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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 435 15 Toward the Future Trends, Challenges, and Obligations W e don’t stride boldly into the future. We back into it, dragging our history with us.

It is tempting to believe that the future is manageable, that an institution can be set on a course that ensures its efﬁciency, relevance, and importance for the community it will serve. Over the years various commissions have assessed community college functions and support and made predictions regarding trends.

State-level groups in Alabama, Connecticut, Maryland, and North Carolina, among others, were active in the 1980s, along with a national Commission on the Future of Community Colleges, empaneled under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the American Association of Community and Junior Colleges. The ﬂurry continued into the 1990s, with California establishing the Commission on Innovation.

At the national level, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation funded the New Expeditions project, which was supposed to set a strategic direction for the community colleges.

The commissions based their studies on apparent population trends, especially age and ethnicity, and on changes in the econ- omy. Predictions were that the growth of the ethnic minority population would accelerate and the proportion of middle-aged workers would decline as the post–World War II baby boomers aged. The economy would continue shifting away from manufac- turing and toward service functions as the dominant form for the United States. This postindustrial or information age would require 435Cohen, 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 436 436 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE a more literate workforce and fuller participation by groups hereto- fore excluded or consigned to the no longer prevalent assembly line. Competition from newly industrialized countries would force us to take a global perspective toward production. America would remain a dominant force, but only if we worked more intelligently.

Each of the commissions issued reports predicting the need for enhanced educational services and emphasizing the importance of maintaining comprehensive, high-quality community colleges that would serve a broad range of clients. Each was optimistic that these institutions were well suited to act in the best interests of the population. None suggested reducing the scope of the colleges.

None suggested major departures from contemporary patterns of service. But quite presciently, all warned that the colleges would be expected to serve more students with fewer resources.

The 21st Century Commission for the Future of Community Colleges, organized by the American Association of Commu- nity Colleges (AACC, 2012), is the latest in the series. Like its predecessors it begins by sounding the alarm: student success rates are unacceptably low; employment preparation is inadequately related to job market needs; disconnections exist between high schools, community colleges, and baccalaureate institutions; community colleges are inadequately funded, with few incentives for student success. And it repeats uncritically the notion that “the connection between education and American prosperity is direct and powerful” (p. vii).

This chapter merges information from the commission reports with trend data emanating from other literature to yield a picture of what community colleges might look like in the coming years.

It considers the institutions, students, faculty, organization and ﬁnance, curriculum and instruction, research, outcomes, and the social role. At heart is a discourse on how the institutions may adapt historical structures and practices to a changing world and how those changes may ultimately affect students, the community, and society at large.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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 437 Toward the Future 437 Projecting the future for the community colleges of the early twenty-ﬁrst century involves projecting the future for the nation in general: its demographics, economy, and public attitudes. Twenty years ago, in the mid-1990s, few could have predicted the two incredibly expensive, open-ended wars that the United States launched in reaction to the atrocity of 9/11/2001 or the deep recession that followed and gave impetus to vastly reduced funding for higher education. The impact of individually accessible social media was only dimly seen. Questions of whether the nation would be able to continue educating more of its youth and sustaining lifelong learning for its adults were rarely raised.

No one can predict the random events of the next twenty years, but public attitude, always mercurial, inﬂuences the colleges.

Periodic disgruntlement with taxation and the rise of other prior- ities such as health care, prisons, and the criminal justice system sometimes translate into lower support for education. However, as long as college degrees are perceived as the route toward personal advancement, people will demand access and will eventually agree to pay for it. None of the ﬁscal crises in any of the states has led to serious calls to shrink the higher education system severely.

And if the community colleges remain accessible and relatively inexpensive, they will remain attractive not only to people seeking education but also to corporate managers and industrialists. The Institutions The number of public community colleges will not change; all the colleges necessary had been built by 1975, when one was available within commuting distance of nearly all the people in all but a few states. The number has remained constant ever since, reaching stasis at around one thousand. Change in this group will occur only as the colleges continue expanding linearly, especially as the number offering the baccalaureate increases. Branch campuses, satellite centers, and courses offered off campus in rented quartersCohen, 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 438 438 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE will accommodate the need for expanded facilities. Many small, autonomous centers or specialized units within larger districts will be built. Some of these centers will emphasize career studies and recertiﬁcation for paraprofessionals; others, operating much like university extension divisions, will offer courses in numerous locations and through online media. These types of instructional centers have accounted for nearly all the institutional expansion that has occurred since the early 1970s.

The independent or private junior colleges seem destined to cling to a territory smaller even than that held by the four- year private colleges in relation to the massive public universities.

Woodroof’s analysis found them shouldered aside by the public col- leges. His data were sobering: In contrast to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which reported 175 private junior colleges in the late 1980s, he found half that number operating as distinct, separate, liberal arts institutions, with one-third single sex and three-fourths of them east of the Mississippi. His conclusion was somber: “There may come a time in the near future when there are simply too few resources, too few students, and too few faculty mem- bers willing to work at poverty income levels” (1990, p. 83). By 2011 only 87 colleges enrolling an average of 375 students each remained.

The form of the community college will not change. The insti- tution offering occupational, integrative, transfer, developmental, and community education, with the associate degree as its highest award, has become well accepted by the public and by state-level coordinating and funding agencies. The college staff also are famil- iar and comfortable with it. Most modiﬁcations will be in emphasis, not in kind, although some institutions will drive toward targeted services — as in contract education, building separately funded and managed programs that may grow to be as large as the tradi- tional college services. Others will blur the community college image even further by offering baccalaureate degrees; however, as long as the accrediting agencies and the major national data compilers continue moving such institutions out of thecommu- nity collegecategory, the deﬁnition will remain intact. Where 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 439 Toward the Future 439 state universities build numerous branch campuses and otherwise make it easy for students to matriculate, the colleges will emphasize occupational studies and continuing education. Where the colleges serve largely as feeders to the universities, the transfer function will remain strongest. But all current services will continue to be provided, with growth or shifting emphases depending on funding and different population bases, not on educational philosophy.

Vertical Expansion The community college’s recent foray into early college initiatives and baccalaureate programs — vertical expansion toward grades 11 and12ononehandandtowardgrades15and16ontheother—will likely continue, further shifting the institution’s emphases. One effort forces the colleges into linkages with the K–12 sector, where many of them began, whereas the other brings them into an area where few had been previously involved. The rationale differs for each of these moves.Early collegeis similar to dual enrollment programs that can accelerate postsecondary attainment, except that it is directed more toward the low-achieving high school students. By bringing college courses and staff to that group, they are more likely to stay in school and matriculate in college programs, thereby serving to reduce the main leakage point for at-risk youth, the place where most of the dropout from the education system occurs. Preliminary ﬁndings are positive, with students showing educational gains in their ﬁrst year in the program and with those graduating from high school winning college scholarships far in excess of others in their socioeconomic group.

For many years universities have offered upper-division classes on community college campuses. Why then do the colleges seek to offer bachelor’s degrees when they can bring bachelor’s-level courses to their students with two-plus-two agreements or part- nerships with proximate universities? College leaders offer two responses: the programs are not available to people in the area; and students are more likely to progress through a program if it is available in the same institution.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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 440 440 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE By 2010, eighteen states had authorized the colleges to offer the baccalaureate. Because the enabling legislation statedworkforce and high-demand ﬁelds, the ﬁrst programs opened were in teacher education, nursing, and business. Since then, public safety, ﬁre science, interior design, ﬁlm and TV production, paralegal studies, and banking have been added. The colleges in Florida have been most vigorous: twenty of the twenty-eight have changed their names, most toState College.

Both early college initiatives and the community college bac- calaureate are based on sound rationales, and both have enjoyed much support: the ﬁrst from foundations committed to assisting students from low-income families; the second from the legislatures concerned about labor shortages in key areas where the baccalau- reate is required for entry. Both will expand unless K–12 reform strengthens the secondary schools so that assistance from com- munity colleges becomes unnecessary and unless more universities open satellite centers dedicated to preparing teachers and health professions practitioners and support them vigorously. Neither is likely anytime soon. One certainty, though, is that colleges that do make the vertical expansion in either direction (or both) will be changed markedly, both internally and in the eyes of the public.

Should vertical expansion continue its pattern of growth, deﬁn- ing the baccalaureate degree based on the discipline or ﬁeld of study rather than the type of institution offering it may become the norm.Applied and workforce degreemay be a favorite descriptor.

And if the push for higher levels of education continues, colleges offering bachelor’s degrees may well be expected to articulate them with university master’s degree programs. The Students Projecting the number of college students in general is precarious because various factors — such as employment possibilities, ﬁnan- cial aid availability, and the demands of the military — inﬂuenceCohen, 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 441 Toward the Future 441 the rate of college going. Estimating the numbers who will attend community colleges is further complicated because of unknowns, such as the attractiveness of competing institutions. Even a seem- ingly straightforward projection of the magnitude of the population in general is subject to variability because of immigration patterns.

One factor is certain: As long as the economic beneﬁt of going to college remains high, there will be a demand for collegiate studies.

There will be plenty of students to share among all postsec- ondary sectors, except in a few states such as Maine where the number of eighteen-year-olds is declining. The absolute number of eighteen-year-olds in the United States reached 4.3 million in 1979, bottomed at 3.3 million in 1992, then surpassed the 1979 level and peaked at 4.5 million in 2008 (Table 15.1). NCES predicted that the number of high school graduates that reached 3.4 million in 2009 would decline to 3.1 million in 2015, mainly because the proportion of Anglo students was declining more than the graduation rate for minorities was rising. Since over half of the Latinos who enter higher education do so in community colleges, any increase in their rate of high school graduation or college entry will have an accentuated effect on enrollments. However, Adelman offered a caveat: “Neither gender nor race/ethnicity nor second language background nor ﬁrst generation status ends up playing a statistically signiﬁcant role in explaining who starts out at a community college but SES … does play such a role: the higher the SES quintile, the less likely the student will start in a community college” (2005, p. xvii).

In general, the community colleges will sustain their enroll- ments because the demand for postsecondary education will remain high. By 2020 they will enroll eight million students, or nearly 43 percent of all higher education. They will continue to get their share of eighteen-year-olds because of their traditional appeal:

easy access; relatively low cost; and part-time-attendance possibil- ities. They will continue enrolling job seekers because of the high demand for people in occupations for which some postsecondaryCohen, 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 442 442 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE Table 15.1. Demographics and Enrollments, 1979–2020 Year Number of Enrollment in Public (July 1) 18-Year-Olds Two-Year Degree-Granting (in thousands) Institutions (in thousands) 1979 4,316 4,056 1993 3,455 5,337 1996 3,650 5,314 1998 3,984 5,246 2000 4,078 5,697 2002 4,052 6,270 2004 4,150 6,244 2006 4,205 6,225 2008 4,459 6,640 2010 4,332 7,155 2012 4,233 7,190 2014 4,191 7,397 2016 4,147 7,629 2018 4,241 7,847 2020 4,402 8,025 Source: Hussar and Bailey, 2006; NCES,Digest, 2011. training but not a bachelor’s degree is expected. Assuming that ﬁnancial aid availability for middle- and upper-income students does not increase sufﬁciently so that tuition differentials are offset, the community colleges will get an even greater share of the stu- dents as tuition at four-year colleges and universities continues its rapid rise. Assuming that further limitations are not put on Latino and Asian immigration and on international students, college enrollments will beneﬁt from those groups. The students will con- tinue their intermittent attendance patterns; most will continue to be employed, pursuing work and study as parallel activities; the enrollment of part-time students will remain constant at 60 percent. Fueled by the greater proportion of younger students, the number of associate degrees conferred will increase by 17 percent,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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 443 Toward the Future 443 to 981,000 per year, considerably higher than the 12 percent growth in overall student populations (NCES,Digest, 2012).

Public perceptions have a huge impact on the rate of college going, especially as they relate to the value and importance of college completions. AACC’s (2012) Commission on the Future of Community Colleges said, “By 2007, 59 percent of employed Americans needed a postsecondary credential or degree” (p. vii).

(Whether the wordneededmeanswere in possession of a credential or degreeorcould not have attained their jobs without onemakes a big difference.) Similarly, over the past several years the Lumina Foundation (2012) has repeated variations of the following: “By the year 2020 nearly 65 percent of American jobs will require some postsecondary degree, for a total of 62 million … At current rates, the United States will produce around 39 million two- and four-year college degrees, leaving a gap of 23 million” (p. 1). Here again it is unclear what the wordrequiremeans.

Some analysts point to the labor market and take issue with these ﬁgures. One has said, “Nearly half of the 41.7 million grad- uates of four-year colleges in the workforce hold jobs that require less than a bachelor’s degree … These include sales representative, ofﬁce clerk, retail salesperson, cashier, waiter/waitress” (Lederman, 2013a, n.p.). As reported in Chapter Eleven on occupational edu- cation, this ratio has been true for many decades. Nonetheless, if people hear continually that they need degrees they will seek them even if the contention belies their experience, and even when data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics say that 31 percent of Americans hold a bachelor’s degree even though only 14 percent of jobs require one. The catch is that over the past forty years wages for workers with no more than a high school diploma have been falling relative to degree holders. Whether jobs data are based on revealed demand or on what experts perceive as requirements, young people are well advised to complete college with at least an associate degree. If most of your contemporaries have a degree, don’t be the one without it.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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 444 444 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE In general, the trend toward sorting students at entry will continue. The matriculation plans that have been in effect for several years reveal the persistence of regulations demanding that the colleges guide students into programs consonant with their abilities. It will be difﬁcult for students anywhere to ﬁnd an institution that will allow a random walk through the curriculum.

Students will be tested, guided, and matriculated into programs.

Student ﬂow management based on students’ declared goals and course-taking patterns will be common. The California community colleges have already adopted policies giving registration priority to continuing students and also favoring those new entrants who have completed orientation and assessment tests.

Put in broader terms, the community colleges are experiencing a metamorphosis similar in this regard to that which affected the com- pulsory sector earlier as state-level testing, curriculum standards, and graduation requirements gained prominence. A laissez-faire approach to student attendance, prevalent in community colleges throughout most of the twentieth century, had fostered the high ratio of students attending intermittently and the presentation of classes as discrete units. Now, the strong moves toward assessment and placement, toward students making steady progress toward completing a program, will lead to greater program completion.

The practice of letting everyone in and letting them take what they want has been put to rest as the open door effectually closes. The Faculty Because college enrollments will grow steadily, the number of faculty will increase somewhat. A high proportion of full-timers teach additional courses for extra pay, thus making it unnecessary to employ additional staff except in singular areas. Demands that the full-time instructors be awarded rights of ﬁrst refusal when overload classes are imminent will continue. Pro rata pay for part- time employment has long been discussed but shows no sign 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 445 Toward the Future 445 spreading. As long as full-time faculty are willing to teach extra classes at effectually lower pay rates and as long as administrators need part-time, hourly rate instructors to help balance the budget, pro rata pay will ﬁnd few champions.

Faculty hiring practices show little sign of change. Afﬁrmative action programs have been in place in all colleges for many years, but progress in employing members of minority groups has been slow. Nor has there been much progress in preservice preparation for instructors who are inclined to teach across disciplinary lines.

The number of career-bound students who take liberal arts classes and the number of baccalaureate-bound students in occupational courses seem destined to force some form of faculty crossover to accommodate members of both groups. But the colleges will have to foster their own interdisciplinarians. The greatest need is for faculty who will become leaders in integrating curriculum and assessing outcomes. These will come from within the ranks of the practicing instructors; few people with those skills can be expected to appear as new employees.

Many aspects of instruction will not change. The faculty will continue to hold solo practice as their primary code. The number of hours that a full-time instructor spends in the classroom has not changed for decades. Despite the growth in online education, few sustained innovative practices that would teach more students with fewer instructor contact hours are being introduced. Instruc- tion is stubbornly labor intensive. As Bok pointed out, “College instruction remains among the small cluster of human activities that do not grow demonstrably better over time” (1993, p. 170).

If the productivity of college instructors does not increase and if everyone in the profession is paid and advanced at the same rate, there will be little room for overall pay increases. Teachers cannot anticipate making more money merely because they work harder or are cleverer than their fellows.

How might the profession become differentiated? One way would be if instead of, or perhaps in addition to, the image of 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 446 446 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE instructor in the classroom with a group of students, practicing a profession in solo fashion, the instructor at the apex of a pyramid of paraprofessionals (readers, test scorers, peer advisors, and parapro- fessional aides) came to the fore. But there have been few efforts to build these types of assistants into the instructional pattern.

Until recently, moves toward professionalization as evidenced by managerial roles or enhanced productivity have been made by instructors who have taken command of learning resource cen- ters and various curricular projects designed to maximize student learning by combining instructional and student support services.

The next professional enhancements will be led by the instruc- tors who build or modify existing reproducible learning sequences and interactive media. To the extent they can demonstrate that their efforts have engendered greater learning opportunities for less money, they will be recognized as instructional leaders. More than managers of paraprofessionals, they will be involved with new sets of colleagues: media technologists, script writers, editors, and production coordinators.

The road to professionalism is a long one, and although the faculty have made great strides in extricating themselves from the administrator-dominated, paternalistic situation of an earlier time they have far to go. In some institutions, they may settle in to an untoward model: continuing antagonism between themselves and the administrators; isolation and solo performance in the classroom; and periodic battles for smaller classes, augmented salaries, and more far-reaching fringe beneﬁts. The faculty must take care not to act too much like other public agency workers in their negotiating sessions, in the way they seek redress for grievances through legislative action and the courts, and in their unwillingness to police their own ranks as members of a profession must, lest they be viewed as merely another category of overpaid civil servants.

A more desirable model is a faculty involved with curricu- lum planning in the broadest sense: reading and writing in theirCohen, 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 447 Toward the Future 447 disciplines and in the ﬁeld of education; conducting research on stu- dents’ exit and entrance abilities; and becoming media production specialists, program directors, laboratory managers, or curriculum coordinators. The actuality will be somewhere between the two extremes. In fact, progress toward both civil service status and professionalism can occur simultaneously. In some districts, the faculty champion both a union speaking for wages and welfare and a vigorous academic senate concerning itself with curricular and instructional issues.

It is possible that the conditions of the workplace will sup- port a return to a time when the faculty within single colleges shared a sense of community. The growing move toward assessing learning outcomes, as differentiated from graduation, transfer, and job-getting rates, could perforce involve the entire faculty in cre- ating and employing student learning measures. And faculty will be expected to validate prior-learning portfolios, which will neces- sitate some cross-sector collaboration. But will the part-timers be treated as partners? If the conditions of their employment evolve so that they have rights and status equal to the full-timers, a professional community could arise.

Organization, Governance, and Administration Few changes in organization and governance are imminent. The trend toward greater state-level coordination will continue at a slow pace. As the states become more involved with college policies, gaps in interinstitutional cooperation will be ﬁlled, and criteria for student matriculation and progress will be set. Statewide coordination has also been emphasized as a means of providing proportionate funding, avoiding curriculum duplication, and easing the ﬂow of students from one sector of public postsecondary education to another.

The pressure for state control will result in continued efforts to micromanage the colleges, but it will have minimal effect onCohen, 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 448 448 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE instruction and student services. State-level coordination relates more to reporting, compliance with regulations, and accountability for numerous aspects of institutional operations; there is much room for local autonomy within those requirements. Before a major change can be made, the procedure has to be vetted through an incredible array of organizations, especially state-level associations of trustees, deans, presidents, academic senates, humanities faculty, physical education faculty, counselors, librarians, and on and on.

Nothing very sudden or dramatic can survive that process. The combination of state and local control is intact.

The federal government will continue its efforts to regulate higher education. It has been relentless in pressing accrediting agen- cies to stiffen their requirements on institutions so that expected completion, placement, and licensure pass rates are established for every program, especially in occupational education. The for-proﬁt sector has been urging the federal government to deny senior institutions the right to refuse to accept transfer credits solely on the type of accreditation manifest by the sending institutions. But some governmental moves will advantage community colleges; in fall 2007, the College Cost Reduction and Access Act repealed the provisions that reduced Pell Grant eligibility for students attending lower-cost schools. It also cut the interest rate on student loans, provided tuition assistance for undergraduates committed to teach- ing in high-need public schools, and agreed to forgive debt for alumni who worked for at least ten years in certain public sectors.

The major changes in local college administration will occur in three areas. The ﬁrst will be to augment the number of peo- ple assigned to collect data and prepare reports showing that the college is in compliance with constantly increasing extramural demands. The second will be in program coordination, with staff members assigned to manage the specially funded programs that the colleges develop to serve new clients and increase budgets. This staff differentiation will occur more through internal reassignments than through new hires. The third shift will be an increase 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 449 Toward the Future 449 campus security. The tragedy at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 2007 was a shock to all college presidents, and since then mur- ders at universities in Alabama, California, Illinois, and elsewhere have served to accentuate the alarm. The colleges will not erect a multibillion-dollar agency dedicated to x-raying shoes and con- ﬁscating nail clippers, but the budgets for campus safety including armed guards and student surveillance, proﬁling, and mental health assessment, will certainly increase.

Finance Characteristics of ﬁnancing will change little in the coming years, although college efforts to generate new resources through fundrais- ing and private sector collaboration will continue to grow. Most of the institutions began with substantial funding from their locali- ties, but subsequently the trend has been toward state-level support.

This will not be reversed. The colleges will compete for state funds along with other public agencies, ranging from other sectors of education to state-supported welfare, parks, and prisons.

The community colleges have a decided advantage over other higher education sectors in the cost of instruction. Although the precise amounts allocated to lower-division instruction in the uni- versities are rarely calculated with any reliability, the overall student cost differential is obvious. Community college instruction costs as little as one-half as much as the per-student cost in a comprehensive four-year institution and one-fourth as much as in a public research university.

Enrollment restrictions or caps on growth will continue to be imposed with ever-increasing speciﬁcity. As a supplement to fund- ing on a full-time student equivalent (FTSE) basis, a greater proportion of operating funds may be allocated according to the number of students making steady progress within programs, grad- uating, or transferring to four-year institutions. So far, the amounts involved in performance funding are small, but several far-reachingCohen, 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 450 450 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE shifts are on the horizon: allocation based in part on performance, as contrasted with entitlements; an acceleration of the move from local to state priorities; different indicators for two-year and four- year colleges; and a turn away from any involvement with lifelong learning that does not contribute to career upgrading, retraining, or occupational entry skills.

The colleges will be expected to provide evidence of increased productivity and speciﬁc programmatic outcomes. California’s gov- ernor has recently proposed changing the funding formula to pay for students who complete courses rather than reimbursing them based on third- or fourth-week enrollments. But the community college state chancellor has cautioned that performance-based funding “might encourage colleges to cut courses that are difﬁcult to complete” (Rivera, Jan. 21, 2013, p. A12). Difﬁcult to achieve in a labor-intensive enterprise, one that has been attuned more to process than to product, these demands for data on expenditures relative to outcomes will be expected to lead toward greater efﬁ- ciencies. Cost savings will be sought in many other areas, the most obvious in moves toward yearlong calendars and eighteen-hour days. These would relieve capital costs but would also increase costs of campus security, energy use, and building maintenance.

Some commentators have anticipated that the retirement of high-cost senior faculty who entered the institutions during their growth years in the 1960s would lead to lower faculty costs.

However, to the extent that the senior instructors are replaced with junior full-timers, the cost savings are short-lived. Most salary schedules award automatic pay increments for years of service, with no proviso for increased productivity, and the number of years between the beginning and the top salaries is few. The savings in instructional expenditures will come primarily in institutions that convert their staff to a higher preponderance of part-time, hourly-rate teachers.

The years since 2010 have been unkind to community college ﬁnance. Just as the colleges gained national recognition for theirCohen, 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 451 Toward the Future 451 contributions to student progress and workforce education, their state appropriations declined by one-fourth. Even assuming that the current pattern of annual reductions subsides, it is quite unlikely that any state will increase its allocations by more than one or two percentage points a year because most states will be in structural deﬁcits for years to come. Therefore, the colleges cannot expect to fund wage increases or the costs of new programs, including the widely heralded instructional technology revolution, through traditional budget lines. For the next several years, they will ﬁnd it difﬁcult even to provide classes for all the students who apply for entry.

Because all the community colleges in a state tend to be funded under the same formulas, college budgets will be augmented only to the extent that local leaders are entrepreneurial. Seeking grants from philanthropic foundations, ﬁnding public agencies with funds for staff training, and acquiring state funds for unique programs will be rewarded. The practices of leasing the open areas on campus to agencies that want to conduct fairs, shows, swap meets, and the like will accelerate. College foundations will be pursued with increasing vigor. Contract training has expanded rapidly and bodes to continue as a favorite way of mounting new, specialized programs that beneﬁt local businesses while relieving a portion of the overhead that the college-credit programs bear. Some ﬁnancial relief will be realized by colleges offering credits for cash. Students whose portfolios are assessed may be asked to pay for the course credit they receive. A time may come when some students’ only on-campus experience will consist of taking several tests, while they agree to pay tuition for all the courses required for a degree.

Interestingly, the idea that the colleges should be funded pro- grammatically the way parks, recreation centers, and libraries are funded has made no headway in state capitols, but it will progress nevertheless as each college acquires its own funds for special programs. Using the money generated by higher tuition to sup- port greater aid to low-income students, a favorite concept of 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 452 452 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE economists who study higher education, will continue getting lip service but little tangible support in state legislatures. Instead, the states will use the higher tuition as an excuse to deny requests for increased allocations. Similarly, the contention that two-year college funding should be brought more in line with other public institutions will fall on deaf ears; the colleges’ relatively low per- student expenditures are essential for keeping overall postsecondary costs down.

Instruction and Student Services Instruction is the process of causing learning. Learning may occur in any setting, but instruction involves arranging conditions so that it is predictable and directed. Those conditions include access to new information, organized sequence and content, and, not least, whatever else is necessary to keep the learners attendant on the task. Would that the drive to learn were so powerful that all people engaged themselves individually with learning all they need to know to play valued roles in society. Absent that, instruc- tion remains essential. Regardless of the spread of multimedia, interactive media, and other distance-learning technologies that are currently available, classroom-centered instruction will not only not disappear but it will not even diminish very much as a percentage of instructional effort.

Some of the more sanguine commentators envision instruction as fully learner controlled and totally responsive to individual knowledge seekers. Interestingly, although such a pattern has been given impetus by the availability of the Internet, it actually stems from the philosophy undergirding adult education; Ivan Illich wrote about it inDeschooling Societyin 1972, and theLearning Annex, an informal network of education users and providers, affords a contemporary example. However, in an anarchistic information environment, intermediaries are essential, not because they alone possess knowledge but because the knowledge seeker needs theirCohen, 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 453 Toward the Future 453 help in navigating the sea of irrelevant and often inaccurate information available online.

Before distance learning through any medium can become central to community college instruction, the instructors must adopt it as a desirable concept. It is possible for a college to purchase or lease multimedia or interactive instructional programs and to present them without involving the instructional staff, but to do so would require a shift in focus from faculty ownership of instruction.

Some colleges will do that, leaving the tenured instructors in their classrooms teaching in traditional ways and building massive instructional programs through ancillary organizations. But most will maintain several instructional forms within the parameters of the preexisting college organization.

It is fascinating to reﬂect on all the media that were supposed to change the conditions of teaching. To the phonograph, telephone, radio, television, and computer have been added the laser-directed disc, satellites and downlinks, and other electronic marvels too numerous to be tabulated. These automated media did indeed change the way that information is transmitted, but not in the way that the educators had hoped. Their primary application has not been in socially valuable directions or even in the schools. It has been in the world of entertainment and social media, luring people away from the imagery occasioned by reading, away from reﬂectiveness, patience, and perseverance. The dream of students learning on their own while their instructors were freed from information dispensing to engage in creative interaction with them has remained just that — a dream from which visitors to the schools awaken as they walk the corridors and see instructors and students in classrooms acting quite as they did before the microchip or, for that matter, the vacuum tube.

Changes in the concept of productivity will be central to moves toward media production and use. Productivity in the university coalesced around research and scholarship. In the community colleges, productivity has been deﬁned as numbers of studentsCohen, 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 454 454 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE taught per instructional dollar. But the number of students exposed to an instructional medium, whether in a classroom or computer terminal, is declining as an indicator. Few auditors will continue to accept instructional productivity as a measure of the number of students within range of the instructor’s voice. Changes in instructional form and in assessment of results will have to proceed in tandem. Eventually, measures of student learning, achievement, and satisfaction will have to be emphasized. In the interim, faculty veriﬁcation of prior student learning will grow.

The prior learning assessment activities advocated by such agencies as the Lumina and Bill & Melinda Gates foundations through the Complete College America program and by the U.S.

Labor Department grants aimed at job training for displaced work- ers require colleges to incorporate prior learning credits through testing, examining portfolios, and assessing military on-the-job training. One problem they have encountered is the separation of teaching and assessment, especially as it bypasses the faculty.

Furthermore, if the portfolio assessments and tests lack rigor, the process risks looking like cash for credits.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become popular in the short time since they began, but their momentum may slow. A national survey of college presidents found very small numbers strongly agreeing that MOOCs will improve learning for all students, solve colleges’ ﬁnancial problems, or reduce costs of education for students. The only query to attract more than single- digit agreement (11 percent) wasfoster creative pedagogy(Jaschik, 2013). The low completion rates are also a deterrent. A sample of twenty-nine MOOCs found between 1 and 19 percent of viewers ﬁnishing the courses, 7 percent on average (Parr, 2013).

The development of instruction as a discipline has been retarded by many forces, ranging from preservice faculty prepara- tion that ignores concepts of instruction to institutional funding on the basis of student attendance that pays too little attention to student learning. However, the classiﬁcation of students intoCohen, 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 455 Toward the Future 455 various subgroups is also a rarely acknowledged but powerful limitation. As long as instructors, researchers, and administrators continue subdividing student achievement according to race, gender, and ethnicity, Instruction (deliberately capitalized) as a process leading to measurable student learning cannot progress.

The categories afford a too convenient rationalization for variant student attainment: “They didn’t learn because they are … ” or “They achieved good scores because they are … ” The acceptance of mastery learning or any similar concept will not suffuse the colleges, while characterization of students allows the staff to disclaim responsibility for deﬁning, predicting, and measuring learning across all ﬁelds, disciplines, and programs.

Although student services practitioners have long advocated better integration of their programs with the colleges’ instruc- tional efforts, only rarely have strong links been built between the counseling, tutorial, and orientation efforts, on one hand, and the instructional programs, on the other. More recently, led by managers of instructional resource centers and learning laborato- ries, student services and instruction have come closer together instudent success centersthat integrate several aspects of student services with computer-based learning, tutorial activities, faculty instructional development support, student assessment, and numer- ous other functions now typically scattered across the campus. The budgetary lines that divide student services from instruction have tended to hinder the development of this form of integration. But to the extent its proponents can demonstrate improved student retention, it will proceed.

As of now, though, “students don’t do optional” (AACC, 2012, p. 9). A full 30 percent do not attend orientation; less than 33 percent report that a college adviser helped them; 76 percent never use tutoring services; and most are bewildered by registration processes and often dysfunctional placement methods and advising (pp. 9–10). AACC’s Commission on the Future urged the colleges to redesign themselves and listed numerous essential elements 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 456 456 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE institutional transformation, including focusing on student success, with faculty taking collective responsibility; changing fragmented course-taking patterns to clear educational pathways; moving from a culture of anecdote to a culture of evidence; and seeking funding tied not only to enrollment but also to institutional performance.

The National Center for Academic Transformation has pur- sued similar ideas. One of its multiyear programs worked with numerous two- and four-year colleges in redesigning entire courses around basic principles of learning: providing students with indi- vidual assistance; ongoing assessment and automated feedback; and ensuring sufﬁcient time on task. Many moves in these directions are under way, but the colleges have far to travel before they become the norm.

Curriculum An outline of curriculum classiﬁed broadly as developmental, integrative, transfer, occupational, and community education can be projected.

Developmental Education Developmental education came to the fore after decades of being treated as an embarrassing secret — as something that the colleges did but that their leaders would rather not publicize. But state- level planners typically saw the colleges as key players in literacy development. To name but three: the Maryland State Board for Community Colleges (1986) and the Board of Trustees of Re- gional Community Colleges in Connecticut (1989) concluded early on that community colleges have a primary responsibility to provide developmental education, and in California the Joint Committee for Review of the Master Plan for Higher Education (California State Legislature, 1987) elevated remedial education to a priority second only to transfer and occupational studies.

Despite all the increases in high school graduation, develop- mental education is as big as it ever was. A sizable amount 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 457 Toward the Future 457 basic skill development will continue to be necessary for many years merely to accommodate the backlog of functionally illiter- ate and nonnative-English-speaking people in America. No other postsecondary structure is in better position to provide this essen- tial instruction. The community colleges will not only offer it on their own campuses but will also expand their teaching of literacy in universities, lower schools, and business enterprises. Whether developmental education is funded separately or whether its cost is aggregated along with other curricular functions, it will account for one-third of the instructional budget. This amount will vary widely between colleges; it will be highest where the lower schools pass through numbers of marginally literate students, college going and immigration rates are high, and matriculation testing and placement are mandated. But as Fulton (2012) emphasized, the institutions need to evaluate vendor contracts regarding the validity of placement tests, better match the tests with course requirements, provide information regarding testing and placement to prospec- tive students, and recommend short refresher courses before testing.

They especially should track the effectiveness of the procedures frequently.

Integrative Education Integrative general education has struggled for decades. Among other forces antagonistic to it, the heavy hand of academic discipline–based distribution requirements maintained in the uni- versities limits college efforts to build interdisciplinary curricula.

Fundamental curricular reform occurs very slowly. The clerically dominated classical curriculum was under attack for at least half of the nineteenth century before a secularized curriculum centering on science became the norm. The twentieth century saw the rise of occupational education and the acceptance of remedial studies as legitimate collegiate functions. A mandated, integrative education through which students gain historical perspective and a sense of the social and environmental trends that affect their future has yet to take center stage. In sum, except in the rare institution,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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 458 458 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE integrative education will continue being debated in the context of distribution requirements. It is a centripetal idea that is constantly subverted by the centrifugal forces of staff members with their own agendas and by universities that have rarely provided it for their own students.

The best prospect for socially desirable integrative studies in community colleges is to merge four strands of curriculum that have been thriving individually: critical thinking; service learning; civic engagement; and sustainability. All relate to the educated person’s acting on behalf of the broader community, the general education ideal. Critical thinking is offered typically either as a stand-alone course or as a section in an English or social science course.

Service learning is well established in most colleges and is popular with students who understand they must give something back to their communities. The Kettering Foundation has been promoting civic education for years. And many colleges have formed centers or institutes for civic engagement, often combined with service learning: De Anza (California), Bristol (Massachusetts), Hudson Valley (New York), Ivy Tech (Indiana), and Tunxis (Connecticut) are but a few.

Sustainability, the newer thread, is manifest in the environ- mental science (technology, management, stewardship, and design) and ecology courses now offered throughout the country. A link between them offers a chance to penetrate the conceptual separa- tion between collegiate studies and community service. Half the colleges involved in service learning have reported linkages with environmental conservation. Chandler-Gilbert Community Col- lege (Arizona) has an environmental service-learning project for biology majors. Cape Cod Community College (Massachusetts) has sponsored environmental internships with more than ﬁfty partner- ing agencies. Rowe described numerous examples of sustainability courses and programs along with studies showing that involved students develop “increased caring about the future of society, 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 459 Toward the Future 459 increased belief that they can make a difference” in solving envi- ronmental problems (2002, p. 1). The League for Innovation in the Community College and the American Association of Community Colleges have pledged support for these types of programs. It seems likely that students will be required or at least urged to participate in sustainability projects in the community.

From a curricular point of view, the growth of sustainability has led to at least partial integration among life sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools. Models vary from infusion into courses throughout the curriculum to the establishment of sustainability as a unique academic discipline. Broadly, an emphasis on sustainability leads to a more informed public, with students able to envision it from the local to geopolitical levels. And employers often see its public relations value. The American Association for Sustainability in Higher Education (Johnston, 2012) reported that 90 percent of the two- and four-year colleges they studied in 2010 had infused some aspect of sustainability into their courses.

Several of them were requiring students to take at least one course in sustainability.

Integrative education will become more prominent when a critical mass of educators recognizes its importance. Imparting ways of judging and appraising values, ethics, and morality becomes ever more essential as the unﬁltered media whisk information around indiscriminately. The faster the Internet becomes, the greater the need to imbue values that cannot be downloaded.

Liberal Arts and Transfer Education The prognosis for the liberal arts curriculum is good. The linkage aspect of the transfer function — preparing students to enter junior- level programs leading to the bachelor’s degree in health ﬁelds, business, technologies, and the professions — will thrive because entrance to those programs depends on students’ completing courses in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, mathematics, and English usage. And because of a steady increase in population,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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 460 460 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE the need to maintain access to traditional liberal arts studies has become greater than at any other time since the ﬁrst wave of baby boomers reached age eighteen in the early 1960s. Few universities will expand their freshman classes; online education will not satisfy the demand. Greater numbers of eighteen-year-olds will ﬁnd they have no choice but to enroll in a community college, and transfer rates will continue their slow rise as they have since the late 1990s.

The liberal arts and transfer function will thrive also as the colleges enroll greater numbers of minority students. Like most students, they want jobs; like all students, they need a perspective on the culture, a sense of interpersonal relations, and an ability to analyze situations and communicate appropriately. They seek the higher education that they need to progress in society: increased literacy; understanding of ethical issues; and realization of past and present time. Difﬁcult to recall in an era when a preponderance of research in higher education has been devoted to ferreting out and deploring colleges and programs where students are not represented in exact proportion to their numbers in racial subgroups, these categories are not immutable. They are instead linked to political will, and they and the conditions that the analysts complain about mutate continually. As an example, now that women are in a clear majority in the student body and approximate parity in the community college faculty, those who for years lamented their subordinate position are having difﬁculty ﬁnding areas where they are treated unequally (although unrepentant ideology will keep them seeking pockets of discrimination for years to come). Racial categorizations, too, will shift as progress in higher education for each group expands, as many independent universities offer enhanced aid packages to students from low-income families, and as different ways of stratifying people, especially those characterizing themselves as more than one race, gain appeal.

The emphasis on ethnic identity may be shifting gradually toward family income as a way of differentiating among students. A few foundations, including Jack Kent Cooke, Lumina, and NellieCohen, 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 461 Toward the Future 461 Mae, have focused on assisting low-income students to enter and progress in higher education. The federal Cost Reduction and Access Act is another aid. Among its provisions is one offering challenge grants — matching funds given to states or organizations providing need-based grants and support services to high school and college students from low-income families or those whose parents had not attended college. The need is tremendous: “Perhaps as few as 1,000 out of the 11,000 community college transfer students who enrolled at selective colleges in 2002 are from low income households” (Fischer, 2007, p. 1). Michaels summed the situation:

“When we focus on globalization as a cultural issue, we’re trying to solve a real problem (economic inequality) by working on a false one (cultural identity)” (2006, p. 165). But it may be a long time coming; the poor are not nearly as well organized as the identity groups are.

The continuation of schooling from grades K–20 reveals some broad patterns of curriculum differentiation. From the beginning of school through grade 8, a rather homogeneous curriculum centering on literacy, numeracy, and acculturation is presented. In grades 15–20, that is, the upper division of college through graduate school, the major emphasis is on professional development and in- depth learning. In grades 9–14 — secondary school and community college — the curriculum is most mixed. Part is directed toward workforce development and part toward preprofessional education, personal interest studies, and developmental education. Most of the tracking and sorting of people and most of the student attrition occurs in institutions providing this least homogeneous curriculum.

Occupational Education Occupational education will remain prominent. There can be no reversing the perception that one of the colleges’ prime functions is to train workers, and ample funds are available to support this function. The national push to increase the number of adults with postsecondary credentials or degrees will augment this function,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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 462 462 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE as will contracts with local businesses to train and retrain work- ers. The stackable certiﬁcates noted in Chapter Eleven will help stimulate partnerships between the colleges and industries that are otherwise reluctant to establish their own. In 2012–13 the U.S.

Labor Department awarded $1.5 billion to community colleges to develop stackable certiﬁcates and career training paths for high- skill jobs. Competition from universities that develop programs in the technologies and from proprietary schools and publicly funded ad hoc job training programs that teach the more speciﬁc skills will not change the central tendency. There is enough demand to keep them all occupied.

Among the ten occupations projected to have the largest percentage job growth for the decade subsequent to 2010, eight are in ﬁelds for which the two-year colleges have training programs:

physical therapy assistant; home health aide; medical secretary; occupational therapy assistant; registered nurse; licensed practical and vocational nurse; tractor-trailer truck driver; and personal care aide (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2012a). These and other high-demand ﬁelds, including police ofﬁcers, ﬁreﬁghters, on-site sales, hairdressers, child-care providers, construction workers, and automotive repair persons, have a well-established presence. The rapid advances in technology are making skilled workers obsolete in many manufacturing processes. Even now, when the cost of a robot is no more than two years wages paid to the worker it can replace, that job is at risk of being lost to automation. Whether or not the American economy in fact depends on the addition of millions of degree holders,globalizationand theglobal economyare poor guides for occupational education. The community college programs will thrive as long as they continue preparing people for local jobs that are least likely to be outsourced or automated.

Community Education Community education expanded dramatically during the 1970s and held its own even in the face of budget reductions in the 1980s. ItsCohen, 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 463 Toward the Future 463 proponents have been skilled in effecting cooperative relationships and securing special funds for it. Nonetheless, its future is not assured because questions of intent, quality control, and institu- tional credibility have not been answered. Funding will continue to be the most difﬁcult problem to resolve. Although community education advocates certainly will not achieve their fanciful dream of serving as the nexus of the region’s educational services, their greatest successes will be in rural areas where competing institu- tions are weakest. English as a Second Language and adult basic education will do well, but personal interest courses will do poorly unless they are presented on a self-supporting basis.

Issues of deﬁnition and scope will be no less prominent than they always have been. The notion of community education as building communitieshas never been credible.Communitiestypi- cally were deﬁned as including everyone in the district, which the internationalists extended to the world. Thus, the colleges were supposed to build local, then global communities, a fey concept even before the ugliness of September 11, 2001, forced a reconsid- eration of the term globalization itself. Over sixty years ago Jacobs ([1961] 1992) analyzed how communities developed only from the bottom up. More recently Fukuyama explained, “A community is not formed every time a group of people happens to interact with one another; true communities are bound together by the val- ues, norms, and experiences shared among their members” (2000, p. 14). And “geographical proximity remains important — perhaps even more important — than previously” (p. 15).

Colleges could be reorganized to maintain large-scale commu- nity education operations if community education were funded programmatically; that is, a college would be awarded a ﬁxed sum each year to provide cultural, occupational upgrade, recreation, per- sonal interest, community health, and semiprofessional retraining programs to the people of its district. Or the colleges could maintain their open-access policies — with students taking courses that may or may not lead to degrees — but would build a transfer or honorsCohen, 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 464 464 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE college within such a structure. The main funding pattern would be for individuals participating in courses with reimbursement on an attendance basis, but the transfer or honors college would be operated separately, with a variety of specially funded enrichment opportunities and work assistance or scholarship monies made available. A third way of sustaining community education might be to maintain the college’s transfer and occupational functions but to offer all the community education services through an extension division, as many universities have done. This would put all com- munity education on a self-sustaining basis, since those who take the short courses or participate in the activities would pay for them ad hoc. Still another way of maintaining the traditional college with a community education component would be to place the community service work, along with the developmental and adult basic education function, in a separate center, where staff members would work forty-hour weeks. None of these models is likely to enjoy widespread adoption. Community education will continue as adjunctive, supported by participant fees, contributions from college foundations, and special-purpose grants.

Research, Accountability, and Outcomes The research in community colleges should center on assess- ing institutional outcomes. The classical educational research paradigms apply to the community colleges no less than they do to other forms of schools. Students attend, learn, and move on to other pursuits. Those outcomes can be assessed — as, indeed, they are in many districts and states. More such studies should be done in individual colleges. But too few institutional research ofﬁcers are available to coordinate them, too few high-level administrators appreciate their importance, and when they are conducted, too many well-meaning but futile attempts are made to relate the ﬁndings to particular college practices.

The colleges should be assessed on the basis of their success in promoting individual mobility. How many people used them asCohen, 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 465 Toward the Future 465 a step toward the baccalaureate or higher-status jobs? How many broke out of a cycle of family poverty? How many gained rapid access to society by becoming literate? How many learned to put their own lives together? If the goal of individual mobility is not broad enough for those who seek measures of the colleges’ contri- butions, let them look to what the colleges have done for special populations in the aggregate such as the aged, disabled, low-income youth, or immigrants. How much do the colleges contribute to the solution of perennial social issues like homelessness, a balanced economy, energy conservation, and white-collar and street crime?

Yet assessing these indirect effects is fraught with methodological complications; even analyses of graduates’ workforce success tie only loosely to larger-scale societal gains. Furthermore, college leaders have had ceaseless difﬁculty in explaining how students who attend for not more than one or two classes have beneﬁted.

For half the students who enter the community college as their ﬁrst higher education experience, a course or two before they drop out is the norm. How many of them found what they needed?

In an education system designed to move people from one grade to another, it is difﬁcult to shift the paradigm and argue that sequential enrollments are not the essential outcome but rather that something else — job skills, a sense of well-being, or some other intangible — has been a positive result.

Who will ask and answer these questions? Institutional research budgets, if augmented at all, will not keep pace with demands for greater accountability. State legislatures have never been inclined to support research categorically or to suggest overarching research agendas (although they do not hesitate to put forth unfunded man- dates for more data). Some of the answers will be provided by the nationally oriented researchers housed in universities and federally sponsored agencies and may be forthcoming via national initia- tives such as AACC’s Voluntary Framework of Accountability and the Gates and Lumina foundations’ Complete College America project. But progress will be sporadic, and accountability efforts will focus on student progress and outcomes measures that are moreCohen, 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 466 466 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE easily deﬁnable, like retention, transfer, and graduation rates, as opposed to students’ contributions to societal betterment or even achievement of an enrollee’s educational or training goal.

The Social Role Overall, the community college is a stable institution. Its faculty, curriculum, and types of students change little from year to year.

Institutional stability is evidenced indirectly by viewing the envi- ronmental scans conducted periodically to alert college leaders to trends that might affect their institutions. Three reports issued by the Association of Community College Trustees (2004), the RP Group (2004), and the Colorado Community College System (2003) are illustrative. The ﬁrst was based on a survey of col- lege trustees and the other two on reviewing the popular press plus professional literature. The reports anticipated the importance of predictable funding; collaboration across sectors, including for- proﬁt; increased numbers of students; K–12 weaknesses; responding to changing workforce requirements; demands for accountability; federal inﬂuence; and online instruction. In brief, except for com- ments regarding the for-proﬁt sector and the growth of online instruction, the scans would have reached the same conclusions had they reviewed the literature of the 1960s.

However, social changes affect the way the nation views its social structures. For example, health-care reform became a promi- nent issue in the 1990s as costs of coverage rose and the percentage of people whose employers included health care among their ben- eﬁts declined. A shift in the direction of contingent, fungible, and part-time workers reduced the likelihood that people could expect their health-care costs to be covered by their employ- ers. Accordingly, the burden somehow had to be shifted to the broader community. The magnitude of this change was similar to what industrial nations faced earlier in the century when 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 467 Toward the Future 467 breakdown of the nuclear family meant that the elderly would have to be supported at least in part by a ubiquitous form of old age insurance — hence, the creation of the Social Security Act.

An analogous situation in education has been developing over several decades. As fewer people are prepared for careers that will sustain them throughout their working life, the need for successive retraining experiences becomes apparent. This retraining is more than merely learning to use the latest developments in technology in one’s own ﬁeld; continuing education offered through profes- sional organizations and companies can accommodate most of that.

Retraining is for people who are changing careers altogether, going from production jobs to entrepreneurial situations or from one trade or profession to another. At best, a person’s early education will emphasize ﬂexibility, critical thinking, literacy skills, and social awareness so that a move between endeavors can be undertaken with facility. At least, an easily accessible, low-cost educational structure should be available for the necessary realignment.

These elements of institutional mission are somewhat different from those that guided the community colleges during the 1960s and 1970s. When the colleges were expanding, one contention was that newly emergent populations of college goers needed access to higher education so that the ﬁnest minds among them might be nurtured. Many analysts opined that talent was distributed more or less at random across gender, ethnic, and social class lines; therefore, as access to higher education became available to everyone, new geniuses would emerge. The more sanguine pundits contended that a readily accessible system of postsecondary institutions would lead to a broadscale increase in general community intelligence, taste, understanding, and political will. The ﬁrst contention, that everyone should be given an opportunity, has borne fruit as women have entered careers in business, law, and medicine and as greater numbers of people from racial and ethnic minorities have joined the middle class. The increase in general intelligence and participationCohen, 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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 468 468 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE in the polity has proved considerably more elusive. And the gaps between high- and low-income people are widening as the latter become reluctant to encumber the debt and lost wages that college going entails.

The colleges have contributed to the paradoxes that surround the structure of education. For one, they enhance inequality because they are moving individuals, not groups. Since they are avenues of individual mobility, the more successful they are in attracting students, the greater the resultant societal inequities as the brighter, more motivated, more opportunistic people move out of the social strata into which they were born. At the same time, the colleges’ accessibility enhances equality by providing education and training to all who would seek it, no matter their educational background, race or ethnicity, gender, or family income.

Another paradox is that distance learning, the reconﬁguring of instruction that is supposed to save money, may be directed toward the marginal, nondirected, nonserious, casual students. Why a paradox? Because the young people from families with a high regard for education will ﬁnd their way to a campus that promises a traditional collegiate experience.

One more paradox is that education tends to increase pro- ductivity, whereas incarceration decreases productivity; however, the budget for prisons in some states has now grown greater than that for higher education. How legislators can call for increased productivity and competition in the global economy while at the same time appropriating more money for the corrections system at the expense of support for higher education eludes rationality.

Last, despite massive growth in access to schooling and the vastly greater and diverse numbers who have enrolled, the communities from which they come have been little affected. Do the schools not build a better society? The individual mobility that they foster does not translate into reorganized cities, changed working conditions, modiﬁed immigration policies, or much of anything else affecting the quality of life across the community.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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 469 Toward the Future 469 A view of social conditions in the United States at the turn of the century provides a view of the context for the colleges:

• High immigration, in both absolute numbers and percentages of the American population, along with demands for anti-immigration regulations; • Multilingualism, with scores of foreign-language information sources and a population housed in ethnic enclaves; • Overcrowded cities, with unclean pavements and parks and intractable homelessness; • For the workforce, practically no fringe beneﬁts and piecework in the workplace and take-home or cottage industries; • Powerful media determining what people think; • A great gap between the rich and the poor; • Producer, assembly, or service jobs that yield wages insufﬁcient to sustain a family above the poverty line; • Weak trade unions, representing a small proportion of the workforce; • For the individual, business entrepreneurship as the path to capital formation; • A seeming paucity of civility when compared with an earlier era.

At the turn of which century? The twentieth and twenty-ﬁrst alike. One thousand community colleges have not changed those conditions. But did anyone but the most passionate, self-deceiving institutional advocates ever think that they could?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 c15.tex V2 - 07/22/2013 4:48pm Page 470 470 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE The college may have no ostensible reason for existence other than to serve its students and the business community, but it also has a life of its own as an intellectual community. It is easy to reduce the institution’s value to the increase in its graduates’ social mobility and to ignore its position as a center of acculturation and historical continuity. But the institution’s traditions act to ensure that these values are not completely set aside. Learning is inﬁnite.

We can always teach more, learn more efﬁciently. Thus, there is continual striving for innovation in education, with the innovators occupying prominent places in the system.

Too often overlooked is a view of the staff as models of rational discourse. Educators do not solve problems or cure ills. But neither do they deliberately sell false dreams or spread bad taste.

It is only when they imitate the worst characteristics of business corporations and the mass media that they lose the status the public has granted them. They must not betray the virtues that distinguish the American Community College.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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