By Michael E. Norris
Professor X gave us a pessimistic, even dark view of community colleges in his best-selling book, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: The Truth About College, based on his experience as one of the huge corps of low-pay, no-benefit, no-tenure, part-time professors who now make up about three-fourths of college faculty in the United States.
His fundamental argument was that, contrary to most popular opinion, not everyone needs or is qualified to receive a college degree – despite the constant thrum promoted for more than 50 years by the “American college juggernaut,” as Professor X put it – that “Americans believe in college.”
Community colleges have, of necessity, become a central feature of American higher education, especially – but, of course, not limited to – areas that have suffered economic downturns, leaving students casting about for less expensive alternatives to ever-rising tuition at four-year universities.
In addition, in economically depressed areas of the Rust Belt, where factories have been closing since the 1970s or where jobs have been shipped abroad since the 1970s, former employees frequently turn to community colleges for retraining designed to adapt to a shifting job market.
“You’re absolutely essential engines of workforce and economic development – locally and regionally,” Education Secretary Betsy De Vos told the National Legislative Summit of the Association of Community College Trustees, according to a report by journalist Catherine Morris for Diverse Issues in Higher Education.
Association Vice President David Baine said he was encouraged by De Vos’ remarks. “I think people were really pretty excited by her remarks,” Baine said, according to Morris’ report.
Teaching a basic English composition course in his 10th year as a part-time instructor, who also had an unidentified full-time job elsewhere, Professor X found that his mostly twenty-something students were “already beaten down” despite their youth. They constituted a group, he wrote, that “had not gone directly from high school to college” but instead “had spent some time in the world, time enough for unexpected pregnancies and broken marriages and parental estrangement and substance abuse difficulties and, always, thrumming along in the background, the relentless pulse of the stifling dead-end job.”
Some of these open-admissions students, he told us, “were not even (achieving) at the high school level”; some junior high school students whom he had previously taught “were miles ahead of my new college class.” Even native speakers of English in his classes exhibited a poor command of the language – spoken and written – and routinely fell into “yawning canyons of illogic and error.”
Professor X’s view of the students and the institutions they attend was at odds with that of President Barack Obama. In several speeches and statements, the president had elevated community colleges to the highest levels of political importance in an economy that during his two terms from 2009 to 2107 had grown only slowly – with stagnant earnings for all but the very rich and relatively weak hiring for good-paying jobs – since the fiscal crisis that began in the final year of George W. Bush’s second term.
Indeed, President Obama went so far as to propose making community college educations free. He based his argument in favor of his proposed American Graduation Initiative, of which the free-tuition proposal was a part, on current and expected changes in the work structure of this country. “In the coming years, jobs requiring at least an associate degree are projected to grow twice as fast as jobs requiring no college experience. We will not fill those jobs – or keep those jobs on our shores – without the training offered by community colleges,” the president said in a statement released by the White House. He proposed adding, by 2020, another 5 million graduates from community colleges.
President Trump opposes free community college educations on the grounds that they would give “illegal aliens free college tuition, courtesy of the American taxpayer,” according to a report by Ovetta Wiggins for The Washington Post.
Community colleges, Obama said, are advantageous, particularly to low- and middle-income students, because “they feature affordable tuition, open admission policies, flexible course schedules, and convenient locations.” In addition, he said, they are “particularly important for students who are older, working, or need remedial classes” and often provide a direct link between post-secondary education and the job requirements of business and industry in such fields as “nursing, health information technology, advanced manufacturing, and green jobs,” among others.
The last major legislative initiative in this area to become law was the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (H.R. 4872), when the president had Democrat majorities in both chambers of Congress. Signed by the president into law on March 17, 2010, it included “$2 billion over four years for community college and career training” as part of an effort to “help community colleges and other institutions develop, improve, and provide education training suitable for workers who are eligible for trade adjustment assistance.”
Broadly speaking, the White House said in a statement, “This program would complement President Obama’s broader agenda for higher education, including nearly doubling funding for Pell grants over three years and tripling the largest college tax credit, now known as the American Opportunity Tax Credit. At this time of economic hardship and uncertainty, the Administration’s agenda will build the highly skilled workforce that is crucial for success in the 21st century.”
In general, the president’s position reflects the overall shift in higher education toward career or job preparation. As one largely notable but mostly unnoticed result, liberal arts courses and majors at the university level and enrollment in them have decreased: business and computer majors are quite popular; philosophy and the arts, not so much. This has had an unexpected ancillary impact on community colleges, even though, traditionally, these former “junior” colleges were once considered basically job-training institutes for people who could not win admission, or could not afford admission, to four-year colleges and universities.
An analysis in The New Republic found that “administrators and even state legislators have emphasized that general education (the traditional humanities ‘cores’ like English and history) can be accounted for with credits from high school and community college.” This shift, then, further increases, ironically, the importance of community colleges in the overall post-secondary education system.
Community colleges date from the last half of the 19th century. As of 2013, a total of 1,123 community colleges – 992 of them publicly supported – enrolled approximately 12.4 million, reflecting a dramatic growth rate, according to the most recent data provided by the American Association of Community Colleges. At the peak of the baby-boomer driven college-enrollment tsunami between 1965 and 1972, at least one new community college opened every week.
Today, their importance to the configuration of higher education remains undiminished and has, in some ways, increased. Ivy Tech Community College, with more than 100,000 students in Indiana, is listed among the five largest post-secondary institutions in the United States. Other non-four-year institutions listed among the largest are Miami Dade College, sixth, and Houston Community college, ninth. The vast majority of Americans do not attend or graduate from elite institutions.
Driven by lower tuitions, open admissions, and greater scheduling flexibility, enrollment at community colleges has risen 53 percent in the 20-year period that began in 1990, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers. Somewhere between 40 and 46 percent of all undergraduates today attend community colleges, according to varying estimates by professional educational organizations.
Cost is a major factor driving this growth. “Community colleges generally have lower average tuition and fees prices than other institutional types,” the association reported. “The listed tuition and fee price for full-time students enrolled at public two-year colleges in academic year 2010-11 was $2,713, compared with $7,605 at public four-year colleges and universities, $27,293 at four-year private non-profit institutions, and $13,935 at private for-profit institutions (an average of four-year and two-year private, for-profit colleges and universities). Community colleges have also seen a lower rate of growth in their tuition and fee “sticker” prices. Since 2000-01, the average annual increase in tuition and fee charges at public two-year institutions was 2.7 percent, versus 5.6 percent at public four-year colleges and universities and 3 percent at four-year private non-profit schools.”
Flexibility in scheduling and coursework is important to community college students, as indicated by the relatively high number of part-time students, put at 61 percent in 2013, according to the American Association of Community Colleges. In addition, the association reported, open admissions attract student bodies that are generally more diverse in age, ethnicity, race, and socioeconomic levels than those attending traditional four-year universities, especially in the private sector of higher education. As of 2013, for example, nearly 50 percent of all community college students were between 22 and 39 years of age.
These statistics probably would not surprise most people, but what they suggest, in terms of the overall structure of higher education, should.
The traditional image of a university education is a captured well by Andrew Rossi in his 2014 documentary “Ivory Tower: Is College Worth The Cost?” as it opens on a scene in which Columbia University students are shown gathering for a class on a grassy knoll in the warm sunshine of a bright, clear day. The initial voice-over, which sets the ideal background for this idyllic scene, is provided by Columbia University humanities professor Andrew Delbanco, author of College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, who tells viewers that a university education of this sort “cheats death” in “a struggle against time and mortality” in which the professors age with every new fall semester but the students remain forever young.
How long this sort of scene may remain much of a part of the undergraduate years is in doubt. Even the classic scenario of the new, earnest freshman class reporting to campus dormitories for its grand adventure – Rossi provides footage of move-in day at Harvard – is fading. As Delbanco warns, “The United States has managed to provide a post-secondary education to a larger percentage of its population than any society in history. But a lot of forces are converging at the present moment to create anxiety.”
Community colleges – once referred to as “junior colleges” (the term is now associated primarily with private two-year institutions) – have emerged as a fundamental and essential pillar of post-secondary education in the United States, regardless of the views of Professor X and his supporters. While community colleges may be overshadowed in research achievements, faculty renown, and general prestige, they have become, especially for low- and middle-income families and individuals, especially among racial and ethnic minorities, a more affordable and realistic lifeline to the American dream.
The view from abroad recognizes this distinction, which, in part, makes American higher education quite different from that of most foreign nations. “In the United States, community colleges are very much part of higher education,” according to Twentieth Century Higher Education, which explains how the United States has moved from elite to almost universal post-secondary education. “They are included in its statistics of enrollment, and in its calculations of cost and expenditures.”
Many American community colleges are linked today in what Twentieth Century Higher Education described as a “common, if differentiated, enterprise.” Most, for example, provide the coursework of the freshman and sophomore years toward a baccalaureate degree. In many cases, community college students may enroll in a four-year college, at much less cost, through a direct-transfer agreement. “Community colleges, thus, are genuinely part of higher education,” according to Twentieth Century Higher Education.
Driving the rapidly increasing enrollment in community colleges is an array of what Delbanco calls anxiety-producing forces, most notably university sticker shock.
State legislatures, a majority of which are controlled by Republicans, have for the past three decades continuously shifted the burden of support for state colleges and universities from the taxpayer to the student in the form of sharply increased tuitions. Rossi quotes University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan as saying, “The cost of higher education is now borne by the student.”
This rapid increase has made the once-affordable four-year public college bill largely unaffordable for most lower- and middle-class students who once could rely on such public resources as Pell Grants to cover most of the cost of a four-year degree. As of the late 1970s, Pell Grants, Rossi points out, covered the entire four years’ worth of tuition at the average state university; today, as a result of an increasingly stingy Congress and state legislatures, they cover less than half that cost.
“For the 2012–13 academic year, annual current dollar prices for undergraduate tuition, room, and board were estimated to be $15,022 at public institutions, $39,173 at private nonprofit institutions, and $23,158 at private for-profit institutions,” according to a 2015 report by the National Center for Education Statistics, an agency of the U.S. Department of Education, citing the latest available data. “Between 2002–03 and 2012–13, prices for undergraduate tuition, room, and board at public institutions rose 39 percent, and prices at private nonprofit institutions rose 27 percent, after adjustment for inflation.”
One of the most significant results of this shift has been the growth of student loans and the consequent debt with which graduates leave schools – already burdened as they attempt in their vulnerable youth to establish themselves. Another important result is the turn to community colleges and, hence, the attractiveness of President Obama’s call for taxpayers to cover the cost of community college tuition.
“It gets to the point where the price of a degree is so high that people just don’t want to pay for it anymore,” Peter Schiff, author of Crash Proof 2.0: How to Profit From the Economic Collapse, is quoted by Rossi as saying.
In this scenario, a sort of academic price-earnings ratio becomes the principal determinant in students’ enrollment decisions. The organization and operation of a typical four-year college or university is based on the model that emerged from the establishment of our first universities (Harvard, 1636; The College of William and Mary, 1693; Yale, 1701; Princeton, 1746; and so on). This model has tenured faculty, liberal arts and graduate schools, research, student residences, intercollegiate athletics, selective admissions, merit scholarships, professional credentialing of students, and an endowment to sustain expansion – as well as those endearing and memorable fall move-in days. The problem is that it is losing steam, despite what some scholars call “tremendous inertia” even in the face of an economic environment characterized by wage stagnation and the disappearance of job security – and jobs themselves.
This persistent economic deflation has forced Americans to seek alternatives. At Lansing Community College in Michigan, for example, faculty is making greater of so-called open education resources” – to save their students money, according to a report by Jean Dimeo for Inside Digital Learning. In addition, Dimeo reports, Lansing “is close to offering its first zero-textbook-cost associate degree, in psychology. Professor Mark Kelland, for example, has been providing a textbook that he wrote to his students at no charge.
This year the West Virginia Legislature has been working on a free community college policy that would require recipients of the tuition-free scholarship to remain in the state for two years after graduation, according to a report by the Charleston Gazette-Mail. Programs like this encourage students to help depressed areas regain economic strength.
Four-year universities have made greater use of so-called massive open online courses. But there is something notable about such experiments. With their reliance on non-traditional collegiate structures, they have come to resemble – you guessed it – community colleges. This, in turn, explains how their model of affordable tuition, location convenience, and flexible scheduling has gained popularity, as growth rates over the last three decades have indicated.
Rossi, in his documentary, cites as an example Boston’s Bunker Hill Community College as “the most flexible” and “the most open to alternative curriculums.” And why? “Because they’ve always had to scramble to educate the less advantaged kids in America.” In other words, adaptability is built into the organizational and operational DNA of community colleges – this is why, for example, they are leading in the adoption of online learning and “contract education” – coursework organized to produce graduates trained for specific business interests.
One self-confessed “underachieving” high school student “with lousy SAT scores” has told us how a community college – “all free but for the effort and the cost of used textbooks” – gave him the career focus he needed as a young man. In an op-ed piece published in The New York Times, actor and director Tom Hanks, reflecting on his post-secondary experience, went on to express praise for President Obama’s proposal to make community college free for up to nine million Americans, especially “because more veterans, from Iraq and Afghanistan this time, as well as another generation of mothers, single parents and workers who have been out of the job market, need lower obstacles between now and the next chapter of their lives.”
Author, professor, and journalist Michael E. Norris, PhD, is the founder and editor of Between The Coasts and teaches government at Collin County Community College in Plano, Texas. He is the author of Reinventing the Administrative State, an analysis of the bureaucracy-modernization efforts of the Clinton and following Bush administrations (University Press of America, 2000), and Undue Process: Taking The Law Out Of Law Enforcement, an analysis of the constitutional impact of the privatization of law enforcement (Cognella Academic Press, 2015 and 2018).
By Michael E. Norris
Professor X gave us a pessimistic, even dark view of community colleges in his best-selling book, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: The Truth About College, based on his experience as one of the huge corps of low-pay, no-benefit, no-tenure, part-time professors who now make up about three-fourths of college faculty in the United States.
His fundamental argument was that, contrary to most popular opinion, not everyone needs or is qualified to receive a college degree – despite the constant thrum promoted for more than 50 years by the “American college juggernaut,” as Professor X put it – that “Americans believe in college.”
Community colleges have, of necessity, become a central feature of American higher education, especially – but, of course, not limited to – areas that have suffered economic downturns, leaving students casting about for less expensive alternatives to ever-rising tuition at four-year universities.
In addition, in economically depressed areas of the Rust Belt, where factories have been closing since the 1970s or where jobs have been shipped abroad since the 1970s, former employees frequently turn to community colleges for retraining designed to adapt to a shifting job market.
“You’re absolutely essential engines of workforce and economic development – locally and regionally,” Education Secretary Betsy De Vos told the National Legislative Summit of the Association of Community College Trustees, according to a report by journalist Catherine Morris for Diverse Issues in Higher Education.
Association Vice President David Baine said he was encouraged by De Vos’ remarks. “I think people were really pretty excited by her remarks,” Baine said, according to Morris’ report.
Teaching a basic English composition course in his 10th year as a part-time instructor, who also had an unidentified full-time job elsewhere, Professor X found that his mostly twenty-something students were “already beaten down” despite their youth. They constituted a group, he wrote, that “had not gone directly from high school to college” but instead “had spent some time in the world, time enough for unexpected pregnancies and broken marriages and parental estrangement and substance abuse difficulties and, always, thrumming along in the background, the relentless pulse of the stifling dead-end job.”
Some of these open-admissions students, he told us, “were not even (achieving) at the high school level”; some junior high school students whom he had previously taught “were miles ahead of my new college class.” Even native speakers of English in his classes exhibited a poor command of the language – spoken and written – and routinely fell into “yawning canyons of illogic and error.”
Professor X’s view of the students and the institutions they attend was at odds with that of President Barack Obama. In several speeches and statements, the president had elevated community colleges to the highest levels of political importance in an economy that during his two terms from 2009 to 2107 had grown only slowly – with stagnant earnings for all but the very rich and relatively weak hiring for good-paying jobs – since the fiscal crisis that began in the final year of George W. Bush’s second term.
Indeed, President Obama went so far as to propose making community college educations free. He based his argument in favor of his proposed American Graduation Initiative, of which the free-tuition proposal was a part, on current and expected changes in the work structure of this country. “In the coming years, jobs requiring at least an associate degree are projected to grow twice as fast as jobs requiring no college experience. We will not fill those jobs – or keep those jobs on our shores – without the training offered by community colleges,” the president said in a statement released by the White House. He proposed adding, by 2020, another 5 million graduates from community colleges.
President Trump opposes free community college educations on the grounds that they would give “illegal aliens free college tuition, courtesy of the American taxpayer,” according to a report by Ovetta Wiggins for The Washington Post.
Community colleges, Obama said, are advantageous, particularly to low- and middle-income students, because “they feature affordable tuition, open admission policies, flexible course schedules, and convenient locations.” In addition, he said, they are “particularly important for students who are older, working, or need remedial classes” and often provide a direct link between post-secondary education and the job requirements of business and industry in such fields as “nursing, health information technology, advanced manufacturing, and green jobs,” among others.
The last major legislative initiative in this area to become law was the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (H.R. 4872), when the president had Democrat majorities in both chambers of Congress. Signed by the president into law on March 17, 2010, it included “$2 billion over four years for community college and career training” as part of an effort to “help community colleges and other institutions develop, improve, and provide education training suitable for workers who are eligible for trade adjustment assistance.”
Broadly speaking, the White House said in a statement, “This program would complement President Obama’s broader agenda for higher education, including nearly doubling funding for Pell grants over three years and tripling the largest college tax credit, now known as the American Opportunity Tax Credit. At this time of economic hardship and uncertainty, the Administration’s agenda will build the highly skilled workforce that is crucial for success in the 21st century.”
In general, the president’s position reflects the overall shift in higher education toward career or job preparation. As one largely notable but mostly unnoticed result, liberal arts courses and majors at the university level and enrollment in them have decreased: business and computer majors are quite popular; philosophy and the arts, not so much. This has had an unexpected ancillary impact on community colleges, even though, traditionally, these former “junior” colleges were once considered basically job-training institutes for people who could not win admission, or could not afford admission, to four-year colleges and universities.
An analysis in The New Republic found that “administrators and even state legislators have emphasized that general education (the traditional humanities ‘cores’ like English and history) can be accounted for with credits from high school and community college.” This shift, then, further increases, ironically, the importance of community colleges in the overall post-secondary education system.
Community colleges date from the last half of the 19th century. As of 2013, a total of 1,123 community colleges – 992 of them publicly supported – enrolled approximately 12.4 million, reflecting a dramatic growth rate, according to the most recent data provided by the American Association of Community Colleges. At the peak of the baby-boomer driven college-enrollment tsunami between 1965 and 1972, at least one new community college opened every week.
Today, their importance to the configuration of higher education remains undiminished and has, in some ways, increased. Ivy Tech Community College, with more than 100,000 students in Indiana, is listed among the five largest post-secondary institutions in the United States. Other non-four-year institutions listed among the largest are Miami Dade College, sixth, and Houston Community college, ninth. The vast majority of Americans do not attend or graduate from elite institutions.
Driven by lower tuitions, open admissions, and greater scheduling flexibility, enrollment at community colleges has risen 53 percent in the 20-year period that began in 1990, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers. Somewhere between 40 and 46 percent of all undergraduates today attend community colleges, according to varying estimates by professional educational organizations.
Cost is a major factor driving this growth. “Community colleges generally have lower average tuition and fees prices than other institutional types,” the association reported. “The listed tuition and fee price for full-time students enrolled at public two-year colleges in academic year 2010-11 was $2,713, compared with $7,605 at public four-year colleges and universities, $27,293 at four-year private non-profit institutions, and $13,935 at private for-profit institutions (an average of four-year and two-year private, for-profit colleges and universities). Community colleges have also seen a lower rate of growth in their tuition and fee “sticker” prices. Since 2000-01, the average annual increase in tuition and fee charges at public two-year institutions was 2.7 percent, versus 5.6 percent at public four-year colleges and universities and 3 percent at four-year private non-profit schools.”
Flexibility in scheduling and coursework is important to community college students, as indicated by the relatively high number of part-time students, put at 61 percent in 2013, according to the American Association of Community Colleges. In addition, the association reported, open admissions attract student bodies that are generally more diverse in age, ethnicity, race, and socioeconomic levels than those attending traditional four-year universities, especially in the private sector of higher education. As of 2013, for example, nearly 50 percent of all community college students were between 22 and 39 years of age.
These statistics probably would not surprise most people, but what they suggest, in terms of the overall structure of higher education, should.
The traditional image of a university education is a captured well by Andrew Rossi in his 2014 documentary “Ivory Tower: Is College Worth The Cost?” as it opens on a scene in which Columbia University students are shown gathering for a class on a grassy knoll in the warm sunshine of a bright, clear day. The initial voice-over, which sets the ideal background for this idyllic scene, is provided by Columbia University humanities professor Andrew Delbanco, author of College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, who tells viewers that a university education of this sort “cheats death” in “a struggle against time and mortality” in which the professors age with every new fall semester but the students remain forever young.
How long this sort of scene may remain much of a part of the undergraduate years is in doubt. Even the classic scenario of the new, earnest freshman class reporting to campus dormitories for its grand adventure – Rossi provides footage of move-in day at Harvard – is fading. As Delbanco warns, “The United States has managed to provide a post-secondary education to a larger percentage of its population than any society in history. But a lot of forces are converging at the present moment to create anxiety.”
Community colleges – once referred to as “junior colleges” (the term is now associated primarily with private two-year institutions) – have emerged as a fundamental and essential pillar of post-secondary education in the United States, regardless of the views of Professor X and his supporters. While community colleges may be overshadowed in research achievements, faculty renown, and general prestige, they have become, especially for low- and middle-income families and individuals, especially among racial and ethnic minorities, a more affordable and realistic lifeline to the American dream.
The view from abroad recognizes this distinction, which, in part, makes American higher education quite different from that of most foreign nations. “In the United States, community colleges are very much part of higher education,” according to Twentieth Century Higher Education, which explains how the United States has moved from elite to almost universal post-secondary education. “They are included in its statistics of enrollment, and in its calculations of cost and expenditures.”
Many American community colleges are linked today in what Twentieth Century Higher Education described as a “common, if differentiated, enterprise.” Most, for example, provide the coursework of the freshman and sophomore years toward a baccalaureate degree. In many cases, community college students may enroll in a four-year college, at much less cost, through a direct-transfer agreement. “Community colleges, thus, are genuinely part of higher education,” according to Twentieth Century Higher Education.
Driving the rapidly increasing enrollment in community colleges is an array of what Delbanco calls anxiety-producing forces, most notably university sticker shock.
State legislatures, a majority of which are controlled by Republicans, have for the past three decades continuously shifted the burden of support for state colleges and universities from the taxpayer to the student in the form of sharply increased tuitions. Rossi quotes University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan as saying, “The cost of higher education is now borne by the student.”
This rapid increase has made the once-affordable four-year public college bill largely unaffordable for most lower- and middle-class students who once could rely on such public resources as Pell Grants to cover most of the cost of a four-year degree. As of the late 1970s, Pell Grants, Rossi points out, covered the entire four years’ worth of tuition at the average state university; today, as a result of an increasingly stingy Congress and state legislatures, they cover less than half that cost.
“For the 2012–13 academic year, annual current dollar prices for undergraduate tuition, room, and board were estimated to be $15,022 at public institutions, $39,173 at private nonprofit institutions, and $23,158 at private for-profit institutions,” according to a 2015 report by the National Center for Education Statistics, an agency of the U.S. Department of Education, citing the latest available data. “Between 2002–03 and 2012–13, prices for undergraduate tuition, room, and board at public institutions rose 39 percent, and prices at private nonprofit institutions rose 27 percent, after adjustment for inflation.”
One of the most significant results of this shift has been the growth of student loans and the consequent debt with which graduates leave schools – already burdened as they attempt in their vulnerable youth to establish themselves. Another important result is the turn to community colleges and, hence, the attractiveness of President Obama’s call for taxpayers to cover the cost of community college tuition.
“It gets to the point where the price of a degree is so high that people just don’t want to pay for it anymore,” Peter Schiff, author of Crash Proof 2.0: How to Profit From the Economic Collapse, is quoted by Rossi as saying.
In this scenario, a sort of academic price-earnings ratio becomes the principal determinant in students’ enrollment decisions. The organization and operation of a typical four-year college or university is based on the model that emerged from the establishment of our first universities (Harvard, 1636; The College of William and Mary, 1693; Yale, 1701; Princeton, 1746; and so on). This model has tenured faculty, liberal arts and graduate schools, research, student residences, intercollegiate athletics, selective admissions, merit scholarships, professional credentialing of students, and an endowment to sustain expansion – as well as those endearing and memorable fall move-in days. The problem is that it is losing steam, despite what some scholars call “tremendous inertia” even in the face of an economic environment characterized by wage stagnation and the disappearance of job security – and jobs themselves.
This persistent economic deflation has forced Americans to seek alternatives. At Lansing Community College in Michigan, for example, faculty is making greater of so-called open education resources” – to save their students money, according to a report by Jean Dimeo for Inside Digital Learning. In addition, Dimeo reports, Lansing “is close to offering its first zero-textbook-cost associate degree, in psychology. Professor Mark Kelland, for example, has been providing a textbook that he wrote to his students at no charge.
This year the West Virginia Legislature has been working on a free community college policy that would require recipients of the tuition-free scholarship to remain in the state for two years after graduation, according to a report by the Charleston Gazette-Mail. Programs like this encourage students to help depressed areas regain economic strength.
Four-year universities have made greater use of so-called massive open online courses. But there is something notable about such experiments. With their reliance on non-traditional collegiate structures, they have come to resemble – you guessed it – community colleges. This, in turn, explains how their model of affordable tuition, location convenience, and flexible scheduling has gained popularity, as growth rates over the last three decades have indicated.
Rossi, in his documentary, cites as an example Boston’s Bunker Hill Community College as “the most flexible” and “the most open to alternative curriculums.” And why? “Because they’ve always had to scramble to educate the less advantaged kids in America.” In other words, adaptability is built into the organizational and operational DNA of community colleges – this is why, for example, they are leading in the adoption of online learning and “contract education” – coursework organized to produce graduates trained for specific business interests.
One self-confessed “underachieving” high school student “with lousy SAT scores” has told us how a community college – “all free but for the effort and the cost of used textbooks” – gave him the career focus he needed as a young man. In an op-ed piece published in The New York Times, actor and director Tom Hanks, reflecting on his post-secondary experience, went on to express praise for President Obama’s proposal to make community college free for up to nine million Americans, especially “because more veterans, from Iraq and Afghanistan this time, as well as another generation of mothers, single parents and workers who have been out of the job market, need lower obstacles between now and the next chapter of their lives.”
Author, professor, and journalist Michael E. Norris, PhD, is the founder and editor of Between The Coasts and teaches government at Collin County Community College in Plano, Texas. He is the author of Reinventing the Administrative State, an analysis of the bureaucracy-modernization efforts of the Clinton and following Bush administrations (University Press of America, 2000), and Undue Process: Taking The Law Out Of Law Enforcement, an analysis of the constitutional impact of the privatization of law enforcement (Cognella Academic Press, 2015 and 2018).
By Michael E. Norris
Professor X gave us a pessimistic, even dark view of community colleges in his best-selling book, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: The Truth About College, based on his experience as one of the huge corps of low-pay, no-benefit, no-tenure, part-time professors who now make up about three-fourths of college faculty in the United States.
His fundamental argument was that, contrary to most popular opinion, not everyone needs or is qualified to receive a college degree – despite the constant thrum promoted for more than 50 years by the “American college juggernaut,” as Professor X put it – that “Americans believe in college.”
Community colleges have, of necessity, become a central feature of American higher education, especially – but, of course, not limited to – areas that have suffered economic downturns, leaving students casting about for less expensive alternatives to ever-rising tuition at four-year universities.
In addition, in economically depressed areas of the Rust Belt, where factories have been closing since the 1970s or where jobs have been shipped abroad since the 1970s, former employees frequently turn to community colleges for retraining designed to adapt to a shifting job market.
“You’re absolutely essential engines of workforce and economic development – locally and regionally,” Education Secretary Betsy De Vos told the National Legislative Summit of the Association of Community College Trustees, according to a report by journalist Catherine Morris for Diverse Issues in Higher Education.
Association Vice President David Baine said he was encouraged by De Vos’ remarks. “I think people were really pretty excited by her remarks,” Baine said, according to Morris’ report.
Teaching a basic English composition course in his 10th year as a part-time instructor, who also had an unidentified full-time job elsewhere, Professor X found that his mostly twenty-something students were “already beaten down” despite their youth. They constituted a group, he wrote, that “had not gone directly from high school to college” but instead “had spent some time in the world, time enough for unexpected pregnancies and broken marriages and parental estrangement and substance abuse difficulties and, always, thrumming along in the background, the relentless pulse of the stifling dead-end job.”
Some of these open-admissions students, he told us, “were not even (achieving) at the high school level”; some junior high school students whom he had previously taught “were miles ahead of my new college class.” Even native speakers of English in his classes exhibited a poor command of the language – spoken and written – and routinely fell into “yawning canyons of illogic and error.”
Professor X’s view of the students and the institutions they attend was at odds with that of President Barack Obama. In several speeches and statements, the president had elevated community colleges to the highest levels of political importance in an economy that during his two terms from 2009 to 2107 had grown only slowly – with stagnant earnings for all but the very rich and relatively weak hiring for good-paying jobs – since the fiscal crisis that began in the final year of George W. Bush’s second term.
Indeed, President Obama went so far as to propose making community college educations free. He based his argument in favor of his proposed American Graduation Initiative, of which the free-tuition proposal was a part, on current and expected changes in the work structure of this country. “In the coming years, jobs requiring at least an associate degree are projected to grow twice as fast as jobs requiring no college experience. We will not fill those jobs – or keep those jobs on our shores – without the training offered by community colleges,” the president said in a statement released by the White House. He proposed adding, by 2020, another 5 million graduates from community colleges.
President Trump opposes free community college educations on the grounds that they would give “illegal aliens free college tuition, courtesy of the American taxpayer,” according to a report by Ovetta Wiggins for The Washington Post.
Community colleges, Obama said, are advantageous, particularly to low- and middle-income students, because “they feature affordable tuition, open admission policies, flexible course schedules, and convenient locations.” In addition, he said, they are “particularly important for students who are older, working, or need remedial classes” and often provide a direct link between post-secondary education and the job requirements of business and industry in such fields as “nursing, health information technology, advanced manufacturing, and green jobs,” among others.
The last major legislative initiative in this area to become law was the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (H.R. 4872), when the president had Democrat majorities in both chambers of Congress. Signed by the president into law on March 17, 2010, it included “$2 billion over four years for community college and career training” as part of an effort to “help community colleges and other institutions develop, improve, and provide education training suitable for workers who are eligible for trade adjustment assistance.”
Broadly speaking, the White House said in a statement, “This program would complement President Obama’s broader agenda for higher education, including nearly doubling funding for Pell grants over three years and tripling the largest college tax credit, now known as the American Opportunity Tax Credit. At this time of economic hardship and uncertainty, the Administration’s agenda will build the highly skilled workforce that is crucial for success in the 21st century.”
In general, the president’s position reflects the overall shift in higher education toward career or job preparation. As one largely notable but mostly unnoticed result, liberal arts courses and majors at the university level and enrollment in them have decreased: business and computer majors are quite popular; philosophy and the arts, not so much. This has had an unexpected ancillary impact on community colleges, even though, traditionally, these former “junior” colleges were once considered basically job-training institutes for people who could not win admission, or could not afford admission, to four-year colleges and universities.
An analysis in The New Republic found that “administrators and even state legislators have emphasized that general education (the traditional humanities ‘cores’ like English and history) can be accounted for with credits from high school and community college.” This shift, then, further increases, ironically, the importance of community colleges in the overall post-secondary education system.
Community colleges date from the last half of the 19th century. As of 2013, a total of 1,123 community colleges – 992 of them publicly supported – enrolled approximately 12.4 million, reflecting a dramatic growth rate, according to the most recent data provided by the American Association of Community Colleges. At the peak of the baby-boomer driven college-enrollment tsunami between 1965 and 1972, at least one new community college opened every week.
Today, their importance to the configuration of higher education remains undiminished and has, in some ways, increased. Ivy Tech Community College, with more than 100,000 students in Indiana, is listed among the five largest post-secondary institutions in the United States. Other non-four-year institutions listed among the largest are Miami Dade College, sixth, and Houston Community college, ninth. The vast majority of Americans do not attend or graduate from elite institutions.
Driven by lower tuitions, open admissions, and greater scheduling flexibility, enrollment at community colleges has risen 53 percent in the 20-year period that began in 1990, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers. Somewhere between 40 and 46 percent of all undergraduates today attend community colleges, according to varying estimates by professional educational organizations.
Cost is a major factor driving this growth. “Community colleges generally have lower average tuition and fees prices than other institutional types,” the association reported. “The listed tuition and fee price for full-time students enrolled at public two-year colleges in academic year 2010-11 was $2,713, compared with $7,605 at public four-year colleges and universities, $27,293 at four-year private non-profit institutions, and $13,935 at private for-profit institutions (an average of four-year and two-year private, for-profit colleges and universities). Community colleges have also seen a lower rate of growth in their tuition and fee “sticker” prices. Since 2000-01, the average annual increase in tuition and fee charges at public two-year institutions was 2.7 percent, versus 5.6 percent at public four-year colleges and universities and 3 percent at four-year private non-profit schools.”
Flexibility in scheduling and coursework is important to community college students, as indicated by the relatively high number of part-time students, put at 61 percent in 2013, according to the American Association of Community Colleges. In addition, the association reported, open admissions attract student bodies that are generally more diverse in age, ethnicity, race, and socioeconomic levels than those attending traditional four-year universities, especially in the private sector of higher education. As of 2013, for example, nearly 50 percent of all community college students were between 22 and 39 years of age.
These statistics probably would not surprise most people, but what they suggest, in terms of the overall structure of higher education, should.
The traditional image of a university education is a captured well by Andrew Rossi in his 2014 documentary “Ivory Tower: Is College Worth The Cost?” as it opens on a scene in which Columbia University students are shown gathering for a class on a grassy knoll in the warm sunshine of a bright, clear day. The initial voice-over, which sets the ideal background for this idyllic scene, is provided by Columbia University humanities professor Andrew Delbanco, author of College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, who tells viewers that a university education of this sort “cheats death” in “a struggle against time and mortality” in which the professors age with every new fall semester but the students remain forever young.
How long this sort of scene may remain much of a part of the undergraduate years is in doubt. Even the classic scenario of the new, earnest freshman class reporting to campus dormitories for its grand adventure – Rossi provides footage of move-in day at Harvard – is fading. As Delbanco warns, “The United States has managed to provide a post-secondary education to a larger percentage of its population than any society in history. But a lot of forces are converging at the present moment to create anxiety.”
Community colleges – once referred to as “junior colleges” (the term is now associated primarily with private two-year institutions) – have emerged as a fundamental and essential pillar of post-secondary education in the United States, regardless of the views of Professor X and his supporters. While community colleges may be overshadowed in research achievements, faculty renown, and general prestige, they have become, especially for low- and middle-income families and individuals, especially among racial and ethnic minorities, a more affordable and realistic lifeline to the American dream.
The view from abroad recognizes this distinction, which, in part, makes American higher education quite different from that of most foreign nations. “In the United States, community colleges are very much part of higher education,” according to Twentieth Century Higher Education, which explains how the United States has moved from elite to almost universal post-secondary education. “They are included in its statistics of enrollment, and in its calculations of cost and expenditures.”
Many American community colleges are linked today in what Twentieth Century Higher Education described as a “common, if differentiated, enterprise.” Most, for example, provide the coursework of the freshman and sophomore years toward a baccalaureate degree. In many cases, community college students may enroll in a four-year college, at much less cost, through a direct-transfer agreement. “Community colleges, thus, are genuinely part of higher education,” according to Twentieth Century Higher Education.
Driving the rapidly increasing enrollment in community colleges is an array of what Delbanco calls anxiety-producing forces, most notably university sticker shock.
State legislatures, a majority of which are controlled by Republicans, have for the past three decades continuously shifted the burden of support for state colleges and universities from the taxpayer to the student in the form of sharply increased tuitions. Rossi quotes University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan as saying, “The cost of higher education is now borne by the student.”
This rapid increase has made the once-affordable four-year public college bill largely unaffordable for most lower- and middle-class students who once could rely on such public resources as Pell Grants to cover most of the cost of a four-year degree. As of the late 1970s, Pell Grants, Rossi points out, covered the entire four years’ worth of tuition at the average state university; today, as a result of an increasingly stingy Congress and state legislatures, they cover less than half that cost.
“For the 2012–13 academic year, annual current dollar prices for undergraduate tuition, room, and board were estimated to be $15,022 at public institutions, $39,173 at private nonprofit institutions, and $23,158 at private for-profit institutions,” according to a 2015 report by the National Center for Education Statistics, an agency of the U.S. Department of Education, citing the latest available data. “Between 2002–03 and 2012–13, prices for undergraduate tuition, room, and board at public institutions rose 39 percent, and prices at private nonprofit institutions rose 27 percent, after adjustment for inflation.”
One of the most significant results of this shift has been the growth of student loans and the consequent debt with which graduates leave schools – already burdened as they attempt in their vulnerable youth to establish themselves. Another important result is the turn to community colleges and, hence, the attractiveness of President Obama’s call for taxpayers to cover the cost of community college tuition.
“It gets to the point where the price of a degree is so high that people just don’t want to pay for it anymore,” Peter Schiff, author of Crash Proof 2.0: How to Profit From the Economic Collapse, is quoted by Rossi as saying.
In this scenario, a sort of academic price-earnings ratio becomes the principal determinant in students’ enrollment decisions. The organization and operation of a typical four-year college or university is based on the model that emerged from the establishment of our first universities (Harvard, 1636; The College of William and Mary, 1693; Yale, 1701; Princeton, 1746; and so on). This model has tenured faculty, liberal arts and graduate schools, research, student residences, intercollegiate athletics, selective admissions, merit scholarships, professional credentialing of students, and an endowment to sustain expansion – as well as those endearing and memorable fall move-in days. The problem is that it is losing steam, despite what some scholars call “tremendous inertia” even in the face of an economic environment characterized by wage stagnation and the disappearance of job security – and jobs themselves.
This persistent economic deflation has forced Americans to seek alternatives. At Lansing Community College in Michigan, for example, faculty is making greater of so-called open education resources” – to save their students money, according to a report by Jean Dimeo for Inside Digital Learning. In addition, Dimeo reports, Lansing “is close to offering its first zero-textbook-cost associate degree, in psychology. Professor Mark Kelland, for example, has been providing a textbook that he wrote to his students at no charge.
This year the West Virginia Legislature has been working on a free community college policy that would require recipients of the tuition-free scholarship to remain in the state for two years after graduation, according to a report by the Charleston Gazette-Mail. Programs like this encourage students to help depressed areas regain economic strength.
Four-year universities have made greater use of so-called massive open online courses. But there is something notable about such experiments. With their reliance on non-traditional collegiate structures, they have come to resemble – you guessed it – community colleges. This, in turn, explains how their model of affordable tuition, location convenience, and flexible scheduling has gained popularity, as growth rates over the last three decades have indicated.
Rossi, in his documentary, cites as an example Boston’s Bunker Hill Community College as “the most flexible” and “the most open to alternative curriculums.” And why? “Because they’ve always had to scramble to educate the less advantaged kids in America.” In other words, adaptability is built into the organizational and operational DNA of community colleges – this is why, for example, they are leading in the adoption of online learning and “contract education” – coursework organized to produce graduates trained for specific business interests.
One self-confessed “underachieving” high school student “with lousy SAT scores” has told us how a community college – “all free but for the effort and the cost of used textbooks” – gave him the career focus he needed as a young man. In an op-ed piece published in The New York Times, actor and director Tom Hanks, reflecting on his post-secondary experience, went on to express praise for President Obama’s proposal to make community college free for up to nine million Americans, especially “because more veterans, from Iraq and Afghanistan this time, as well as another generation of mothers, single parents and workers who have been out of the job market, need lower obstacles between now and the next chapter of their lives.”
Author, professor, and journalist Michael E. Norris, PhD, is the founder and editor of Between The Coasts and teaches government at Collin County Community College in Plano, Texas. He is the author of Reinventing the Administrative State, an analysis of the bureaucracy-modernization efforts of the Clinton and following Bush administrations (University Press of America, 2000), and Undue Process: Taking The Law Out Of Law Enforcement, an analysis of the constitutional impact of the privatization of law enforcement (Cognella Academic Press, 2015 and 2018).
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