The readings Attached introduce you to what many consider the "lesser" missions of the community college, including lifelong learning, continuing education, community education, and community services

Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 303 11 Occupational Education Growth and Change in Workforce Preparation A group of prominent citizens called together in 1964 by the American Association of Junior Colleges (AAJC) to serve as a National Advisory Committee on the Junior College concluded that “the two-year college offers unparalleled promise for expanding educational opportunity through the provision of comprehensive programs embracing job training as well as traditional liberal arts and general education” (American Association of Junior Colleges, 1964, p. 14). The committee recommended that “immediate steps be taken to reinforce occupational education efforts” (p. 1), a statement similar to those emanating from many other commis- sions and advisory groups, including the AAJC’s own Commission on Terminal Education a quarter-century earlier. Its words were notable only because they came at a time when the ﬂoodgates had just opened and a tide of occupational education programs was beginning to inundate the two-year colleges.

The year 1963 marked the passage of the federal Vocational Education Act, which broadened the criteria for federal aid to the schools. Along with the new criteria, Congress appropriated funds generously — $43 million in 1968, $707 million in 1972, and $981 million in 1974 — and these funds were augmented with additional monies for vocational programs for the disadvantaged and for students with disabilities. On this surge of funding, occupational education swept into the colleges in a fashion dreamed of and pleaded for but never previously realized by its advocates. 303Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 304 304 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE This chapter considers various aspects of occupational educa- tion, including the growth, successes, and limitations of courses and programs designed to lead to initial job entry with no fur- ther schooling or to modify the skills of people who have already been employed. Also covered are the broader implications of occupational education: Is it a deterrent to baccalaureate seekers?

How important is it in mitigating unemployment? How much cooperation with business and industry is desirable? Early Development One of the criteria for professionalization is the number of years of schooling that a group requires before allowing neophytes to enter their rank. A major impetus to the expansion of higher education early in the century was the drive toward professional status made by numerous occupational groups. And as these professions developed, a set of auxiliary or support occupations, sometimes called semipro- fessional, developed around them. Professional training moved into the university, but the training of the auxiliaries remained outside.

The community colleges grew in part because some of their earlier proponents recognized the coming need for semiprofessionals and despaired of the universities’ adjusting rapidly enough to provide this less-than-baccalaureate education.

Calls for vocational education in the two-year colleges had been made from their earliest days. In 1900, William Rainey Harper, president of the University of Chicago, suggested that “many students who might not have the courage to enter upon a course of four years’ study would be willing to do the two years of work before entering business or the professional school” (cited by Brick, 1965, p. 18). The founders of the junior colleges in California postulated that one purpose of their institutions was to provide terminal programs in agriculture, technical studies, manual training, and the domestic arts. Alexis Lange (1927) indicated that the junior colleges would train the technicians occupying the middle groundCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 305 Occupational Education 305 between manual laborers and professional people, and Koos (1924) described and applauded the occupational curricula in the junior colleges of the early 1920s.

Arguments on behalf of vocational education were raised at the earliest gatherings of the AAJC. At its organizational meeting in 1920 and at nearly every meeting throughout the 1920s and 1930s, occupational education was on the agenda. Brick traced these dis- cussions and noted that “the AAJC was aware that it had to take a leadership role in directing the movement for terminal educa- tion” (1965, p. 120). He quoted C. C. Colvert, president of the association, who, in a 1941 address, had admonished junior college educators for not encouraging the national government to fund occupational education for people of junior college age: “Had not we of the junior college been so busy trying to offer courses which would get our graduates into the senior colleges instead of working and offering appropriate and practical courses — terminal courses — for the vast majority of junior college students, we might have thought to ask for, and as a result of having asked, received the privilege of training these young people” (cited by Brick, 1965, p. 121).

The thesis of Brint and Karabel’s bookThe Diverted Dream (1989) is that the AAJC was the prime force in effecting a change in community college emphasis from prebaccalaureate to terminal-occupational education. The extent to which local school boards and college leaders were attentive to the national association is debatable, but there is no doubt that AAJC had been diligent. In 1939, it created the Commission on Junior College Terminal Education, which proceeded to study terminal (primarily vocational) education, hold workshops and conferences on its behalf, and issue three books summarizing junior college efforts in its area of interest. Much had been done, but as the commission noted, more remained to do: “At the present time probably about one-third of all the curricular offerings in the junior colleges of the country are in the nonacademic or terminal ﬁelds. Doubtless this situation is far short of the ideal, but it shows a steady andCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 306 306 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE healthy growth in the right direction” (Eells, 1941a, pp. 22–23).

Eells (1941a) in particular deplored the fact that 66 percent of the students were enrolled in programs designed primarily to prepare them for what 25 percent would do: transfer to the upper division.

In 1940, terminal programs were offered in about 70 percent of the colleges. The most popular were business and secretarial studies, music, teaching, general courses, and home economics. Over one- third of the terminal students were in business studies; enrollments in agriculture and home economics were quite low. Table 11.1 presents data on the numbers of colleges and the percentage of their offerings that were terminal.

Deﬁnitions The terminology of occupational education has never been exact:

the wordsterminal, vocational, technical, semiprofessional, occu- pational,andcareerhave all been used interchangeably or in combination. To the commission and the colleges of 1940,terminal meant all studies not applicable to the baccalaureate, but programs designed to lead to employment dominated the category. Earlier, vocationalhad generally been used for curricula preparing people for work in agriculture, the trades, and sales.Semiprofessionaltypically referred to engineering technicians, general assistants, laboratory technicians, and other people in manufacturing, business, and service occupations.Technicalimplied preparation for work in sci- entiﬁc and industrial ﬁelds.Occupationalseemed to encompass the greatest number of programs and is used most often for all curricula leading to employment.Careereducation was coined in the 1950s to connote lower-school efforts at orienting young people toward the workplace; this terms seems now mostly used as a hybrid, as in Career-Technical Education (CTE). Currently, terminal is no longer in use, but all the other terms are.Occupationalis the term most often used by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and other governmental agencies.Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 307 Table 11.1. Percentage of Total Curricular Offerings Classiﬁed as Terminal or Occupational in Junior Colleges, 1917–1937 All Junior Colleges Public Junior Colleges Private Junior Colleges Investigator Number of Percentage Number of Percentage Number of Percentage (Year) Colleges of Offerings Colleges of Offerings Colleges of Offerings Terminal Terminal Terminal McDowell (1917) 47 14 9 18 28 9 Koos (1921) 58 29 23 31 35 25 Hollingsworth- 279 32 129 33 150 29 Eells (1930) Colvert (1937) – – 195 35 – – Source: Eells, 1941a, p. 22.Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 308 308 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE Although the collegiate transfer function was dominant in com- munity colleges until the late 1960s, the structure for occupational education had been present from the start. The community college authorization acts in most states had tended to recognize both. The California District Law of 1921 allowed junior colleges to provide college preparatory instruction; training for agricultural, industrial, commercial, homemaking, and other vocations; and civic and lib- eral education. The comparable 1937 Colorado act deﬁned a junior college as an institution providing studies beyond the twelfth grade along with vocational education. Mississippi required that the junior college curriculum include agriculture, home economics, commerce, and mechanical arts. By 1940, nearly half of the states’ junior college laws speciﬁcally set forth the occupational func- tions along with the collegiate studies. The national and regional accrediting associations of the time also wrote that provision into their rules.

Enrollments in occupational programs did not reach parity with those in collegiate studies, however; well into the 1950s, they accounted for only one-fourth or less of the whole. In 1929, 20 percent of the students in California and 23 percent in Texas were in terminal programs (Eells, 1941a, p. 24), and not all of those were in occupational studies; the ﬁgures include high school postgraduate courses forcivic responsibility. Eells reported 35 percent in terminal curricula in 1938, but when nonvocational terminal curricula were excluded the percentage dropped to less than 25, a ﬁgure that held constant until 1960. Although 75 percent of students entering junior college as freshmen did not continue beyond the sophomore year and hence were terminal students by deﬁnition, only about one-third of them were enrolled in terminal curricula. “The difference of these two ﬁgures shows that more than 40 per cent of all junior college students are enrolled in curricula which are not planned primarily to best meet their needs” (Eells, 1941a, p. 59).Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 309 Occupational Education 309 Limitations on Expansion Why did the occupational programs fail to ﬂourish before the 1960s?

First, their terminal nature was emphasized, and that tended to turn potential students away; few wanted to foreclose their option for further studies. For most students, going to college meant striving for the baccalaureate, the “legitimate” degree. That concept of collegiate education had been ﬁrmly established.

Another handicap to the growth of occupational programs was the small size of the colleges. Average enrollment remained below one thousand until 1946. Colleges with low enrollments could not offer many vocational courses; the costs were too high. Eells (1941a) reported a direct relation between size and occupational enrollments. Small colleges (up to 99 students) had 10 percent in terminal curricula; medium colleges (100–499 students), 32 percent; large colleges (500–999), 34 percent; and very large colleges (1,000 and over), 38 percent.

A third reason for limited terminal offerings was the association of many early junior colleges with high schools. In these colleges, administrators favored collegiate courses because they were more attractive to high school students than occupational courses, they entailed no new facilities or equipment, they could be combined with fourth-year high school courses to bolster enrollments, and they would not require the hiring of new teachers.

The prestige factor was important. Most of the new junior colleges were opened in cities and towns where no college had existed before. Citizens and educators alike wanted theirs to be a “real college.” If it could not itself offer the bachelor’s degree, it could at least provide the ﬁrst two years of study leading toward one. In the eyes of the public, a college was not a manual-training shop. Costs were an important factor. Many vocational programs used expensive, special facilities: clinics, machine tools, automo- tive repair shops, welding equipment. By comparison, collegiate studies were cheap. The transfer courses had always been taughtCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 310 310 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE in interchangeable classrooms. The same chairs and chalkboards, and often the same teachers, could be used for English, history, or mathematics.

And last, the secondary schools of the 1920s and 1930s provided education in shop trades, agriculture, secretarial skills, bookkeep- ing, and salesmanship. Occupational education in community colleges could not grow until employers in these ﬁelds began demanding some postsecondary experience and until the health, engineering, and electronic technologies gained prominence.

For all these reasons, and despite the efforts of Eells and his commission and subsequent AAJC activities, college lead- ers did not rally around the calls for terminal studies. In some states — Mississippi, for example, where occupational education was a requisite, and California, where the institutions were large enough to mount comprehensive programs in both occupational and collegiate studies — occupational education did well. But in the smaller institutions in states where the popularizing function, that of promoting higher education, was dominant, sizable occupational programs were not developed until much later.

Growth Occupational education enrollments began growing at a rate greater than liberal arts enrollments in the 1960s and continued to do so for twenty years. This rise is attributable to many causes: the legacy left by early leaders of the junior college movement and the importunities, goading, and sometimes barbs of later leaders; the Vocational Education Act of 1963 and later amendments; the increase in the size of public two-year colleges; the increase in part-time, women, disadvantaged, disabled, and older students; the community colleges’ absorption of adult education programs and postsecondary occupational programs formerly operated by the secondary schools; and the changing shape of the labor market.

The Vocational Education Act was not the ﬁrst to run fed- eral funds to two-year colleges. The 1939 Commission on JuniorCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 311 Occupational Education 311 College Terminal Education had noted that at least sixty-two junior colleges in fourteen states were receiving federal funds that had been appropriated under the 1917 Smith-Hughes Act and the 1937 George-Deen Act. The federal monies were earmarked for institutions where education was less than college grade: “It does not mean that the institution must be of less than college grade — only that the particular work offered, for which federal aid is received, must be of less than college grade” (Eells, 1941a, p.

29). The U.S. Ofﬁce of Education called programs of trade and industrial education less than college grade if college entrance requirements were not prerequisites for admission, the objective was to prepare for employment in industry, the program did not lead to a degree, and the program was not required to conform to conditions governing a regular college course. According to Dougherty (1988), as early as 1937, the AAJC was lobbying for the repeal of the provision restricting support to programs of less than college grade.

The 1963 Vocational Education Act and the amendments of 1968 and 1972 vastly augmented the federal funds available to com- munity colleges. Other federal programs provided additional funds that the community colleges shared: the Comprehensive Training and Employment Administration (1973), Job Training Partnership Act (1982), and Carl D. Perkins Vocational Education Act (1984).

Subsequent years saw Job Opportunities and Basic Skills, Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness, Worksite Literacy, and Cooperative Education — programs that were superseded, modiﬁed, or extended when the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994 and the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 were added to the set. In 1994, the Advanced Technical Education program was passed and the National Science Foundation subsequently funded more than two hundred programs, along with laboratory improvements. In summation, several speciﬁc acts were marked clearly for workforce preparation and occupational studies, whereas most federal funds dedicated to other types of education were run through Pell GrantsCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 312 312 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE and loan programs directed toward individual students. The federal government’s direction was evident.

The states were active as well. In Illinois, where many of the new districts were formed on the promise to the electorate of having more than 50 percent of the programs in career education, 1,871 curricula, or 66 percent of the total, were occupational (Illinois Community College Board, 1976). In Florida, associate degree and certiﬁcate occupational programs exceeded two hundred. The small Hawaii system offered eighty different programs. As detailed in McCabe’s (1997) review, “The states … are better positioned than the federal government to reform workforce development.

Although workforce reform has traditionally centered on federally funded programs, state expenditures for these efforts far exceed federal monies” (p. 9).

Although many individual colleges offered one hundred or more different occupational programs, those that led to the greatest vari- ety of career options were the most popular. Programs in business drew the most students because of the breadth of opportunity they presented. The health professions and the engineering technologies drew large numbers of students because of the expanding base of the professions in those areas and the ever-growing need for support staff. Computer science became popular in the 1980s because of the rapidly expanding applications of computers in all career ﬁelds.

Other programs ebbed and ﬂowed depending on job markets.

Some of the enrollment increases resulted from the upgrad- ing of institutions and the transfer to the community colleges of functions formerly performed by other segments of education:

secondary and adult schools, technical institutes, and area voca- tional schools or centers. This trend was most marked in Florida, where fourteen of the twenty-eight community colleges had a department designated as an area vocational education school, and others had cooperative agreements with school boards that operate area vocational-technical centers; in Iowa, where all the public community colleges were merged with area schools; in Nebraska,Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 313 Occupational Education 313 where the state was divided into technical community college areas; in North Carolina, where the technical institutes were part of the community college system; and in Chicago, where the adult and vocational education programs were transferred from the city schools to the community college system (Lombardi, 1975).

The combination of these forces counteracted to a consider- able degree those forces that caused students and their parents to value the baccalaureate over the occupational programs. In its statewide master plan for 1978 to 1987, the Maryland State Board for Community Colleges reported that the “increasing emphasis on occupational programs reﬂected changing values and attitudes among students and their families as to the level of education required to qualify for desirable employment opportunities. This shift was reﬂected in national projections predicting that through- out the next decade, 80 percent of available jobs would require less than the bachelor’s degree” (1977, p. 34). U.S. Department of Labor data listed as the main areas of job openings in the 1980s retail salesclerks, cashiers, stock handlers, and similar jobs for which a bachelor’s degree is not required;Managers and Administratorswas the only job category in the top ﬁfteen to suggest baccalaureate training (Kuttner, 1983).

Stability The growth in occupational enrollments that began in the second half of the 1960s could not continue indeﬁnitely, and it began leveling off in the 1980s. Although only a minority of community college matriculants complete programs, the ﬁgures on associate degrees awarded provide a measure of the popularity of occupa- tional education. Tables 11.2 and 11.3 show the percentage of career-related degrees and the ﬁelds in which awards were made.

Associate degrees conferred showed liberal arts and sciences, gen- eral studies, and humanities decreasing slightly from 34 percent of total awards in 2000–01 to 33 percent in 2010–11. HealthCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 314 314 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE Table 11.2. Associate Degrees Conferred by Institutions of Higher Education by Type of Curriculum, 1970–71 to 2010–11 Year All Arts and Percentage Occupational Percentage Curricula Sciences or of Total Curricula of Total General Programs 1970–71 253,635 145,473 57 108,162 43 1976–77 409,942 172,631 42 237,311 58 1982–83 456,441 133,917 29 322,524 71 1987–88 435,085 148,466 34 286,619 66 1991–92 504,321 195,238 39 309,083 61 1995–96 555,216 211,822 38 343,394 62 1999–00 564,933 249,975 44 314,958 56 2003–04 665,301 308,064 46 357,237 54 2010–11 942,327 398,091 42 544,236 58 Source: NCES,Digests, 2005, 2012. Table 11.3. Main Fields in Which Associate Degrees Were Conferred, 2010–11 Main Associate Percentage Fields Degrees of Total Liberal arts and sciences, general studies, and humanities306,670 33 Health professions and related sciences 201,831 21 Business 139,986 15 Homeland security, law enforcement, and ﬁreﬁghting44,923 5 Computer and information sciences 37,677 4 Engineering technologies and engineering-related ﬁelds35,521 4 Multi/interdisciplinary studies 23,729 3 Visual and performing arts 21,379 2 Education 20,459 2 Mechanic and repair technology/technicians19,969 2 Source: NCES,Digest, 2012.Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 315 Occupational Education 315 professions and related sciences jumped from 15 to 21 percent, and homeland security, law enforcement, and ﬁreﬁghting increased from 3 to 5 percent of total awards. Business, management, and marketing degrees remained stable at 15 percent of all associate degrees awarded, and degrees in computer and information sciences decreased from 6 to 4 percent. Overall, in 2010–11, occupationally oriented degrees accounted for 58 percent of the awards.

In summation, the national data on degrees awarded yield a ﬁgure of more than 50 percent for the past forty years in areas designed for direct employment. This ratio peaked in the mid-1980s and declined as the proportion of baccalaureate-bound students once again grew to equal those seeking immediate employment.

Contract Training Contract training refers to instruction that is provided for speciﬁc occupational purposes, usually outside the college-credit program.

It falls into three categories: training designed speciﬁcally for the employees of certain companies; training for public agency employees; and training for speciﬁc groups such as unemployed people or people on welfare. Funds may come from the companies or public agencies that beneﬁt or from state or federal funds.

Contract training for businesses is often presented at the com- pany’s ofﬁces or plants, using their equipment. There is no problem if the company pays all expenses, including the instructors’ salaries, on a ﬂat rate or cost per head. But if the programs are offered for college credit and the usual state reimbursement procedures are in effect, they must be open to all applicants, thus potentially compromising the company’s work rules. In many cases, existing courses offered at the college have been modiﬁed to ﬁt a major employer’s requirements, thereby maintaining intact the faculty contracts and preexisting course accreditation. The company may provide new equipment, paying in kind for the special service.

Program development costs may also be charged to the company, but the accounting procedures occasioned by the charge-back can be difﬁcult to effect.Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 316 316 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE Contract training has become a signiﬁcant portion of the com- munity college’s overall educational effort. Surveys conducted by the Commission on Workforce and Community Development (1997) and the Government Accountability Ofﬁce (2004) suggest its magnitude. Practically all community colleges in the nation are involved. The programs designed for speciﬁc companies include job-speciﬁc and computer-related training, management prepara- tion, and workplace literacy. The pervasiveness of contract training is due to colleges’ search for external funds to offset decreasing state and local revenues; to businesses seeking less expensive ways of training and educating their workers; and to states wishing to sub- sidize contract training opportunities to attract new businesses and employment opportunities. And in many states it is big indeed; Colorado has provided $2.7 million in business and industry grants for contract training at community colleges. Similarly, Kentucky provides $6 million annually to a workforce training incentive program administered by the state’s Community and Technical College System. This program covers up to 65 percent of the community colleges’ costs of providing training to a business; the business contributes the remaining dollars (Oleksiw and others, 2007). For some colleges, especially those with large or multi- ple contract training partnerships, this means big business: A 2005 survey of colleges across the nation reported that 32 percent of two- year colleges’ continuing education revenue came from contract training (Pusser and others, 2005).

Labor union leaders also have supported occupational programs — for example, by negotiating tuition aid packages with employers, serving on advisory committees for the programs, and helping to establish cooperative apprenticeship training programs and programs to assist union members in studying for leadership roles. Some union-sponsored activities assist members in studying the liberal arts; others are designed to help working people deal with personal problems or problems with employers.Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 317 Occupational Education 317 Dougherty and Bakia (1999) examined contract training as represented in ﬁve industries — auto manufacturing, apparel making, construction, banking, and auto repair — in twenty community colleges. Programs for skilled workers were found to dominate contract training in the auto manufacturing, auto repair, and construction industries, whereas training for entry-level and semiskilled workers was scarce. Training programs are typically governed by employers and unions, but community colleges have some degree of inﬂuence in curricular, selection, and evaluation-related decision making. The colleges emerged as the training partner of choice for many employers because of their low cost, reliability, and responsiveness to employers’ needs.

How are the colleges affected? As an important beneﬁt, contract training boosts enrollment ﬁgures, and many students who initially take occupationally oriented contract classes later return to enroll in classes in general education as well. Contract training also often provides a substantial source of additional revenue. Nonmonetary revenue from contract training includes new facilities, equipment, training aids, and training for faculty.

The greater visibility and political support that contract training brings, emphasizing the colleges’ role in lowering the rate of unemployment, are also among the advantages.

Contract training is associated with several negative conse- quences as well. It brings expanded business involvement into the colleges’ internal decision-making processes and may create unease among faculty in occupational and contract training programs, since the two often compete for the same students. Although the employ- ers who beneﬁt provide a signiﬁcant portion of the cost of these programs, college funds are often used as a supplement. Because the programs are only tangentially connected with the college- credit curriculum, some faculty groups have complained that they are employing instructors who are not reviewed by the regular faculty and that they are bypassing the traditional channels ofCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 318 318 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE curriculum development, thus weakening the overall college program.

The Broader Implications What are the broader implications of occupational education? How much college effort should be devoted to providing trained workers for the nation’s industries? None of it, say the academic purists and many civic leaders; all of it, say many community college leaders and legislators. A lengthy list of commentators and educational philosophers would argue that the preparation of people speciﬁcally to work in certain industries is not the school’s purpose because it should have broader social aims and because the industries can do the particular job training much more efﬁciently. And those who take this approach are not necessarily those who plead for a return to an era when the purpose of higher education was to provide gentlemen with a distinctive set of manners.

The pattern of workforce training in other industrialized nations offers a few insights. Some countries depend on postsecondary institutions to carry the main burden, some on schools in the com- pulsory sector, and others on adult education that is provided by other than formal educational institutions. For example, occupa- tional education in Canada is centered in the community colleges; in France, it is in the high schools and apprentice training centers; Germany has a dual system, with students pursuing occupational education through the upper secondary schools and in on-the-job training; Italy depends on technical schools and non–school-based vocational programs; Japan has special training schools at the post- compulsory level; and the United Kingdom provides occupational training through institutions of further education and apprentice- ships. The greatest proportions of students in formal, postsecondary occupational programs are in Japan, Germany, France, and Italy.

Is occupational education primarily an individual or a social beneﬁt? Individuals gain skills that make them more employableCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 319 Occupational Education 319 and at higher rates of pay; society gains skilled workers for the nation’s businesses and technologies. Solmon (1976) argued that community colleges can and should work closely with employers to facilitate students’ passage through to the labor market. To the extent that they do, everyone beneﬁts: students, their families, the colleges, business, and the general public. And he contended that the costs must be maintained by all. Although employers must provide expensive apprenticeships, they can beneﬁt by using cooperative programs to identify students whom they would like to retain; thestackable certiﬁcatesdescribed later in this chapter afford an example. The colleges lose some control over their students when business ﬁrms decide whom to involve in cooperative programs and when those programs become more susceptible to external evaluation. However, they gain by doing a better, more direct job for students and by keeping them enrolled longer.

Other writers in education, and certainly the majority of those who comment on the role of the community colleges, suggest that education is an essential expenditure for economic growth, a common good, and is not merely a nonproductive sector of the economy, a form of consumption. To the extent that the schools are viewed as investments of this type, educators can make a more effective claim on national budgets. To justify this claim, the schools must be brought in line with the goals of society; if they are to foster economic growth, they must provide trained workers, and the more they provide trained workers, the more they will be looked on to ﬁt those trainees to available jobs. Hence, they can be criticized to the extent that their graduates do not obtain jobs or are not able to function effectively in the jobs they get. And the termovereducatedcan be used to describe those who are prepared for nonexistent jobs or have jobs to which they do not apply the type of education they received.

The idea of occupational education reﬂects a belief that separate curricular tracks are the best way to accommodate the varying edu- cational objectives and characteristics of the students. However,Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 320 320 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE Palmer (1987a) suggested that the organization of career education as a separate curricular track stems from several viewpoints other than student intentions. The ﬁrst is a political agenda held by state legislators and college planners. According to this agenda, occupational programs are supposed to serve students whose pri- mary educational objective is to gain skills allowing them to enter the workforce. Second is the terminal education agenda, which sees vocational studies as a way of serving academically less able students, who are not likely to obtain the baccalaureate. Third is the economic agenda, which holds that occupational studies improve the economy through labor force development and thus serve society. These three agendas are embedded in the history of the community college. A fourth, the hidden agenda, has been postulated by other commentators who charge that occupational programs channel low-income and minority students away from academic studies and the upward social mobility attendant thereon.

Palmer’s study demonstrates that the career programs in com- munity colleges may have been furthered by leaders who subscribe to those beliefs but that the agendas do not accurately reﬂect what the curricula do. Occupational studies actually serve a much broader diversity of students, with a wide range of abilities and goals. The programs are not exclusively related to the workforce or the economy; they also serve individuals wishing to obtain skills for their personal interest, students who take occupational classes “for their intrinsic value and not necessarily for their vocational import” (1987a, p. 291). Palmer based his assertions on the 1986 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching-sponsored Center for the Study of Community Colleges survey of students enrolled in all types of classes in community colleges nationwide.

In that survey, 16 percent of the students in occupational classes indicated that they were not enrolled in an occupational program, and 26 percent of the students who were in occupational classes or programs said that they intended to transfer. He rejected the charge that community college students are counseled into careerCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 321 Occupational Education 321 programs on the basis of their academic ability and hence their socioeconomic status. His analysis shows that the enrollment pat- terns in high-status and low-status occupational classes deviate considerably from what would be expected if curricular tracking were efﬁciently carried out. Low-income students enroll in high- status and low-status program areas in almost equal numbers, and highly self-conﬁdent students equally tend to enroll in low-status program areas, just as students with below-average self-ratings of ability are as likely to enroll in high-status programs. “Many stu- dents clearly go their own way, regardless of whether counselors try to track students by ability” (p. 305).

Thus, an oversimpliﬁed view of occupational education as a track leading away from the baccalaureate gives ground to several errors. It neglects the extent to which occupational classes serve avocational or community service functions. It contributes to the confusion of curricular content with student intentions. It suggests that occupational education serves an ever-changing middle-level portion of the job market, which supposedly requires some college study but not the baccalaureate and thus ignores the high transfer rates exhibited by career program graduates. And it perpetuates the myth that vocational studies are the exclusive domain of low-ability or low-income students.

Whether or not occupational education is useful or proper, it has certainly captured the community colleges and their support- ers. The 1960s to 1980s enrollment surge and ﬁnancial support from business, industry, and government have given occupational educators a buoyancy that shows up in new courses, programs, and teaching strategies. They have a large reservoir of funds, mostly public but some private and foundation, to undertake studies on every aspect of occupational education: preparing model courses and programs; conducting follow-up studies of graduates; assess- ing employment trends; establishing guidelines for choosing new courses and curricula; and developing criteria for weeding out the obsolescent and weak courses and programs or for upgrading othersCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 322 322 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE to conform to new job speciﬁcations. Help is available from many sources. The U.S. Department of Labor has been involved through its Employment and Training Division, which has deﬁned compe- tencies needed in the workplace. Its “Building Block Model” is a reﬁnement of the Developing a Curriculum occupational analysis methodology, a way of determining tasks that persons need for certain occupational areas.

The Building Block Model displays parallel descriptions for Management Competencies and Occupation Speciﬁc Require- ments. These are broken out as Industry-Sector Technical and Workplace Competencies and further deﬁned by industry, such as Aerospace, Automation, and Biosciences, for a total of twenty-two.

They include goals in each area and level, such as Professional- ism, Maintaining a Socially Acceptable Demeanor, Demonstrate a Positive Attitude toward Work, Follow Rules and Standards of Dress, and Refrain from Substance Abuse. The various levels and speciﬁcations within, coded to job types, are thestarting placefor deﬁning speciﬁc measureable objectives. Agreement on those by an institution’s staff (faculty, tutors, test makers, and readers) is necessary to implement the process. Then the objectives have to be validated by employers and disciplinary groups. Getting everyone to agree on just what constitutes a Socially Acceptable Demeanor or a Positive Attitude can be a daunting task. And these are at the base of the pyramid; the higher-order expectations such as Meet Customer Needs and Provide Ongoing Support (in the Retail hierarchy) are capable of widely variant interpretations.

A more feasibly introduced method has also become available.

Recently, the Manufacturing Institute created a National Associa- tion of Manufacturers–endorsed manufacturing skills certiﬁcation system to directly address the deﬁcits in manufacturing education, which are supposedly limiting the pool of qualiﬁed candidates for the high-quality manufacturing jobs now available. This system is based on nationally portable, industry recognized,stackablecre- dentials. They begin with a certiﬁcate for Career Readiness, whichCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 323 Occupational Education 323 concentrates on soft skills such as dress, demeanor, and reliability.

The next levels are called Production Technician and Manufac- turing Engineer. The ﬁelds include precision manufacturing, metal fabrication, and supply chain management. The ﬁrst-level certiﬁ- cate includes sixteen credits that can be earned in four months, and many companies have agreed to employ students as paid interns as soon as they complete it. They may progress from there in their manufacturing careers, or they can continue toward more advanced certiﬁcates. The credits are not applicable toward associate degrees, but several colleges have added the program to their occupational offerings.

The drive for occupational training gained additional momen- tum with the increase in unemployment triggered by the recession that began in 2008. On July 14, 2009, President Barack Obama announced the American Graduation Initiative. His premise was that America’s economic strength depends on the education and skill of its workers. Jobs requiring an associate degree will grow twice as fast as those requiring no college experience. There- fore, every American should commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training, ideally leading to an addi- tional ﬁve million community college graduates by 2020. Although eventually scaled back, the American Graduation Initiative was to provide $1 billion per year for ten years to fund innovative strategies to promote college completion, to modernize community college facilities, to expand online instruction, and to explore ways to award credit for academic achievement rather than class hours.

Jamie Merisotis of the Lumina Foundation (“Lumina Renews Commitment to Achieving the Dream,” 2007) said that in each recession since 1980 an increasing share of total unemployment has been caused by structural job loss, not by short-term cyclical layoffs.

Thus, education and training are essential in putting people back to work. He argued that for individual citizens to prosper, and for the nation to compete in the global marketplace, Americans will have to signiﬁcantly increase their level of postsecondary attainment.Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 324 324 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE The economic recovery is lagging because too few workers possess the skills and knowledge that can be developed only in high-quality postsecondary programs. His remarks summarize what innumerable commentators have reported in books, articles, and the popular press: Higher education bears major responsibility for the welfare of the American economy.

However, this conventional belief has been challenged by several analysts. Clark Kerr, one of the leading educators of the twentieth century, agreed that “higher education … has always served the labor market in one way or another … preparing lawyers, judges, administrators, and accountants, in a curriculum that evolved to include medicine, engineering, and teaching. But employers apparently have more responsibility than is generally realized … A nation may advance rapidly in productivity without a signiﬁcant rise in schooling attainment of the workforce” (1994, p. 54). Kerr referred to the apprenticeship systems in northern Europe and Japan as examples. Furthermore, he pointed out that “the United States is sending work abroad … to be done by less educated workers than those displaced … and, thus, not because of failures in the American school system” (pp. 92–93).

Formal schooling, he argued, “has been subject to more blame for the slowdown in productivity than can be justiﬁed; to higher expectations for near-term future contributions to an improved economy than can be met” (p. 95). To contend that problems of international competitiveness can be solved by education reform is a crass effort to direct attention away from those truly responsible and to lay the burden instead on the schools. “Management has probably more total responsibility for changes in productivity than does any other segment of American society” by, among other ills, “not investing sufﬁciently in on-the-job training” (p. 95).

John Lombardi, a prominent community college leader, also questioned whether occupational education provided by the col- leges was efﬁcient or well guided: “Are there really so many jobsCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 325 Occupational Education 325 awaiting our graduates as we are told? If so, are none of the unem- ployed qualiﬁed to take the jobs? Some skills are more readily learned in schools than on-the-job, especially those that require formal education for licensure. But these jobs are not in the majority … Would the millions of unemployed be hired if they learned a skill? Unemployment is only minimally related to the pool of people who know how to work” (1992, pp. 81–82).

Since a major proportion of manufacturing jobs have been exported, increasing numbers of remaining jobs require generic skills and traits: basic computational and linguistic literacy; desire to work; cooperative demeanor; and tendency toward promptness and regular appearance. This so-called skills gap is in reality another term for work ethic. The development of values and attitudes is probably of more use to employers than speciﬁc knowledge.

There are no consistent data on the actual number of certiﬁcates or associate degrees needed for individual advancement, global competition, workforce development, unemployment reduction, and economic enhancement. The degree may not be required for or even relevant to a job. But applicants with a college background are usually more likely to become employed; if most job seekers have credentials, then people without them are at a distinct disadvantage.

In October 2012, 12.3 million Americans were seeking employ- ment. Roughly 5 million of them had been unemployed for at least six months. A total of 4 percent of all bachelor’s degree holders were unemployed, as well as 7 percent of those with an associate degree or some college experience (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2012a). Had all of them suddenly become unskilled and forgotten how to work? Or had their jobs been downsized, automated, or exported out from under them? Are paralegal, accountant, and technical service provider jobs that have been sent overseas ever coming back? How are American workers to compete for them?

Or does globalization connote a race to the cheapest wages? Fur- thermore, as residential construction revived in 2013 and hugeCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 326 326 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE numbers of the previously unemployed resumed working in the building trades and in real estate, furniture, home appliance, and insurance sales, did their employers insist they have college degrees?

Kerr’s (1994) comments on the absurdity of blaming the schools for the comparative decline of the American economy included the compelling statement: “Seldom in the course of policy making in the United States have such ﬁrm conclusions rested on so little convincing evidence” (p. 88). As if to conﬁrm Kerr’s contentions, data collected in summer 2012 showed that, whereas most jobs that had been lost during the Great Recession paid mid-level wages, the majority of jobs created in the recovery paid much less.

Lower-paying jobs, with median hourly wages from $7.69 to $13.83, accounted for 21 percent of the job losses during the recession but 58 percent of the job growth from late 2009 through early 2012.

The mid-wage occupations with hourly pay up to $21.13 accounted for only 22 percent of the new jobs, while they had made up 60 percent of the job losses (Puzzanghera, 2012). And the list of jobs being sent overseas keeps growing. Data processing, accounting, medical record-keeping, and the reading of x-rays had been leaving the country for many years, but the jobs that had been considered safe from export, such as nursing functions and the processing of medical claims, are now joining the group (Lee, 2012).

In 2012, U.S. factories employed less than one-tenth of the workforce, down from one-third in the 1950s. But the trend toward sending manufacturing jobs overseas has shown signs of reversal recently, not in the areas of mass-market clothing, plastic utensils, and other products that can be assembled by minimally skilled workers but in higher-order manufacturing. The attractiveness of low-cost labor that had led managers to build or contract for factories in other countries has faded for several reasons: shipping products great distances is more expensive; costs for running energy- intensive factories in the United States have declined; salaries in some low-wage countries are many times higher than they were;Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 327 Occupational Education 327 and “U.S. labor productivity has continued its long march upward” (Fishman, 2012, p. 48).

But overall, 3.5 million job openings were being reported to the U.S. Department of Labor in fall 2012, and almost half of U.S. employers were saying they could not ﬁnd qualiﬁed workers.

These openings included areas from skilled machinists to retail establishments where higher levels of soft skills are needed. The required skills include analytical and critical thinking, creativity, presentation, and punctuality, as well as the absence of improper dress, poor etiquette (e.g., job applicants answering their cell phones in the middle of an interview), failing drug tests, and not admitting to criminal records. Whether community colleges are the most effective institutions to teach these skills is debatable; whether they will have to if the United States is to produce the number of associate, bachelor’s and graduate degree holders necessary to ﬁll projected job openings is not. To wit: Whereas workers with high school diplomas lost a net of 250,000 jobs between 2010 and 2012, those with associate degrees gained 1.4 million (this despite the previously noted drop in hourly wages). And the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates 14 million new job openings between 2012 and 2022 for holders of associate degrees.

These data reﬂect variant deﬁnitions. As related by Anthony Carnevale, an economist at Georgetown University (personal com- munication, December 5, 2012), in 2010 the Current Population Survey (CPS) classiﬁed more than 60 percent of all jobs in the U.S. economy as postsecondary, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports half as many: 31 percent. This wide discrepancy is because the CPS measures the education levels of people who are now working in various jobs, whereas the BLS statistics reﬂect the entry-level education requirements for those jobs (a classiﬁcation that seems to change from year to year). Thus, the job belong- ing to a college-educated retail salesperson would be classiﬁed as postsecondary by the CPS but not by the BLS.Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 328 328 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE Which statistic is better suited to projecting the need for college- educated workers? It is hard to say; a retail sales job might not require a college degree, but the resumes of college-educated applicants will almost certainly be moved to the top of the stack. Given this, where do community colleges ﬁt in? Georgetown University statistics relying on the CPS show that in 2010 28 percent of prime-age workers had some college experience, a postsecondary vocational certiﬁcate, or an associate degree, but BLS ﬁgures display that only 11 percent of jobs required that level of education. Merging Academic and Occupational Studies The separation between the career and collegiate functions is more organizationally than conceptually inspired. Consider the follow- ing statement: Students will learn to plan more efﬁcient use of time, analyze written communications, understand interpersonal relations, respond appropriately to verbal directives, evolve alter- native solutions, maintain involvement with tasks until resolution, communicate effectively verbally. Are those goals related to occu- pational or to baccalaureate studies? They are likely to appear in course syllabi from either area.

For decades, pleas have been made for reducing the separation between vocational and liberal studies. Solmon (1977) surveyed graduates of all types of programs several years out of college and found them wishing they had been better prepared in English, psychology, and ways of understanding interpersonal relations.

Employers, too, frequently expect higher levels of competency, especially in writing, mathematics, thinking, computer literacy, leadership abilities, and interpersonal or team relationships. Salz- man, Moss, and Tilly reviewed changes in the workplace and found “increased demands for soft skills and basic literacy for the lowest-level jobs” (1998, p. 3), along with entry- to middle-level jobs that are “increasingly based on formal education and training that is not possible to obtain through internal training and learningCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 329 Occupational Education 329 on the job” (p. 18). Thus, hiring criteria are no longer based on “a person’s ability to perform a particular function … but rather on an assessment of his or her ability to master a host of skills and responsibilities” (p. 18). They concluded: “Ironically, one of the reasons community colleges seem like an ideal candidate for deepening and broadening the skill base of the workforce is their broader focus on skill which in turn is due to their dual educational mission modeled at least in part on four-year colleges” (p. 28).

Harris and Grede (1977) predicted a breakdown in the rigid dichotomy between liberal arts and occupational curricula or between transfer and nontransfer curricula in community colleges.

This prediction has not come to pass, not least because of the rigid- ity of the separate funding channels through which support ﬂows into the occupational and the collegiate courses. The crossovers that do exist tend to be at the microlevel. A few courses in some colleges have been designed so that they incorporate elements of both the liberal arts and career studies; Grubb and Kraskouskas (1992) and Bailey (2000) mentioned several examples. But in the main, the proponents of the liberal arts have depended on accredi- tation and state requirements to sustain their offerings in programs leading to associate degrees in career ﬁelds.

Occupational training involves a higher risk for the student than does liberal arts education. The costs in tuition and forgone earnings may be the same for both, but occupational training is almost entirely wasted if there is no job at the end. The liberal arts at least hold the person’s options open, a perception certainly accounting for some of the continuing popularity of liberal arts among students. Since it seems impossible to predict with much accuracy the types of jobs that will be available by the time an entering student leaves school, the problem can be accommodated in two ways. First, the educational system can be made open enough that people may return successively for retraining throughout life.

Second, the initial training can be made sufﬁciently broad that the skills learned are applicable to a variety of situations. The argumentCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 330 330 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE can be made that all contemporary education is vocational, since it is designed for people who will one day work. In the long run, occupational education usually fails if it is focused narrowly on job skills. Knowing how to produce something is quite different from all of the other requirements for sustaining employment. Functional literacy is basic, along with interpersonal relations and knowledge of how to ﬁnd a job in the ﬁrst place. Furthermore, the concept of matching a trained worker to an available job is not as prominent now in the overall picture of employment as it was previously, predominantly because more production is occurring in structures that have less distinct boundaries, in other words networks or virtual corporations. Entrepreneurship, too, is the place where many new jobs are created. It involves not only skills but also the ability to ﬁnd capital, understanding of the marketplace, and knowledge of all that it takes to organize a business. A growing proportion of occupational training has been directed toward helping people create their own jobs through small-business development. (This topic is further explored in Chapter 12 on community education.) A major change in recent years has been that occupational programs in community colleges increasingly became feeders to senior institutions, which were undergoing their own form of voca- tionalization. Students were ﬁnding that many of the credits they earned in their two-year occupational programs were acceptable for transfer. Thus, the categoriesvocationalandtransferbecame inadequate to describe the realities of the community colleges, andterminalcertainly became obsolete. Sizable percentages of the transfer students sought leisure-time pursuits; sizable percentages of the occupational students desired certiﬁcation for transfer. A view of the community colleges as terminal institutions and of the universities as institutions for students interested in the liberal arts is woefully inaccurate.

As though it anticipated later developments, the AAJC’s 1964 National Advisory Committee concluded: “Time must be pro- vided, even in a two-year curriculum, for at least basic courses inCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 331 Occupational Education 331 languages, arts, and social sciences. The technicians of the future must be inoculated against the malady of overspecialization … They must not be forced to concentrate so narrowly on technology that they cannot be useful citizens or cannot accommodate changes in their own specialties” (p. 14). Nearly a quarter-century later, an AACJC-sponsored group reiterated a concern for combining career and general education: “Many students come to the community college with narrow backgrounds, and, for them, career education may mean only gaining skills for a speciﬁc job … Through lack of attention to general education, community colleges often exacer- bate this tendency toward narrowness … We recommend that the core curriculum be integrated into technical and career programs” (AACJC, 1988, pp. 17–19).

Issues Certiﬁcates that lead to job entry have become prominent, but they often do not carry credit toward associate degrees or transfer.

How does this trend affect the overall occupational program in community colleges?

Can occupational education be effectively merged with the collegiate function? Few prior attempts to integrate aesthetic appre- ciation, rationality, ethics, and other elements of higher learning with programs training people for particular jobs have met with success. Can the staff itself do it? Does the community college leadership want it? Will an increase in applied associate degrees designed to transfer to applied baccalaureate programs move the needle?

The lines between occupational and collegiate education have become blurred since as many students began transferring to uni- versities from community college career programs as from the so-called transfer programs. Questions of the conceptual differences between occupational and liberal studies have often been raised, but the answers have yielded little to inﬂuence program designCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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Cohen c11.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 3:48pm Page 332 332 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE in the community colleges. What type of staff training, program reorganization, or external incentives might be provided to encour- age faculties and administrators to reexamine both programs in the light of the practicalities of their own institutions?

Programs designed to prepare students to work in particular industries should be supported, at least in part, by those industries; many examples of this type of support have been set in place. But how can industry be assigned its proportionate share of all training costs? What channels can be opened to merge public and private funds so that an equitable share is borne by each?

The full effects of occupational education as a primary function have yet to be discerned. The public’s view of community colleges as agents of upward mobility for individuals seems to be shifting toward a view of the institutions as occupational training centers.

This narrowing of the colleges’ comprehensiveness could lead to a shift in the pattern of support.Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

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