New Panel to Address Divide Between 2- and 4-Year Colleges

A new national panel aims to address the growing economic and racial divide between two- and four-year colleges. The uneconomically named Task Force on Preventing Community Colleges from Becoming Separate and Unequal, convened by the Century Foundation and funded by the Ford Foundation, seeks to strengthen community colleges so that they do not become a refuge for low-income and academically underprepared students alone, because doing so will be their undoing, say the panel's leaders. “While two-year institutions must always provide access to low-income and working-class students, community colleges need to find ways to recruit middle-class students as well, or the political and financial support for the two-year sector will continue to decline,” Eduardo J. Padrón, president of Miami Dade College and a co-chair of the panel, said in a news release. The other co-chair of the panel, which will hold its first meeting on Feb. 17, is Anthony Marx, president of the New York Public Library and former president of Amherst College. A list of the panel's members can be found here.