Confessions of a Community College Dean

With much of selective higher ed focused on the Supreme Court and its impending declaration on affirmative action in admissions, I’m grateful again to be at a community college. Here, affirmative action in admissions is a non-issue; we take all comers. We have our own legal and political challenges, heaven knows, but not that one.

Connecticut’s new centralized higher education system office has apparently been making either offers or threats -- there’s some dispute, and I have no inside information on it -- to community college presidents. As I understand it, the legislature passed a law last year limiting remedial coursework to a single semester. Apparently, some campuses have balked, so the system office has let the presidents know that if they feel unable to comply, they are welcome to leave.

I love this question. A new correspondent writes: "Do you (or any of your wise and worldly readers) have any advice about looking for or finding clues to a college's culture, before you actually work there?"

A few years ago, I floated the idea of an upscale proprietary. (For convenience, I called it Mercedes U.) My argument was that for-profits have, until now, focused on the lower end of the market, where they have to compete with (subsidized) community colleges. Since they can’t compete on price at the low end, I suggested, better to try on the high end. (In California, at this point, they can compete simply by being open. But in the other 49 states, the argument still stands.) The only attempt I saw, Founders College, quickly ran aground on the shoals of Ayn Randian ideology and some pretty iffy management. Since then, nothing.

Sometimes the best moments at conferences come in between the official presentations.

I was advised by some well-placed people at CASE not to use the term “fundraisers.” But I wasn’t given a preferred alternative, and nothing else seems quite right. I refuse to use “friendraisers” on the grounds that it’s a crime against the English language, and it conjures a mental image of zombies rising from graves. “Development officers” is politically correct, but it’s both clunky and vague. “Advancement professionals” is even worse. So I’ll use “fundraisers” until I hear something better.

I’m at the CASE conference in San Diego, seeing what “development” (that is, fundraising) officers at community colleges talk about when they gather. (CASE is the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.) It’s a national organization of development officers from all sectors of nonprofit higher ed, but this is their first conference focused specifically on community colleges.

If you read only one book about higher education this year, read The Cost Disease, by William Baumol. It’s essential, brilliant, and even readable. And it answers an important question – why the costs of health care and education keep going up – more intelligently than anything else I’ve seen.