Community Colleges are better than “good”

Andre Furtado and Nathan Whitaker’s comments about community colleges are examples of the prejudices that exist against community colleges.

Furtado accuses community colleges of not teaching critical thinking skills, suggesting that CC’s teach only manual skills. Nothing could be further from the truth. While many community colleges, mine included, began as job training schools, they now require courses in math, science, social sciences, humanities and English to complete a transferable associate’s degree.

Whitaker’s comment is even more damaging. He paints community colleges as the place to go when you can’t get into a “real” school. Not only that, he implies that CC’s are dead-end options. What he should say is that if you want education closer to home, if you want education you can afford, if you need individual attention to help you get started toward higher education, then CC’s are “your place over there,” but it is an opportunity, not a banishment.

Implicit in all the comments are that four-year institutions can be better at being a community college than actual community colleges are at fulfilling their mission. State funding is certainly scarce, so why not let four-year schools do what they do best, and stop trying to be what they are not, and allow community colleges do what they do best, which is put more students into the education pipeline. The four-year schools will benefit from associate degree-holding students who are certainly more college ready, and savvy, than the freshmen they are seeing today.

Tom McCool, Exec. Director, Marketing at Ivy Tech State College, at 9:13 am EDT on June 9, 2005

Having gone through a community college before tranferring to a small elite libral arts college, I am a big proponent of comminity and junior colleges. However, the quality of a community college depends highly on the type of funding it recieves and the regulations it operates under — not all community colleges are alike, and while mine and many others are excellent, some are not. Simply blindly routing low income, at risk or otherwise non-traditional, non-elite students into a community college without knowing the capabilities of that institution may be no better than simply ignoring such students outright.

Heather Phillips, at 12:12 pm EDT on June 9, 2005

Nationwide assault on access to higher education

As a faculty member of the Interdisciplinary Studies (IS) department, part of CULMA, at Wayne State University, I can tell you that this is part of a three decade assault on open access and interdisciplinarity at Wayne, as well as part of a nationwide trend away from a democratic society. When I arrived in 1998, I was attracted and impressed by the IS faculty’s commitment to innovative pedagogy for working, adult, mostly African-American students rooted in a faculty that was very productive in carrying out genuinely interdisciplinary and integrative research. It is this combination of interdisciplinarity and innovative, writing-centered pedagogical work in a research university setting that was virtually unique in the nation and that has lived its life under the bull’s eye of local hostility since its predecessor program, Montieth College, with outreach to unionized factory workers, was killed out the same sort of elitism and irrational hostility that motivated this action by the administration, who cherry-picked one option from an internal advisory document that they clearly desired from the outset. This follows on the heels of the closure of the previous college we were a part of—Lifelong Learning—see a pattern, anyone?

The issue about community colleges is a red herring, since we get most of our students from community colleges. We offer something different, in any event. Our program is interdisciplinary and taught by a significant, if declining, number of full-time faculty who meet the larger university’s research requirements while developing a full spectrum of general education and topical courses adapted to the needs of working adults, supported by a dedicated staff of advisors who help recruit and retain students who otherwise feel abandoned in the impersonal bureaucracy of the rest of the university. In short, we have an open access program with an intensive curriculum leading to a high quality outcome, complete with senior writing requirements. This is only possible given the resources of full-time faculty, small teacher-student ratios, and dedicated advisers we have and that other units would like to poach for use by traditional students. All these resources have been slowly drying up before the closure of CULMA, as faculty retirements are not replaced and, as we now understand, lines eliminated. The faculty senate and our AAUP union chapter have done NOTHING other than rubber stamp the provost’s plan and taken all promises by the administration at face value.

No positions to be eliminated? Don’t count on it—we will continue to be starved of the resources that allow us to recruit and teach so many adult students and then penalized when the enrollments inevitably fall. The urban mission of the university will be better met by dispersal of its units across the university? Are you kidding me?!: CULMA was the only place that urban research and outreach was done not because everyone else is dying to do it but were somehow prevented from doing so by the existence of CULMA. Yet this is the kind of Orwellian rhetoric we hear from the administration. You really have to wonder about the critical thinking skills of faculty who will believe this kind of nonsense.

Now Republican state legislators are changing the formula for state funding of Michigan’s universities to punish Detroit’s urban university out of their own pathological hatred for everything urban, working class, and black (if you know anything about Michigan politics, this is a very old story). And the administration will no doubt take up the rallying cry for how important it is to have an urban university, parroting the very language that the defenders of CULMA used that fell on deaf ears. If they manage to save funding, look for them to cut the albatross of access so that they are ready for the next round.

Finally, there is no way to analyze what is happening to education in this country without observing where all the money is going—to a senseless war and occupation of Iraq. Empire or education?; war or health care?—take your pick, you can’t have both.

Bill Lynch, Wayne State University, at 5:29 pm EDT on June 9, 2005

Thank you for your comments`

Thank you Bill, Nathan and Andre for your further comments. I commend you and your colleagues for your commitment to urban minority students, and I share your concerns for your respective institutions. Community colleges should NOT be the only option for them. We share with you the mission of providing opportunity and access to higher education.

The comments from Merina and Heather are evidence that not all community colleges are created equal. Yet, the same could be said for all of higher education. It is a reality that must be faced and dealt with, institution by institution.

I hope that the powers-that-be at Minnesota and Wayne State understand what their true missions are, and that the situation takes a positive turn to benefit the students they serve.

Tom McCool, Exec. Director, Marketing at Ivy Tech Community College, at 10:44 am EDT on June 13, 2005