Challenges Facing Community Colleges
weekends. By contrast, community college students taking popular majors commonly complain that they have to wait for semesters to get into certain popular courses for their majors, because the number of sections being offered is insufficient to meet demand, and community colleges cannot afford to hire more instructors or are limited by physical space. For-profit colleges also make lavish claims about their job placement services and abilities to place graduates in jobs, services that are often neglected in under-resourced community colleges. Again, however, critics of the proprietary sector have claimed these colleges make false promises about job placement. A recent report from the Government Accountability Office found that students at for-profit colleges have lower pass rates on professional credentialing exams than their public college counterparts. Researchers disagree whether graduation or degree completion rates at for-profit colleges equal those at public community colleges. The raw numbers suggest they graduate students at about the same, rather low, rate. On the other hand, our own analyses of national longitudinal data find that, among students seeking associate degrees, for-profits have significantly higher completion rates than community colleges, after one allows for the demographics of their student bodies. Viewed one way, community colleges and for-profit colleges are not in direct competition, because they tend to serve somewhat different populations. Moreover, community colleges currently have so many applicants that they can barely serve them all, so there is no shortage of customers. But looked at differently, these two sectors are in competition, because the for-profits are drawing ever more dollars out of the federal Pell grant and student loan systems. The public community colleges are dependent on this same pool of federal funding. The growth in low-income students enrolling in college – especially at for-profit institutions– has driven expenditures for these government programs through the roof, and has provoked a backlash in Congress over the growing cost. Some politicians call for reining in for-profits through regulation. Others defend the for-profits and instead suggest restrictions in federal loan eligibility to counter rising costs: reducing support for part-time students (who enroll disproportionately in community colleges), or requiring students supported by Pell grants to take more credits per semester, and so on. These political battles are ongoing, and for-profits have spent lavishly on lobbying. The outcome is quite unclear, but it does seem as if the emergence and growth of the for-profit sector may set off an avalanche of change in federal funding that will have profound implications for community colleges and their students.
Tensions between Vocational and Academic Missions These are interesting times, indeed. On the one hand, in the effort to close achievement gaps and make higher education accessible to more and more students, there has been a narrowing of the mission of community colleges to that of providing fundamental academic foundations and preparation for degree attainment beyond the Associates level. As a result, the curricula found in many community colleges have become much more focused on General Education goals mirroring the standard educational model of most four year degree granting institutions. This has been accompanied by a generalized devaluing of the vocational and technical educational experiences in society at large, but certainly throughout k-12 education, pushing all students toward a college degree. And it is supported by accreditation bodies that periodically visit and evaluate community colleges, as well as state education policies that define the requirements for granting a degree. The result is that the structure of education at most community colleges closely mirrors that at more elite traditional institutions: there are majors, required courses and electives. Courses are associated with certain number of credits, primarily defined by ‘seat time’ – the hours spent in class per week. There are midterms and finals, Grade Point Averages and honor rolls.
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