The Comprehensive Community College: Institution for Changing Times
by Don Doucette
Associate Director,
League for Innovation in the Community College
Community colleges are often misunderstood and generally underappreciated despite the growing importance of their role in the higher education systems of the United States.
They are not “junior” colleges, smaller and simpler versions of their “senior” university counterparts. In fact, many community colleges are sophisticated and complex institutions. However, they are distinct from four-year colleges and universities, and do not fit the general public’s most common ideas about “college.” The fact that community colleges do not take their cues from prestigious research universities such as Harvard and Stanford feeds many of the misperceptions that people have about them.
Advocates of comprehensive community colleges tout these institutions as America’s only major contribution to models of higher education in the world, as contrasted with the most renowned private research universities, liberal arts colleges, and major state universities, which are based upon European models, transplanted in earlier centuries largely from England and Germany. As they reach out to an increasingly diverse array of nontraditional students to assist them in achieving the economic benefits that accrue to educational accomplishment, community colleges represent one of the most perfect institutional expressions of the democratic ideals that motivated our founding fathers.
A Little History
The first public community college is generally acknowledged to be Joliet Junior College, founded in 1901 in Joliet, Ill. Yet it would be misleading to think of most community colleges as the products of nearly a century of development. In fact, more than half of all community, junior, and technical two-year colleges in the United States are less than three decades old. The majority were founded in the 1960s and early 1970s, when public demand for higher education opportunities required a massive response from federal, state, and local governments. Veterans returning from World War II and the “baby boom” generation of the ’60s and ’70s fueled the rapid growth of community colleges, and, during the late 1960s, a new community college opened every week for a number of years.
Community colleges, then, are the most recent additions to the system of higher education in the United States. They have emerged as mature institutions from three decades of extraordinary growth.
The 1,211 two-year community, junior, and technical colleges in the United States (which as a group are usually referred to as “community colleges”) enroll more than six million students or just under half of all students enrolled in colleges and universities in the United States, in courses offered for academic credit. In addition, at least as many students are enrolled in a variety of noncredit courses that range from vocational offerings to the most advanced technical retraining programs offered for employees of business and industry.
Growing Enrollments
Community college enrollments are growing at annual rates as high as 10 percent, while enrollments in the other institutions of higher education have essentially leveled off. In fact, each fall community colleges enroll about 55 percent of all students who are entering college for the first time. In market terms not often used by educators, but which provide a clear sense of the emergence of community colleges, these institutions have in less than 30 years of sustained operation captured more than half of the 350-year-old higher education market.
Community colleges are an important higher education entry point for the least advantaged citizens. They enroll the great proportion of all minorities in higher education in the United States, and they continue to provide the recent influx of immigrants initial access to postsecondary education and to the skilled work force.
However, they are also a socially acceptable alternative for mainstream students who, for many reasons, including financial prudence, choose to begin their college careers in the small, nurturing classrooms of the local community college.
But, even as increasing numbers of well-qualified students begin their higher education careers there, these institutions often suffer both from the snobbery of professionals and business and political leaders who are products of more elite colleges and universities, and from misperceptions and confusion among the general public regarding community colleges’ missions.
Missions of Modern, Comprehensive Community Colleges
What all community colleges have in common is a focus on teaching and student learning. They are student-centered institutions, and the programs and services they provide have student learning and development as their principal intended outcomes. In fact, some have argued that community colleges are the premier teaching institutions in all of higher education.
One of the ways that community colleges most distinguish themselves from their four-year college and university counterparts is in mission. Small, usually private junior colleges and most technical colleges—a minority of the two-year institutions—perform subsets of the following missions, all of which are common to the modern, comprehensive U.S. community college.
The transfer mission is perhaps the most traditional role of community colleges; it is generally defined as providing freshman and sophomore-level courses that meet requirements for the baccalaureate or bachelor’s degree at most four-year colleges and universities.
Preparing students for new careers, career change, and career advancement has also been a cornerstone mission of community colleges. This mission—whether referred to as career, occupational, vocational, or technical education—includes some of the most advanced training available anywhere in a variety of new and emerging fields.
Most community colleges offer state-of-the-art programs in health-related fields, business services, computer sciences, electronics, manufacturing, public service, and skilled trades. These institutions have also become the largest publicly supported provider of job training and retraining, including contract training programs customized for local business and industry and offered at the worksite.
In addition, nearly all community colleges perform a more controversial mission: providing basic skills and developmental education, made up primarily of remedial courses in reading, writing, and mathematics.
While the public is uncertain about the appropriateness of such programs for collegiate institutions, and although legislators hate to “pay twice” for such skills training, there has been a gradual recognition of the importance of this mission, if only because of the urgent national priority of preparing a competent work force.
The continuing education and community service mission also distinguishes community colleges as particularly responsive to the needs of their local constituents. Such programs often include noncredit courses, seminars, and workshops, as well as a broad range of activities and functions that provide support to individuals or groups in the community.
Because today’s community college was established on the principle that people of all ages, all races, all stations in life, and in all geographic areas should have access to educational opportunity beyond high school, access has become a leading mission for all community colleges. Thus, community colleges offer a host of support services to improve both student access and success through the student development or student services divisions, which have traditionally championed student access and success as dual goals.
Thus, while student development programs seek to serve and support all students and all of the college’s missions, they are particularly key to the success of the access mission.
Using Technology to Fulfill Missions
Another distinctive characteristic of community colleges is that their use of information technology has historically focused on serving students. This simple trait is an important touchstone regarding trends in technology applications: in community colleges, the emphasis has always been upon those applications that provide direct benefit and service to students.
In fact, the earliest use of computers in community colleges was to provide instruction in data processing for students preparing to enter the field. In the early- to mid-1970s, mainframes were installed primarily to provide instruction in this career field. With unused mainframe capacity, colleges began to automate their administrative systems, focusing predictably on student information systems. By the 1980s, led by pioneers like the Miami-Dade system, community colleges had designed and implemented some of the most comprehensive systems available for registering and processing students.
The best of these systems has also allowed colleges to assess student skill levels upon enrollment in the institution; to develop educational program plans and monitor student progress; to identify students requiring assistance; and to facilitate advisement, degree audits, and transfer to four-year colleges and universities.
Today, most technologically sophisticated colleges provide students with touch-tone telephone registration and one-stop matriculation, including assessment, advisement, financial aid, and class enrollment. The next generation of information tools now being developed will provide students with direct information access to their own records and enhanced electronic communications with teachers and fellow students—all around the world.
A second distinct set of information technology applications in community colleges is associated with the state-of-the-art career programs offered by nearly all two-year institutions. Because such training must be current to provide skills necessary for the work force, training programs have always incorporated the actual technology used on the job in allied health fields, electronics, business services, communications, and manufacturing.
For example, students at Antelope Valley Community College in Lancaster, Calif. are using desktop computers to become proficient in digital photography and image processing. Using the same hardware and software available to desktop publishers, students can prepare for a career in newspapers, magazines, medicine or law enforcement (see profile, page 14).
To further illustrate, community colleges lead in providing advanced training in computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM), and, typically, such training is provided in partnership with major manufacturers and suppliers of CIM technology.
A provocative aspect of applying information technology in technical training is that these applications are likely to assist the incorporation of technology into instructional practices in more traditional college disciplines.
As community colleges provide more and more training and retraining of the local work force under contract from local business and industry, their use of instructional technologies will be driven by the expectations of these corporations.
Already in technical training and in areas such as workplace literacy, supervision and management, communications skills, and total quality management training, colleges are incorporating interactive technologies, telecommunications, multimedia presentations, and simulations in response to client demands.
As in other educational institutions, the challenge to use information technology to improve teaching and learning has proven more difficult across all disciplines. Colleges have employed computer-assisted instruction, primarily to provide drill and practice lessons that are supplemental to classroom teaching, in such subjects as mathematics and the sciences.
Community colleges have tended to focus their computer resources in open-access, multi-purpose laboratories to maximize student access and use. They have also invested in independent learning systems, which have become much more sophisticated in the past three or four years with the use of interactive media technologies.
Self-paced, open-entry/open-exit courses and programs have become an important alternative instructional format in many colleges. Instructors have learned how to use various presentation technologies, including tapping resources from remote databases to enliven classroom instruction, and also productivity tools from word processors to classroom management systems. However, the promise of information technology to transform the teaching and learning process has not yet been fulfilled, as educators continue to struggle with appropriate applications.
Perhaps one of the areas of greatest potential for community colleges is the use of information technology to support expanded distance learning programs. For example, the University of Maine has been a leader in distance learning using interactive TV systems and residence hall-based computers.One of the major challenges facing community colleges, as well as other educational institutions, is to serve more students without using more resources. Also, as the task of postsecondary education becomes not only preparing young people for entry into the work force but also retraining the existing work force, colleges will need to find ways to serve much larger numbers of adults.
Distance learning, supported by interactive, self-paced learning systems and electronic networks that provide both remote access to information resources and enhanced communications and interactivity among student and faculty participants, is likely to be the next great frontier in higher education.
Not reluctant about experimenting with alternative methods of instruction that meet the needs of their constituents, community colleges are already engaged in pioneering workable models that move learning out of the classroom to the learners.
Community colleges are likely to remain an enigma to many who hold traditional notions of what constitutes a college experience. However, they continue to grow and change in response to the needs of their communities and, increasingly, to the needs of the national economy. They remain uniquely American and the most democratic of the nation’s institutions. And, just as democracy remains an unfinished experiment, community colleges remain a work in progress—even as they are exported to established and developing democracies all around the world.
