“The University”

As a vice president at a community college, I’m repeatedly struck by the assumptions about higher education made by people in other sectors of the industry. They’ll frequently make pronouncements about “The University” as if there’s only one model of higher education and it looks like Harvard. Just this week, a writer I respect tweeted out a question to upper-level admins: Would you be willing to reduce your pay to $200,000 per year in exchange for offering free tuition to students? I laughed out loud at the idea that community college admins routinely make more than that; in my own case, it would represent a dramatic raise. (So to answer his question, sure!) That’s not a complaint about my salary; it’s an observation of what outside observers routinely, and incorrectly, take as given.

Sector-based assumptions are constant issues here. CARES Act funding, for instance, is based on FTE counts in credit-bearing classes (with extra weight given for Pell recipients). That sounds reasonable, but it shorts community colleges in at least three major ways. With the largest proportion of part-time students, the FTE count severely undercounts the services we need to provide. (Part-time students need just as much counseling and advising as full-time ones, for instance.) As the sector with the largest presence in the noncredit space -- workforce training and adult basic education, for example -- we get literally no help for that crucial work. And as the sector with the largest dual-enrollment presence, well, that gets ruled out, too. The only students who count are the kinds that disproportionately attend four-year schools.

Dual enrollment has largely been ignored in the discussions of scenarios for the fall semester. The discussions of how colleges will resume in the fall almost always assume that colleges are self-contained and autonomous, able to control their own environments. That’s a good description of classic liberal arts colleges, but it doesn’t capture most community colleges at all. For instance, we have over 60 K-12 public school districts in our county, and we have dual enrollment, middle college or early college high school arrangements with most of them. (Yes, I said “districts.” New Jersey has a strong tradition of home rule. Some districts are only K-8, so that reduces the relevant total somewhat.) We also have arrangements with several private high schools.

That means, among other things, that we have to coordinate our schedules and offerings with the various high schools. That’s a significant task in normal times, given the varying schedules that the different high schools use. This fall it promises to be exponentially more complicated. Take the myriad of schedules we face normally and add social distancing, remote live classes, small cohorts and maybe a late-October return to home-based instruction. What if we come back and a high school doesn’t? What if a high school shuts down at a resurgence before we do? What about students and faculty who have kids in school? The K-12 variable looms large here.

You’d think that issues like these would be worthy of a little help. But they’re not top of mind for folks whose model of higher education is Yale or the University of Michigan. So we figure it out locally, with the resources we can muster.

That would be hard even if we didn’t just get our state funding cut in half. The CARES Act maintenance-of-effort “requirement” is so toothless that the state didn’t even pause. That cut, alone, is larger than the institutional portion of CARES Act funding, and that’s before accounting for the piano’s worth of strings attached to the federal money.

I offer this not in the spirit of doom and gloom -- community colleges are optimistic by their very nature, and they’ve raised resourcefulness to an art form -- but in the spirit of a reality check. “The University” may hold an outsize place in our political imagination, but generalizing from that to here does real harm.

What if … stay with me here … we designed higher ed policies and assumptions around community colleges and treated the Ivies as outliers? What if we spent more time discussing the ins and outs of dual enrollment than whatever Michael Sandel is doing at any given time? What if we assumed that the salary of a Big Ten football coach has approximately nothing to do with what most colleges are facing? What if we recognized that part-time students are students, that adult literacy programs matter and that high schools and community colleges rely on each other?

That would help. In the meantime, it’s back to drawing up multiple scenarios for wild enrollment fluctuations in the context of halved state funding and an unpredictable virus. I’ll leave coverage of the Harvard English department to The New York Times. They never seem to tire of it.