other public services in recent years. Many of the functions for community colleges that Obama himself has endorsed, for drawing larger numbers of Americans into higher ed and improving workforce preparedness, it is clear, are going to have a harder time than ever sustaining themselves.