32 Years In Almost College

The kiss of death: two-year colleges are praised in the 2004 State of the Union Address by a man who couldn't spell cat if you spotted him the "c" and the "t." I rolled a stone uphill at the Collegium Excellens for 32 years. The common term in the community for the Collegium Excellens was "AC." Early in my time there (mid-1970s), a student told me that in the community high schools that sent the majority of Amarillo students to 4-year colleges, the pejorative for "AC" was Almost College. As is often the case, there was a kernel of truth in the myth. Students at "AC" were almost college students at best and time-wasters at worst. I spent 32 years trying to prepare these unwilling and unprepared folks for the real world of higher education. Forget about making them history majors (my discipline). That was beyond their ken. In fact, few—if any—of the students I encountered in 32 years could define liberal arts, let alone spell it. So—when Jay Leno mocks community college students and Bill Cosby (that hypocrite model father) denigrates a community college education and Burger King advises 2-year college students to focus on the 99¢-menu because of their earning potential—the truth is brutal and honest. If this is (fair & balanced) futility, so be it.

[x Chronicle of Higher Education]
2-Year Colleges Face an Identity Crisis
They play a central role in job training and access to higher education, but their public image suffers
By Jamilah Evelyn

One was the kind of publicity that money couldn't buy. The other was the kind that no one wants. President Bush, during his State of the Union address last January, praised "America's fine community colleges" and proposed giving them more federal support.

It was one of only a few moments during the two-hour speech that received a standing ovation from both sides of the aisle. In their coverage the next day, newspapers gave prominent attention to the role the president wanted two-year institutions to play in the nation's economic recovery.

Community-college officials, long frustrated with the Rodney Dangerfield treatment, were combustibly giddy.

"We believe it was the first time a president has mentioned community colleges during a State of the Union," says George R. Boggs, president of the American Association of Community Colleges. That kind of respect was long overdue, he says, and the ovation was "a sign of the high opinion those lawmakers have of community colleges."

Two months later the talk-show host Jay Leno gave a different kind of attention to two-year colleges in his own nightly address to the nation, taking note of a student protest in Sacramento.

"You could kind of tell they were community-college students," Mr. Leno said, before displaying a faked photograph of protesters holding signs that read "skool is expensive," "let us lern," and "don't raise tooishun."

Community-college officials were not laughing.

"We're part of the last group of people that it's still okay to make fun of," says Mr. Boggs.

The little colleges that could, that have chugged along doing academe's dirty work -- spinning ill-prepared students into, for example, a movie star turned California governor, a poet laureate, members of Congress, and a space-shuttle commander -- are suddenly enjoying an unprecedented moment in the national spotlight. Even so, when it comes to society at large, they get little respect.

The institutionspart liberal-arts colleges, part occupational-training grounds, with more than a dash of remedial education and a pinch of general-equivalency-diploma preparation thrown inare widely misunderstood.

As politicians try to pump the institutions' job-training components while hordes of high-school graduates -- shut out of four-year institutions by rising academic standards and cramped capacity -- flock to their open doors, the identity and stature of the nation's 1,200 community and technical colleges have perhaps never been more in flux.

Most two-year institutions started out as junior colleges, born out of high schools and providing the first two years of a bachelor's degree. In the 1970s and '80s, many added occupational and technical programs and became comprehensive community colleges. The last couple of decades saw the growth of corporate-training, welfare-to-work, GED, and remedial programs.

Today they educate 65 percent of the country's allied-health workers, many of them registered nurses, and 80 percent of firefighters and other "first responders."

Whenever there is a work-force shortage, they are all over it, setting up new programs and tweaking others. It's a spirit that has brilliantly positioned them for enrollment growth, but has done little to shore up their academic reputations.

To further muddy their already complicated identity, some community colleges have begun to offer baccalaureate degrees.

"What is the center of the institution?" asks Richard P. Alfred, co-director of the Consortium for Community College Development, at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. "What is the one thing these institutions stand for? It's hard to figure that out because they stand for so many things."

Their all-God's-children philosophy may well merit the moniker they give themselves, "democracy's colleges," but their lack of selectivity puts them at the bottom of academe's hierarchy. Attempting to educate students who were not well prepared by elementary and secondary schools, as well as those who want to just drop in for a course here and there, can wreak havoc on an institution's graduation and retention rates, two measures that lawmakers, parents, and ranking mechanisms increasingly rely on to assess quality and accountability.

But among certain constituencies, community colleges' value has soared.

Their stock grew among business and industry leaders in the 1990s, when unemployment was so low it was hard to find employees, points out Kathleen Schatzberg, president of Cape Cod Community College, in Massachusetts. "The business community was beginning to understand that they needed community colleges to produce the work force," she says.

Now, in an era of job losses, supporting community colleges is de rigueur for the politician who wants to align his political record with job growth.

Today community colleges are seeing enrollment explosions they can barely contain, fueled largely by high-school graduates who can't get into four-year institutions.

Those students in turn push out less academically prepared students who are not so savvy about navigating higher education's bureaucracy and don't sign up for courses in time, forcing community-college officials, in some cases, to make a choice on which population they will continue to serve.

"The access question is forcing an identity crisis for sure," says Mr. Alfred. "How we respond to it will lay bare what kinds of institutions we really want to be."

At colleges where officials have dreams of reaching a higher status, low-income, minority, and ill-prepared students will be shut out, he warns. At the same time, if the Bush administration comes through with its proposal of $250-million in federal funds to support worker training, it may propel community colleges to look for more ways to increase their focus on job training, even though it is not as prestigious as liberal-arts education.

"There are so many directions we could go right now," says Mr. Alfred. "It probably won't be a question of either/or, but rather emphasis. The emphasis that these colleges choose will play a large role in shaping their image."

Perhaps no one knows better how much community colleges could use an image boost than Robert S. Palinchak, vice president for academic affairs at the Community College of Southern Nevada. He maintains a scrapbook of sorts where he keeps newspaper stories and jotted-down notes on episodes of situation comedies and other popular-culture moments that involve community colleges.

His file is full of slights: Bill Cosby warning his dyslexic son, Theo, on The Cosby Show that if he didn't hit the books hard, he'd end up at a community college; the old "high schools with ashtrays" put-down that shows up again and again; a Burger King commercial where a talking menu board advises two community-college students at the drive-through that they would be wise to choose from the 99-cent menu because they probably wouldn't be making much money in their lifetimes. (That commercial was pulled by the company after protests from the American Association of Community Colleges.)

Mr. Palinchak believes that community colleges can reap all the praise they want from the president, but pop culture illuminates what the man on the street is thinking. We live in a brand-name society. "If it's free or inexpensive, how good could it be?" is the attitude that prevails when parents and students consider community colleges, he says.

Norma G. Kent, vice president for communications at the community-college association, says she agrees but notes that some things may be changing. Until recently, she rarely got phone calls from reporters from prominent national publications. But recent articles about their booming enrollments, particularly among students who might otherwise have gone on to four-year institutions, in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post have greatly heightened awareness, she says.

"When you get a few people like that who have the respect of the commercial press at large," says Ms. Kent, "things open up."

But the press coverage and the presidential nods -- Mr. Bush mentioned community colleges again during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in August and in the third national presidential debate this monthhave not yet helped them ascend the pecking order. Community colleges in Arizona and California, for example, still complain about being left out of important budget and policy decisions despite boasting enrollments that dwarf those of the universities in those states.

Lawmakers "get it, but I don't think it necessarily translates into economic support," says Mr. Boggs, of the community-college association. "And it doesn't necessarily translate to where they want their kids to go to college."

But Ms. Schatzberg, from Cape Cod, believes that as enrollments have grown and as two-year colleges have reached out to the community more, word of mouth is making a difference. "Almost everybody has some connection to us," she says, "even if it's only that they've been to an event on campus."

In the end, community colleges may never win the stature game.

"Maybe we're looking for the wrong thing," says Mr. Palinchak. "Maybe we will never enjoy the kind of status we deserve. So long as we get the job done, maybe we shouldn't care so much that Jay Leno's got jokes."

Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education