For this question, choose two criticisms of the comprehensive community college presented in Chapter 13 of The American Community College (linked in below). Write a letter to the editor of no more tha

Cohen c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 359 13 Scholarship and Commentary Perspectives of the Community College T he amount spent for research in social service institutions is low compared with that in the commercial sector. Research in education commands a minuscule proportion of education expen- ditures and has even decreased as a proportion of overall budgets since the early 1970s. A major reason for this meager support is that, until recently, few legislators, members of the lay public, or education practitioners have thought that research about education was useful or that it had anything to contribute to productivity or efﬁciency. The wordscommunity college, junior college,andtwo-year collegedo not appear in the index to Feldman and Newcomb’s (1969) two-volume compendium of research,The Impact of College on Students, and only a few dozen studies that include community college student data are among the more than three thousand reports cited by Pascarella and Terenzini in their successor vol- umes,How College Affects Students(1991, 2005). Thus, according to those who study the effects of postsecondary schooling, nearly 40 percent of America’s college students, the proportion enrolled in the community colleges, were for many years not even important enough to tabulate.

However, this lack has become less pronounced in recent years as more studies of community college functioning are being undertaken. As abbreviated as this research effort is compared with the magnitude of the enterprise, it is worthy of note. The research is conducted by professors and graduate students; national organizations, sponsored primarily by foundations and membership 359Cohen, 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 360 360 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE fees; federal and state agencies; and researchers within the colleges.

It takes several forms: historical and sociological analysis; state and national data compilation; data that set norms for interinstitutional comparisons; and information such as program review, student satisfaction and behavior, and student placement validation that may be used for intramural planning. Much of it is driven by external mandates, especially the calls for institutional accountability, and it has yielded a substantive increase in assessment and outcomes studies. More research on community colleges has appeared in the past twenty years than in the previous ﬁfty.

This chapter reviews the groups that conduct these studies and the types of research they report. It also examines commentary, cri- tiques, and proposed modiﬁcations. The contemporary research on community colleges is inchoate. The institutions are assailed with demands for data showing their effectiveness. College leaders know that they live in a world of images and applaud reports displaying any type of institutional success while ignoring or attacking those showing negative outcomes. State ofﬁcials demand to know how policy and funding relate to accountability. The researchers them- selves waver between attempts to present scientiﬁcally veriﬁable evidence and that which a lay audience can understand, even while relying on mushy deﬁnitions and data. All this is to be expected because the studies do not stem from a tradition of valid research designed for knowledgeable audiences. They are dominated by the need for positive public relations, an imperative guiding many of the studies reported in this chapter.

Sources of Research Except for the college-based institutional research ofﬁcers, nearly all those who study community colleges are afﬁliated with uni- versities or federal or state agencies. An occasional report written by a private, nonproﬁt corporation or an ad hoc commission may appear, but the extramural studies are usually conducted byCohen, 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 361 Scholarship and Commentary 361 university professors and students in the social sciences, most of them in schools of education. Just over one hundred university professors are exclusively concerned with teaching and writing about community colleges. Perhaps one hundred more have some interest in the institutions and occasionally conduct a study or prepare a commentary. However, these researchers are responsible for the lion’s share of the analyses that appear as published doc- uments. Graduate students working under their direction collect original data or write theses based on existing data sets; many of the reports written by community college practitioners about their own institutions are prepared while they are concurrently enrolled in graduate programs. A limitation to these studies is that to legitimize education as a profession and education departments as worthy of status in graduate schools the professors must obey the university imperative to emulate scientiﬁc methods. Accordingly, their studies and those of their students typically display a strained connection to theory and often employ high-powered statistical analyses of soft data.

The topics studied vary considerably. Commentary on the place of the colleges in the American societal context has been a long-term favorite, joined recently with their role in glob- alization. Analyses of outcomes, especially graduation, transfer, and job-getting rates, are popular, as are studies of how various groups — low-income and minority students, for example, or those ﬁrst in their families to attend college — fare. Less sweeping themes have been the effects of part-time faculty, programmatic successes, and alternative instructional approaches.

Much of the expansion in research has resulted from state legislatures demanding justiﬁcation for their appropriations. The magnitude of state agency efforts varies, depending on state gov- ernance structures. Some states (for example, Florida, Illinois, and Washington) have sophisticated research ofﬁces as arms of their governing or coordinating boards. Where the community colleges are part of the state university system (as in Hawaii and New York),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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 362 362 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE reliable data collection and analysis may result. In other states, such as Colorado, Oklahoma, and North Carolina, the university and the community college systems cooperate closely in compiling and reporting data about both sectors. And across the nation, the state agency effort has grown. Ewell and Boeke described the unit record systems tracking student progress in public institutions in forty states, which have become more sophisticated and reliable. They conclude, however, that “little progress has been made in sharing across state lines” (2007, p. 7) and see that as the next frontier.

The U.S. Department of Education compiles most of the data on community colleges at the national level. Its National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) sponsors the Integrated Postsec- ondary Education Data System (IPEDS), the most comprehensive compilation; NCES reports annually on the number of community colleges, institutional services provided, revenues, costs, expen- ditures, enrollment, degrees conferred, and staff composition and salaries. In recent years, it has expanded its efforts far beyond IPEDS to assess school dropout, academic progress, literacy development, national goals, and a host of interrelated issues; it publishes separate reports of those data.

Other agencies, especially the American Association of Com- munity Colleges, extract the community college-related data from the NCES reports and publish their own compendia. The Education Department also funded the ERIC Clearinghouse for Community Colleges, which was not a research agency but a collector, indexer, abstractor, and disseminator of research reports that, between 1966 and 2003, added over twenty thousand documents to the ERIC database, providing an easily accessible archive and resource for everyone studying the institutions.

Some useful work has been done by a few groups studying higher education overall, including the National Center for Post- secondary Improvement and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. Organizations dedicated especially to study- ing community colleges from a national perspective include theCohen, 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 363 Scholarship and Commentary 363 Center for Community College Policy at the Education Commis- sion of the States; the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia; the Institute for Community College Development, Cornell University; and the stand-alone Center for the Study of Community Colleges.

Various national professional and institutional membership associations conduct a few specialized studies: The National Associ- ation of College and University Business Ofﬁcers collects ﬁnancial data; and the American Association of University Professors col- lects salary data. The League for Innovation in the Community College, a membership organization, has sponsored research on several aspects of institutional functioning. Many of the other pro- fessional and institutional associations serve the research enterprise by encouraging philanthropic foundations and governmental agen- cies to sponsor studies of community colleges as unique entities, and to use paradigms that ﬁt the colleges’ mission and role. Some collect information of a type that supports their lobbying efforts.

Institutional Research Ofﬁces Institutional research (IR) in the colleges manifests a pattern ranging from the sophisticated to the rudimentary. Except in a few colleges, it has never been well supported. A 1968 study reported by Roueche and Boggs found full-time research coordinators in only about one in ﬁve community colleges, usually the larger institutions. Knapp (1979) found IR ofﬁces typically staffed with only one or two persons. In 1987 the community colleges of southern California averaged only 0.67 full-time equivalent (FTE) institutional researchers each, hardly enough to ﬁll out the data request forms that ﬂowed in from governmental agencies (Wilcox, 1987), and fewer than half the colleges in the South employed as much as a half-time institutional researcher (Rowh, 1990). Little has changed. A recent survey found that about half the colleges employed “just one or fewer IR staff persons on an FTE basis” (Morest and Jenkins, 2007, p. 6).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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 364 364 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE State after state has generated demands for outcomes assess- ment, but the IR ofﬁces have not grown nearly so much as the requests for additional information would warrant. A centralized research effort depends on someone at the community college level to provide the basic information. Thus, the IR function is heavily freighted with compliance reporting or performance accountability, in which rates of student retention, transfer, grad- uation, job placement success, performance on licensing exams, and student satisfaction are the targets. After compliance reporting and enrollment reports, the third major function is preparation for accreditation visits. Such information systems are not designed with research in mind; they are rather for record-keeping purposes and ﬁnancial administration, facility use, and class scheduling.

In a few colleges, highly qualiﬁed IR personnel use sophisticated methodologies, but these are not really necessary for the job. “In- deed, the more sophisticated IR work may be done for the purpose of journal submissions and conference presentations rather than for college management” (Morest and Jenkins, 2007, p. 3). Morest and Jenkins’s (2007) study found that college staff shunned complex research reports. College presidents, vice presidents, and IR staff themselves said that complex studies were not useful, that there were simply too many variables to account for when analyzing education outcomes, and that there was “simply no audience for complicated analysis” (p. 11).

Calls for assessment assail the colleges relentlessly: state- level mandates; federal reporting regulations; accrediting agency requests. First come the requests for data, then the suggestions for how the data should be arrayed, and ﬁnally the requirements to do it. These requests and demands seek a never-ending variety of types of information: program accountability; outcomes assessment; transfer rates; employment placement validation; graduation rates; evaluation criteria; satisfaction measures; job performance. The research ofﬁce must have ready access to all the information banks in every college ofﬁce such as personnel, admissions, and studentCohen, 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 365 Scholarship and Commentary 365 records. The task is easier now because of the greater data process- ing capability that has become economical and readily available in recent years. But the community colleges with research ofﬁces averaging one or two FTE staff members per campus can barely keep up with the demand.

Understaffed as they are, the IR ofﬁces produce a sizable number of reports useful not only to their own colleges but also to analysts seeking data about program effects. Relating student progress to placement and testing procedures is popular. The IR ofﬁces also occasionally design community surveys, asking, How many of our graduates are working in the area, and in what ﬁelds? They conduct studies of student aspirations, attempting to link them to program design and student success: Why did the students enroll? Did they get what they were looking for? They do program review, often under the impetus of an external agency’s request:

Is this program properly staffed? Does it attract students? Is it cost-effective? They include comparative studies: How do other colleges in our state organize their orientation programs? They conduct academic validation studies: Which tests best predict course grades? They study student learning, using standardized instruments to test student gains in writing, mathematics, reading, and critical thinking. And they do attainment studies: How many of our graduates obtained jobs or went on to further education?

The audience for these reports varies. The state agencies that have requested the data receive copies, as do the college’s senior ofﬁcials and board members. The institutional researchers’ state and national associations publish selected data compilations. Some researchers condense their reports into short memoranda that they distribute to everyone on the campus. They usually include a bar graph or pie chart or some eye-catching artwork and an amount of information sufﬁciently abbreviated so that the casual reader might still ﬁnd something of use.

Although most IR reports circulate only within the college, some are distributed to a broader audience. Several state 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 366 366 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE national faculty associations organized along disciplinary lines pub- lish journals and sponsor conferences in which their members report on studies of their own; the Community College Human- ities Association and the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges are prominent. The journalsCommunity College Enterprise, Community College Review, Community College Journal of Research and Practice, Journal of Applied Research in Community Colleges,andNew Directions for Community Colleges carry articles by both practitioners and researchers. Various state groups, including two-year college trustee, administrator, institu- tional research, and faculty associations, report their members’ studies in their own publications. Examples areInquiry, the jour- nal of the Virginia Community Colleges; andVisions, the journal of applied research for the Florida community colleges. Several national forums welcome presentations of research. Among the more prominent are the Association for Institutional Research, Society of College and University Planners, Association for the Study of Higher Education, National Council for Research and Planning, American Association of Community Colleges, Divi- sion J of the American Educational Research Association, and Council for the Study of Community Colleges.

Forms of Research Research in education takes many forms, depending on the aca- demic discipline underlying it, the size of the sample, the purpose toward which it is directed, the source of support, and the scope of the problem to be investigated. Historical and sociological studies take broad views, often guided by the prejudices of the researchers.

Large-scale data compilations provide bases for subsequent analyses.

Critiques of the colleges ﬁll a category of their own.

Historical and Sociological Studies Several treatments of the formation and development of junior (later community) colleges have been written from the viewpointCohen, 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 367 Scholarship and Commentary 367 of history or sociology. Those with a historical bent look for doc- umentation and details of the founding of individual institutions, such as Bishop’sThe Community’s College(2002), hoping that when such examples are strung together a picture of nationwide institu- tional formation will emerge. The sociologists usually work from the top down, seeking to connect the development of the colleges with broad social forces and theories of institutional formation.

Much of the sociological and political science–based research linking college development to broad social forces is reviewed here along with a few of the historical treatments: books by Eaton (1994), Vaughan (1980), Dougherty (1994), Frye (1992), and Witt and others (1994) and dissertations by Pedersen (2000) and Meier (2008). Articles have been prepared by Gallagher (1994), Murray (1988–89), Plucker (1987), and Wagoner (1985). Some trace college genesis to the inﬂuence of business and community leaders or local ofﬁcials, such as school superintendents and university presidents. By showing how these actors brought about the colleges in their areas, the authors rebut the arguments that they were products of a national agenda. If university leaders wanted to give a boost to undergraduate education (Gallagher, 1994), if business leaders wanted a precollegiate structure as an ornament of civic pride (Frye, 1992), and if school ofﬁcials built the colleges despite reluctance on the part of state legislators (Dougherty, 1994; Pedersen, 2000), then the thesis of response to directives from a national association breaks down. Whether these local leaders were acting from noble or base motives seems irrelevant.

The contemporary dominant historical view is that prior to the 1950s the colleges were formed as local institutions in which recent high school graduates could get a start at a collegiate career. Most of the colleges were organized in small towns, far from universities; if the intent had been to form colleges for terminal students, the presence of a university would not have been a limiting factor.

Furthermore, if vocational education were the guiding reason for establishing the colleges, they would have been organized ﬁrst in the big industrial states, not in Iowa, Missouri, Texas, and California.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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 368 368 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE These analyses have contributed to a long-standing debate over the motives of the early promoters and leaders of the institutions.

Were the institutions formed because of the pleadings of national organizations, or did they develop in response to local enthusiasts?

Did they arise in response to broad social forces or to the determi- nation of individual opportunists? Do they evidence a capitalistic society’s conspiracy to keep the lower classes in their place? Are they a major democratic force, assisting people in moving toward the American dream of higher-status jobs and social position?

Depending on the author’s biases, the colleges are either the great- est invention of the twentieth century or the social tragedy of the era. Still, it has been refreshing to see the institution ana- lyzed, even if the analysts range from neo-Marxists to Chamber of Commerce–type hagiographers.

Large-Scale Efforts Although large-scale compilations obscure information about sin- gle colleges, they provide useful overviews. The NCES collects data on all sectors and publishes numerous reports; nearly twenty are cited in this book. Beyond its routine census-style reports of enrollments, its data reﬂect congressional concerns. Because of the various forms of federal aid awarded to postsecondary students, NCES summarizes data on college revenues, expenditures, and tuition. Federal afﬁrmative action rulings require the colleges to report data on the gender and ethnicity of college staff, students, and graduates, and NCES compiles them. Federal regulations regarding discrimination against, or special funds available for, students with disabilities have led to data on special services provided.

In an effort to reduce loan default and abuse of ﬁnancial aid, regulations such as Student Right-to-Know, passed by Congress in 1990, have brought forth calls for data on student success. The Student-Right-to-Know graduation rate is based on assessing all ﬁrst-time-in-college, full-time, degree-seeking students who enroll on a certain date. The rate is calculated at 150 percent of the timeCohen, 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 369 Scholarship and Commentary 369 normally required to complete the degree (which is two years for an associate). Students who transfer are counted as noncompleters, even if they obtain a degree at a different institution. As Chapter Fourteen on outcomes illustrates, this yields some weird data because roughly one-third of all ﬁrst-time community college students eventually attend more than one institution. Furthermore, three years is too short to measure community college student outcomes (see Chapter Fourteen, on outcomes for a broader discussion of outcomes assessment time frames).

The Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act, passed in 1984 and reauthorized (and renamed) several times since, instructed the colleges to provide data on student job attainment and maintenance. Two other federal initiatives of the 1990s impinged on data collection. Goals 2000 was designed to stimulate attempts to develop national curriculum standards, along with information on student literacy and other capacities. State Postsecondary Review Entities (SPRE) directed colleges to provide data on graduation rates, student withdrawal, licensure exam pass rates, and several other categories. Although both initiatives have been rescinded, they reveal how the federal government has been involved in setting a research agenda for the colleges.

National data are an essential beginning point for any commu- nity college studies, but various types of information useful for a more complete picture of college contributions are only starting to be compiled routinely. Beginning in 1994 the American Associa- tion of Community Colleges (AACC) began publishing data on several core indicators of effectiveness, including student persis- tence, satisfaction, and goal attainment; transfer and job placement numbers and success ratios; literacy and citizenship skill devel- opment; and college relationships with the community. Alfred, Ewell, Hudgins, and McClenney (1999) further described fourteen of these indicators, and the association subsequently published a third edition of core indicators, this time with sixteen measuresCohen, 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 370 370 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE listed (Alfred, Shults, and Seybert, 2007). The AACC’s Volun- tary Framework of Accountability (VFA) initiative, described in Chapter Fourteen on outcomes, extends these efforts and will eventually publish national or near-national data on numerous indicators related to student progress, outcomes, and learning as well as career and technical education and adult basic education.

The League for Innovation in the Community College detailed sixty-nine measures of institutional effectiveness that could be reported (Doucette and Hughes, 1990). Participants in a conference sponsored by the Spencer Foundation listed one hundred questions, most so broad that they could be used to justify any types of research (Ashley, Barr, and Lattuca, 1999). Other suggested assessment frameworks include combinations of multiple forms such as exams, hands-on learning activities, web-based designs, opinion polls, and diagnostic tests. All these plans suffer from complexity in design and attempt to account for too many arcane variables. As Gleick stressed, “The choice is always the same. You can make your model more complex and more faithful to reality, or you can make it simpler and easier to handle” (1987, p. 278).

The U.S. Education Department has continued the efforts it made in the early 1990s toward drafting speciﬁcations for a national collegiate assessment system. In various ways it has attempted to pressure all of higher education to set standards that the states and the accrediting agencies would enforce; the Secretary of Educa- tion’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education (Spelling Commission) held hearings in 2006–2007 on those and related topics. The purpose of its recommendations was to develop proce- dures for continuous monitoring of access and outcomes, the rate at which students complete their programs, and various indicators of student learning. Primarily, the group was looking for uniform reporting formats and some set of indicators beyond accreditation standards that could be readily understood and generally accepted.

Despite some acceptance of the idea by a public concerned about its schools, many politicians and college ofﬁcials opposed what theyCohen, 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 371 Scholarship and Commentary 371 characterized as a usurpation of authority by the federal government and an invasion of student privacy.

The types of data that state agencies compile differ greatly because of the variant place of community colleges in state higher education systems and because each state legislature and governing board enacts different regulations. State agencies typically receive data from the colleges and publish statewide aggregates. Some of thesefact books, such as those published annually in Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, and Washington, are useful in making interinstitutional comparisons.

More often, the state agencies act as NCES does in responding to legislative mandates. The law directs the colleges to initiate a program — student matriculation, for example — and directs the state agency to collect data on program effects, whereupon the agency draws guidelines for the colleges to use in assessing students at entry. The colleges deﬁne their procedures and validate their tests in accordance with student access in the programs in which they were placed. Whether the colleges are allowed to select their own instruments, as in California, or whether uniform tests are administered statewide, as in New Jersey, the colleges have had a portion of their research agenda deﬁned. Supplemental state funding for these procedures, if available, is rarely sufﬁcient for the colleges to mount comprehensive programs that integrate ﬁndings with practice.

Limitations of the Research Whatever the source and the form it takes, research on the commu- nity colleges suffers several limitations stemming from imprecision in the language of the social sciences and from the relationships between researchers and practitioners, who must respond to conﬂict- ing mandates: see “Why Researchers and Practitioners Ignore Each Other, Even When They Are the Same Person” (Cohen, 2005).

Styles in research in education affect studies about community colleges. The higher education research community is considerablyCohen, 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 372 372 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE less likely to use psychological measures and theories of the devel- oping adolescent than it was a couple of generations ago. Still in use are high-powered statistical tests applied to the soft data typical of the social sciences — rather like driving Indy race cars on dirt roads. Moreover, the recent literature, especially dissertations, displays a drift toward qualitative analysis, reports based often on observations of or interviews with a handful of students, faculty, or staff. Although it is daunting to pick up a three-hundred-page dissertation ﬁlled with verbatim transcriptions of commentary by a half-dozen students, the practice suggests a move toward story- telling, a venerable mode of information transmission. In particular, the shift toward qualitative inquiry suggests a desire to understand why or how a particular phenomenon is occurring; the fact that itisoccurring (which can be documented through quantitative analyses of the large data sets) is often viewed as the starting point.

The historical and sociological treatises are evidence that there is no such thing as unbiased scholarship. The attempt to link institutional formation and development to sociological theory, the premise that either broad social forces or local initiative gave rise to community colleges, and the conclusion that society is well served or betrayed by the existence of these open-access, postsecondary structures all argue that the termobjective inquiryis an oxymoron.

The ﬁndings are as stylized and predictable as those reached by quantitative researchers who discover that only 25 percent of the entering students transfer. (How many transfers would it take for them to remove the qualiﬁer “only”?) The researchers who demonstrate (once again) that students who matriculate at a community college are less likely to obtain the baccalaureate than those who start at a university have offered nothing new.

Their conclusions — “The colleges should begin offering the B.A.,” or “The colleges should abandon their collegiate function,” for example — reveal their prejudgments. Hoos (1972) critiqued the latter types of research, saying that relying on it to make policyCohen, 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 373 Scholarship and Commentary 373 decisions is almost always an ex post facto justiﬁcation of a position already taken.

Survey research, too, has its limitations. Even NCES some- times provides ambiguous information. For example, the question, “Which of the following services does your institution provide?” addressed to all the colleges, listed services for students with various types of disabilities. It yielded the ﬁnding that 837 of the nation’s 1,020 public two-year institutions offer “assistance for the visually impaired” (NCES, 1994a, p. 21). But the reader of the report has no way of telling whether that assistance is a full-scale curriculum or a set of Braille markers on the campus’s elevator buttons.

Furthermore, there remains a persistent gap between policy- makers and policy scholars. Birnbaum sketched reasons for the disconnection, saying that the nature of policy problems is such that solutions are not apparent through research and “the ways in which policy makers deﬁne a problem is often part of the problem” (2000, p. 122). He noted further that “trying to improve research methods is not a solution” (p. 124) because closer adherence to scientiﬁc standards only makes the reports less understandable to those outside the research community. He concludes, as did Bowen in 1981, that the cumulative aggregation of many small studies eventually can be used to support such sweeping statements as, “Higher education is a social good and a positive force for economic development” (p. 124).

In summation, the sources and forms of research, the purposes for which it has been conducted, the problems with social science research in general, and above all, the colleges’ managers’ essential need for ﬁndings that in no way can be interpreted as disparaging their institutions result in widely inconsistent reports. This problem can never be reconciled because of disparities in perspective. From a distance, mountains appear as silhouettes with pointed, rounded, or jagged peaks. Close up, the peaks are not visible and the mountains have become collections of rocks, crevasses, and foliage.

A full description of a mountain that makes sense to both thoseCohen, 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 374 374 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE standing at its base and those ten miles away borders on the impossible.

Critiques of the Colleges A few scholars have been intent on criticizing the institution in its social role or the institution as a school. In the ﬁrst of these criticisms, the college is often seen in a negative light. It is an agent of capitalism, training workers to ﬁt business and industry; it is a tool of the upper classes, designed to keep the poor, especially minorities, in their place by denying them access to the baccalaure- ate and, concomitantly, to higher-status positions in society. When it is criticized as a school, questions are raised about its success in teaching: Do these colleges really teach the basic skills that the lower schools failed to impart? Can they provide a foundation for higher learning? Here, too, the answers are usually negative; since the community colleges pass few of their students through to the senior institutions, they are said to have failed the test.

Criticizing the Social Role Several distressingly similar articles have taken community colleges to task for their failure to assist in leveling the social class structure of America. These writings became prominent beginning in the 1970s, when the rapidly expanding institutions brought them to the attention of sociologists. Karabel asserted that they are elements in both educational inﬂation and the American system of class-based tracking. The massive community college expansion, he said, was due to an increase in the proportion of technical and professional workers in the labor force. This increase caused those who wanted any job other than the lowest paying to seek postsecondary training, thereby contributing to a heightened pressure for admission to higher education in general.

Hence educational inﬂation: an increased percentage of people attending school and staying longer. But the system of social stratiﬁcation has not changed: “Apparently, the extension 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 375 Scholarship and Commentary 375 educational opportunity, however much it may have contributed to other spheres such as economic productivity and the general cultural level of the society, has resulted in little or no change in the overall extent of social mobility and economic equality” (1972, pp. 525–526). More students, yes; more equality, no.

Ever class conscious, Karabel cited data showing that com- munity college students were less likely to be from the higher socioeconomic classes than were students at four-year colleges or universities. They were more likely to be from families whose breadwinner was a skilled or semiskilled worker, had not completed grammar school or had not completed high school, and was not a college graduate. (Not incidentally, these facts had been noted by Koos, the ﬁrst analyst of junior colleges, in 1924.) Some years later, Karabel argued that the research conducted since he put forth his thesis had conﬁrmed his perspective: “With a far greater body of empirical evidence now available, the fundamental argument may be stated again with even greater conﬁdence: Far from embodying the democratization of higher education and a redistribution of opportunity in the wider society, the expansion of the community college instead heralded the arrival in higher education of a form of class-linked tracking that served to reproduce existing social relations … The overall impact of the community college has been to accentuate rather than reduce prevailing patterns of social and class inequality” (1986, p. 18).

Zwerling echoed the thesis that the community college plays an essential role in maintaining the pyramid of American social and economic structure: “It has become just one more barrier put between the poor and the disenfranchised and a decent and respectable stake in the social system which they seek” (1976, p.

xvii). The chief function of the community college is to “assist in channeling young people to essentially the same relative positions in the social structure that their parents already occupy” (p. 33).

The institution is remarkably effective at controlling mobility between classes because its students come primarily from theCohen, 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 376 376 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE lowest socioeconomic classes of college attenders, its dropout rate is the highest in the college population, and dropouts and graduates alike enter lower-level occupations than the equivalent students who attend higher-status colleges. This dropout rate is “related to a rather deliberate process of channeling students to positions in the social order that are deemed appropriate for them” (p. 35).

Pincus, another writer in the same genre, also discussed the community colleges in terms of class conﬂict, with a particular emphasis on their role in vocational education. He traced the development of the occupational function, showing how it ﬁt everyone’s needs exactly: “Corporations get the kind of workers they need; four-year colleges do not waste resources on students who will drop out; students get decent jobs; and the political dangers of an excess of college graduates are avoided” (1980, p. 333). And he alleged that “business and government leaders — those at the top of the heap — regard postsecondary vocational education as a means of solving the political and economic problems created by the rising expectations of the working class” (p. 356).

Other commentators have also contended that the career pro- grams divert students from lower-class backgrounds away from baccalaureate studies. Levine postulated a cabal, based in the col- leges themselves: “Faced with a potential student body increasingly large and diverse in socioeconomic backgrounds and interests, … educators encouraged the formation of a new type of postsecondary education devoted to semi-professional vocational training” (1986, p. 183). It was easy for him to conclude, then, that “the interests and needs of the many who attended the junior college to prepare for the university were frustrated by educators’ elitist intentions” (p. 184). Richardson and Bender, in their treatise on minority access and achievement, pointed out that despite increased col- lege attendance rates “there has been little change in economic and social class mobility for minorities because their curriculum choices have been so concentrated in the career and vocationalCohen, 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 377 Scholarship and Commentary 377 areas” (1987, p. 1). They argued further that “concentrating occu- pational offerings on campuses serving the highest proportion of minorities while concurrently permitting transfer programs to decline in availability and quality” leads minority students to “be- come vocational/technical majors because no viable alternatives are provided to them” (pp. 44–45).

Data to support the arguments regarding class-based tracking are easy to ﬁnd. After examining patterns of college going in Illinois, Tinto (1973) concluded that students of low socioeconomic status who go to community colleges are more likely to drop out than their counterparts who attend senior institutions. Dougherty pursued a similar line. He saw the community college as both “democratizing access to higher education” and “hampering attainment of the baccalaureate” (1994, p. 21). He stated that these colleges do allow more students to enjoy the beneﬁts of higher education, but they are not successful at propelling students toward a bachelor’s degree.

These commentators rarely acknowledge the fact that since the colleges admit many students whose chances at success are low their poor graduation and transfer rates are practically guaranteed a pri- ori. Their jeremiads are more politically inspired than empirically founded. At bottom, those who pronounce them are less antagonis- tic to the community college than they are to what they perceive as a pernicious American social class system, which they wish was more equitable. The arguments are decades old. Schools at all levels have long been criticized for failing to overturn the social class system. In 1944, Warner and his colleagues asserted that Americans were not sufﬁciently conscious of the class structure and the place of the schools in it. Their concern was for equality of opportunity, curricular differentiation, and teaching people to accept the idea of social status.

More recently, belief in the inevitability of the class structure has become attenuated, confounded now with social justice, equality of opportunity, cultural deprivation, and a determination to correct the abuses historically heaped onto certain peoples. The factCohen, 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 378 378 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE that African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians tend to be overrepresented in the lower socioeconomic classes has contributed to this confusion, but it has provided the protagonists with a cachet. In Gabler’s words, “One of the great political achievements of conservatives over the past 30 years or so has been to tie social welfare to race rather than class” (2002, p. M6).

The practice is not new; for decades, the labor movement in the South was retarded by industrialists’ deliberately pitting whites against blacks every time a union organizer appeared. And, indeed, the polemics directed toward community colleges for their role in perpetrating the structure of social class have now been superseded by contentions that college culture is antagonistic to students (read:

minorities) from outside a tradition of rationality and literacy.

London’sThe Culture of a Community College(1978) and Weis’s Between Two Worlds(1985), early books in this genre, were fol- lowed by Rhoads and Valadez’sDemocracy, Multiculturalism, and the Community College(1996) and Shaw, Valadez, and Rhoads’s Community Colleges as Cultural Texts(1999). These commenta- tors examined college ideology, morale, the messages that students receive, and interactions among faculty, students, policies, and requirements and then concluded that a vast disjuncture exists between the collegiate form and the students’ expectations, aspira- tions, and abilities. A typical conclusion is that the college culture, with its roots in a language-centered orthodoxy, militates against student progress toward the baccalaureate.

These types of critiques have appeared less frequently in recent years as political leaders and educators alike have come to appre- ciate the community colleges’ role as a viable option to the universities’ inability to expand their freshman classes sufﬁciently to accommodate the greater number of people seeking admission.

This has become apparent also to the lay public who realize that scrambling for a limited number of places in selective universities is a game of musical chairs and many college seekers will be refused admission regardless of their qualiﬁcations.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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 379 Scholarship and Commentary 379 The neo-Marxist contentions still reappear though, but in different guises:globalization, neoliberalism, new economy, all terms used by various commentators. One example is Dowd: “A capitalist ideology has been forcefully reshaping the community college and its mission … The increase in contract training programs … coincides with this shift in focus from students to industries” (2003, pp. 98–99). Ayers provided another: “The community college itself is instrumental in reproducing the class inequalities associated with advanced capitalism” (2005, p. 528). “Learners are reduced to an economic entity designed to please employers so that business and industry may remain competitive in the global economy” (p. 539).

And the faculty are displaced by representatives of business in planning educational programs. The arguments are the same: The corporations get the kinds of workers they need; the community colleges are occupational training institutions; and the colleges are complicit with the global reach of the multinational corporations, even to the extent of exploiting their own workers, the part- time instructors. In summation, the issue of community college complicity in a neoliberal agenda has a long history, except that capitalism was the term of choice in earlier decades.

Criticizing the School A second set of criticisms pertains to the community colleges as schools. Can they really teach the basic skills that the lower schools failed to impart? Do they provide a foundation for higher learning?

Do their students learn the proper skills and attitudes that will enable them to succeed at jobs or in senior institutions? Stripping away the rhetoric and social implications reduces these questions to the following: How many occupational education students obtain jobs in the ﬁeld for which they were trained? How many students transfer to the senior colleges?

The few large-scale studies that have been conducted provide some clues. After reviewing several comparative studies, Pascarella and Terenzini (2005) concluded that “even when educationalCohen, 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 380 380 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE attainment is taken into account, initially attending a two-year college appears to have only a modest, negative effect on subsequent occupational status, and for similar individuals of equal educational attainment, initial attendance at a two-year college does not appear to confer a signiﬁcant earnings penalty” (p. 592). They also found that, “Consistent with pre-1990 estimates, beginning pursuit of a bachelor’s degree at a two- rather than a four-year institution reduces the chances of ultimately earning that degree by 15 to 20 percentage points” (p. 592). Part of this may be attributed to the difﬁculty of transferring. “The difference in bachelor’s degree completion rates appears to lie in whether a community college student seeking a bachelor’s degree actually transfers to a four-year institution. Once across that bridge, community college transfer students have about the same likelihood of earning a bachelor’s degree as do similar students who began at a four-year college or university, although community college students tend to take longer to complete their degrees” (p. 592).

If the analysts would bother to ask the question, “If students are qualiﬁed to enter universities why are they enrolling in community colleges?” their conclusions might be different. Since most com- munity college students would not be in higher education if not for the community colleges, “it does not make sense to ask how most students who attended a two-year college would have fared at a four-year college” (Rosenbaum, Redline, and Stephan, 2007, p. 50).

Indeed, Pascarella and Terenzini (2005) determined that commu- nity colleges are relatively underfunded but “in some cases having greater impact than four-year institutions … Viewed in such a light, at least one implication is that two-year institutions may well provide students (and taxpayers) with cost-effective routes to the bachelor’s degree that do not sacriﬁce either intellectual rigor or competitiveness in the marketplace” (p. 640).

Data on the numbers of students who transfer from community colleges to four-year colleges and universities are scattered because the ways of counting transfers vary greatly from system to systemCohen, 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 381 Scholarship and Commentary 381 and state to state. Patterns of student ﬂow have never been linear; they swirl, with students dropping in and out of both community colleges and universities, taking courses in both types of institutions concurrently, and transferring from one to another frequently. However, when the data are compiled uniformly across the nation, the transfer rates show that in numerical terms, of the 1.25 million students per year whose initial higher education experience is in a community college, at least 250,000 eventually transfer to universities and most transfer to more selective four-year institutions than they could have attended right out of high school.

Whether this rate veriﬁes the community colleges as contributors to social mobility or as agencies displacing the hopes of the underprivileged depends entirely on the viewers’ perceptions.

Responding to the Critics What can we say to the critics? They are on ﬁrm ground when they present data showing that many community college matriculants do not transfer; that the community colleges enroll sizable percentages of minority and low-income students; and that of the students who do transfer the smallest percentage is among students from minority and lower-income groups. But their conclusions are not always warranted. Several of the commentators suggest elevating the class consciousness of community college students so that they become aware of the social trap into which they have been led. Zwerling (1976) recommended that students be shown how they are being channeled within the social class structure; they should know that the school is an instrument of power so that they can act to resist it. Pincus (1980) similarly sought to elevate class consciousness and said that community college educators should help working- class and minority students by providing them with a social context from which to understand the dismal choices they face. They might then begin to question the legitimacy of educational, political, and economic institutions in the United States.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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 382 382 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE Other critics reach different conclusions. Some want to make the community colleges equal to the universities, so that the low- income students who attend them will have an equal chance at obtaining baccalaureate degrees and higher-status positions. Others propose that the colleges should deemphasize baccalaureate educa- tion and focus instead on the occupational and career education of their students.

So the critics skirt the notion of the community college as an agency enhancing equal opportunity. Faced with the irreconcilable problem of social equalization, they present draconian solutions.

Suppose all two-year colleges were converted into four-year insti- tutions. Would all colleges and their students then miraculously become equal? There is a pecking order among institutions that even now are ostensibly the same. Neighboring institutions such as Harvard and Northeastern, the University of California at Los Angeles and Pepperdine, the University of Chicago and Loyola all offer the doctorate. But in the eyes of the public they are not equiv- alent. Authorizing the community colleges to offer the bachelor’s degree, as is happening now in several states, does not change pub- lic perceptions of their relative merit; it merely establishes a bottom stratum of former two-year colleges among the senior institutions.

As for the centrality of occupational education, all higher education, including graduate and professional school, is career oriented. The poverty-proud scholar, attending college for the joy of pure knowledge, is about as common as the presidential candidate who was born in a log cabin. Both myths deserve decent burials. The Mythology of Schooling The truism that the further one goes in school the greater one’s earnings has been modiﬁed in favor of a myth: that the type of school that people attend determines their future success. The various rulings designed to mitigate discrimination based on aCohen, 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 383 Scholarship and Commentary 383 person’s gender, religion, or ethnic identiﬁcation were designed to facilitate access. Young people from every social stratum were to enter college and train for lucrative careers. But the more the goal of equal opportunity was approached, the greater the importance of schooling became. The most marked measure of that importance is the gap in earnings between college graduates and people who have not ﬁnished high school, something on the order of three to one. Thus, an anomaly: When the standards for who entered college were set on the basis of wealth, race, and intelligence, the arguments for equal opportunity centered on the notion that we were wasting talent by depriving qualiﬁed young people of an education. As the doors swung open, as civil rights legislation, state and federal grants for students, and institutions with open- admissions policies became prevalent, issues of segregation within higher education came to the fore. The opportunity to go to college was not enough. Which college was available? Which program?

What were the achievement rates for certain members of certain groups? The target kept shifting.

Jencks (1972) explored the socially constructed notion of inequality and concluded that educators confound equal oppor- tunity for education with equalizing income in the population.

Rather than demanding that all persons receive the same educa- tion, a better way to decrease the gaps in income is to change such public policies as the tax structure. He believed that, even if a college education were as easy to obtain as an elementary edu- cation, not everyone would attend and inequalities would persist.

People work at different paces; they have different abilities and are of different value to their employers. Chance may propel them toward a ﬁeld that blossoms or withers over the length of their career. The type of school they attend or the cognitive ability they manifest has little to do with equalizing those traits in the general population. If society really wanted to balance outcomes, a system would be erected whereby those who attend school and those who do not would receive the same or similar beneﬁts.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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 384 384 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE More recently, Michaels extended Jencks’ contentions, saying that what’s keeping poor people out of elite colleges “is not their inability to pay but their inability to qualify for admission in the ﬁrst place” (2006, p. 87). Michaels reproduced a chart prepared by the College Board showing family income and SAT scores rising in tandem (detailed in the Decline in Literacy section in Chapter Eight). And he explained how the correlation arises from the wealthier families’ ability to send their children to private schools or to better public schools associated with high-income neighborhoods and to pay for extensive tutoring. He attributed much of the problem of inequity to the public’s (or at least the academics’) ﬁxation on identity: “We like diversity and we like programs like afﬁrmative action because they tell us that racism is the problem we need to solve and that solving it requires us just to give up our prejudices. (Solving the problem of economic inequality might require something more; it might require us to give up our money.)” (p. 89).

Another response might be that the community colleges are no more able to overturn the inequities of the nation than the lower schools have been, that all schools are relatively low-inﬂuence envi- ronments when compared with other social institutions. But the critics’ fundamental error is that they have attempted to shift the meaning of educational equality from individual to group mobil- ity. If equal opportunity means allowing people from any social, ethnic, or religious group to have the same chance to enter higher education as people from any other group, the goal is both worthy and attainable. And few would question the community colleges’ contribution to the breaking down of social, ethnic, ﬁnancial, and geographical barriers to college attendance. But when that concept is converted to group mobility, its meaning changes, and it is put beyond the reach of the schools. Neither the community colleges nor any other form of school can break down class distinctions.

They cannot move entire ethnic groups from one social stratum toCohen, 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 385 Scholarship and Commentary 385 another. They cannot ensure the equal distribution of educational results.

What the Colleges Really Provide The real beneﬁt of the community college cannot be measured by the extent to which it contributes to the overthrow of the social class system in America. Nor can it be measured by the extent to which the college changes the mores of its community. It is a system for individuals, and it does what the best educational forms have always done: It helps individuals learn what they need to know to be effective, responsible members of their society. The colleges can and do make it easier for individuals to move between social classes.

As long as they maintain their place in the mainstream of graded education, they provide a channel of upward mobility. Those who deplore the colleges’ failure to overturn inequities between classes do a disservice to the institutions’ main function and tend to ignore beneﬁts derived by the millions of people who have looked on them as the main point of access to, exit from, and reentry into higher education — the lungs of the system.

A person who receives a degree or certiﬁcate and does not work in the ﬁeld in which that certiﬁcate was earned does not represent an institutional indictment unless no other programs were available to the person. If the community college were a participant in an educational system that said to potential matriculants, “You may enter but only if you are particularly qualiﬁed and only in this pro- gram,” subsequent failure to obtain employment in that ﬁeld might be cause for dismay. But the community college does not operate that way; most of its programs are open to all who present them- selves. When programs do have selective admissions, as in dental hygiene, nursing, and some of the higher-level technologies, nearly all the entrants graduate and obtain positions in the ﬁelds for which they were trained. When programs are open to everyone, as in most of the less-professionalized trades such as real estate or marketing,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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 386 386 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE the chances that a matriculant will complete the curriculum and begin working in that ﬁeld are markedly reduced.Dropoutis a reﬂection of the structure of a program. An institution, or a pro- gram within that institution, that places few barriers to student matriculation cannot expect a high rate of program completion.

Few commentators have mentioned an important social and economic role played by community colleges: their relieving pres- sure on the universities and their saving money for the states. Both are apparent in the articulation agreements designed to enhance transfer that have become widespread across the nation. Such agreements have been in place for many decades, but until recently they tended to be voluntary compacts agreed on by the public- sector institutions and monitored by state agencies or coordinating boards. Now that many legislatures have mandated them, they have become important politically even though college promises to enhance economic development and relieve unemployment remain the will-o’-the-wisp that lures legislators.

What Are the Alternatives to Community Colleges?

It is easier to criticize the current structure than it is to propose solutions that both please everyone and have a chance at being enacted. There is no point in taking an ahistorical approach to postsecondary education. Tempting as it is, a view of higher education, of what students need, of what would be good for society, without a corresponding view of the current institutions in their social context is not very useful. To start with the questions of what individuals need or what society needs is nice, but regardless of the answers those institutions will not disappear. Institutional needs are as real as individual and social needs; in fact, they may be more valid as beginning points for analysis because they offer somewhat uniﬁed positions that have developed over time, whereas individualandsocialneeds are as diverse as anyone cares to make them. And the existing institutions have allies, constituencies, alumni, support groups, people with interest in their continuation.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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 387 Scholarship and Commentary 387 The alternatives to community colleges are already being built, as the contemporary institutions reform themselves in reaction to the new media and the changes in support patterns. Some of these modiﬁcations have been forced on them; others result from intramural pressures. Local funding has diminished and local control along with it. Low tuition is a distant memory, and higher cost for the students has made the colleges less competitive with the state’s universities.

Curricular articulation steadily becomes more prominent, both with the universities and the high schools. Institutions such as early or middle colleges that combine grades 11–14 have been expand- ing, spurred by foundation support. Student transfer to universities steadily gains, with several states mandating agreements in the form of transfer associate degrees (Kisker and Wagoner, 2013). Major portions of occupational education have been modularized. As one example, the Community College of Baltimore County (Mary- land) offers a six-month, four-full-days-a-week certiﬁcate program in Machine Tool Technology. And stackable certiﬁcates whereby students may learn skills ranging from the most minimal to spe- cialized technology in four-month modules leading to internships have been introduced in several colleges.

The percentage of community college matriculants who go on to the baccalaureate varies greatly between institutions. It depends on the vigor with which students interested in other outcomes are recruited and on an institution’s relations with its neighboring secondary schools and universities. Although the colleges provide occupational and community education, they are certainly not going to surrender the university-parallel portion of their curriculum. If they did, they would be denying access to higher education to those of their students who do go on, particularly to the students from families in which college going is not the norm. They would betray their own staff members, who entered the institution with the intent of teaching college courses.

They would no longer serve as the safety valve for the universities,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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 388 388 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE which can shunt the poorly prepared petitioners for admission to these alternative colleges and that would otherwise be forced to mount massive developmental programs of their own or face the outrage of people denied access.

Some states have multiple college systems and so separate the liberal arts from other functions. The Wisconsin Vocational, Tech- nical, and Adult Education Centers perform all community college functions except for the university lower-division courses; Wiscon- sin has a university-center system with numerous branch campuses of the state university doing the collegiate work. In South Carolina, state technical colleges coexist with branch campuses of the univer- sity. The North Carolina system operates both technical institutes and community colleges. These and other alternative structures can also be found in large community college districts. Coast Community College District (California) has two full-service, com- prehensive colleges along with one institution devoted exclusively to short-cycle education and community services. The institutional forms adapt, but all functions are maintained.

The list of modiﬁcations can be extended by accommodations that are rarely made. Long overdue is a reconception of the liberal arts to ﬁt the vocational programs: What portions of traditional liberal arts studies are most useful for students in occupational programs, and how might they best be inserted into those areas?

Modular courses have been tried in several institutions, but much more work needs to be done there to build bridges between these two central college functions. Programs such as Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, early college high school, and dual enrollment allow more students to earn some college credits while in high school, but a comprehensive rethinking of grades 11–14 to reduce course overlap and move students more quickly to a postsecondary certiﬁcate or degree is little more than a good idea, although it could be encouraged through legislation.

The community colleges’ potential is greater than that of any other institution because their concern is with the people most in need of assistance. President Bill Clinton referred toCohen, 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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 389 Scholarship and Commentary 389 that characteristic when he described the community colleges as functioning on thefault lineof American education (Bourque, 1995). If the community colleges succeed in moving even a slightly greater proportion of their clients toward what the dominant society regards as achievement, it is as though they changed the world. They are engaged with people on the cusp, people who could enter the mainstream or fall back into a cycle of poverty and welfare. That is why they deserve the support of everyone who values societal cohesion and the opportunity for all people to realize their potential.

Issues The meager support for research on community colleges is not surprising because research in education does not nearly reﬂect the importance of schooling in American life. However, research on community colleges has improved, and much information is avail- able, even if it must be sifted from a mass of reportage that includes self-congratulatory commentary, data compiled with little regard for relevance, unwarranted criticism based on selected statistics, and interpretations of stories told by a few people presumptively representative of a group.

Systemic mendacity is a perennial issue, a reﬂection of the state of public discourse. The media thrive on negative news, so to protect their colleges (and themselves) ofﬁcials typically provide pabulum, clich´ es, and information that appears positive, whether or not it is accurate. Can state and federal demands for hard data overcome these tendencies?

Few colleges have developed their own research agendas. Can they continue providing data according to external agency def- initions without distorting public views of individual college accomplishments?

Can researchers sustain a proper balance between adherence to social science research standards and the need to report in a journalistic style suitable to a broad audience?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 c13.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 5:59pm Page 390 390 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE Although some of the critics have recommended major changes in institutional structure and functioning, few suggest closing the colleges. However, what would happen to a community if its local college’s budget were halved?

Nearly everyone has access to telephones and the Internet.

Both are instantly responsive tools that allow people to interact with one another at will. What is the value of the human contact fostered by community colleges?

Museums offer both entertainment and education. A museum may be compared with another museum according to the strength of its collection, the appeal of its exhibitions, and the number of people who participate in its programs. What would be the value of assessing the colleges along those dimensions?

Government agencies are social institutions designed to provide services. They are successful to the extent that they enhance the quality of life in a community by maintaining order and providing public places where people may conduct their own affairs. Can the colleges be so assessed?

Because few scholars are concerned with community colleges, there is no true forum. The colleges’ own spokespersons do not help much. Either they do not know how to examine their own institutions critically, or they are disinclined to do so. They say the colleges strive to meet everyone’s educational needs, but they rarely acknowledge the patent illogic of that premise. They say the colleges provide access for all, but they fail to examine the obvious corollary question: access to what? The true supporters of the com- munity college, those who believe in its ideals, would consider the institution’s role on both educational and philosophical grounds.

Democracy’s college deserves no less.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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