[Education] Community Colleges: Innovation or Gimmickry? While much of American higher education is cutting back, the two-year colleges are expanding, even though the value of some of their methods remains unproven. by Edwin Kiester, Jr. hatcom Community College in Ferndale, Washington, is a college without a campus. One thousand students attend classes in churches, Grange halls, firehouses, the Lummi Indian reserva- tion headquarters, and eighty-seven other rented or borrowed locations around the rural Canadian-border county. Student dairy farmers learn agricultural manage- ment in their own barns from their own books. Circuit-riding instructors visit them on a regular basis to discuss prin- ciples of accounting and marketing, and once a month they all get together for a lecture and discussion. South Oklahoma City Junior College has abolished established notions of academic time and space. Classes are held in one giant room, in which tem- porary partitions are erected when pri- vacy seems necessary. Students are ad- mitted to SOCJC every five weeks, in- stead of merely at spring and fall semes- ters. They map out an educational plan, setting forth what they hope to achieve, which they then are free to follow when- ever and wherever they choose. Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, California, recognizes that many stu- dents learn by doing rather than by read- ing, listening, and note taking. Orange Coast business students operate their own retail clothing store, The Windjam- mer. Classes in accounting, marketing, and data processing revolve around the store’s operations—and so do classes in law enforcement. Once a month a hold- up is staged so that students can prac- tice principles of crime detection. To the traditionalists in American higher education, what is happening at Whatcom, South Oklahoma City, and Orange Coast, as well as at many more of the nation’s 1100 two-year community colleges, does not qualify as educational Edwin Kiester, Jr., is a free-lance writer based in San Francisco and is former execu- tive editor of Change magazine. innovation, but as gimmickry. In fact, the institutions themselvs are fre- quently put down as “high schools with ashtrays,” overblown technizal and trade schools, and as a thinly disguised way to keep the blacks off the streets. Community college officials them- selves acknowledge that the: educational value of some of their methods remains unproven. Yet while much pf American higher education is cutting back, count- ing its pennies, and trying to maintain a low profile, the community colleges are expanding. In the pas} five years, while more than one hundred private colleges have closed their doors and others have teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, an equal numer of com- rnunity colleges have opened; and while four-year public colleges and universi- ties have had to scramble far their share of tax money, the community colleges have been heavily funded by both federal and state governments, In education to- day the community colleges are where the action is. The ferment on the two-year campus is a natural product of the wave of change that is sweeping the whole phi- losophy of American higher education. The American academy is b2ing broadly transformed from an exclusive institu- tion to an inclusive one. The once- narrow gates to higher education have been thrown wide to admit ¢very Amer- ican regardless of race, color, creed, age, sex, or previous bloodstains on his or her high school transcript. In this revolution the first truly demo- cratic college, the community college, is the spearhead. During the middle 1960s a community college jas opening somewhere in America every week. To- day the growth rate is slower, but com- munity colleges now make up almost half of the post-secondary institutions in America, They enroll nearly one-third of the 5 million students. And the end is still not in sight. The Carnegie Com- mission on Higher Education recently called for 230 to 280 more comprehen- i sive community colleges to be estab- lished by 1980, putting a college within commuting distance of 95 percent of the U.S. student population. Such expan- sion would accommodate 35 to 40 per- cent of all students, the commission pre- dicted, including virtually all the freshmen and sophomores. Today, the two-year, low-tuition com- munity colleges are still spread unevenly over the land. According to the ERIC (Education Research Information Cen- ter) at the University of California, Los Angeles, more than one-third of all community colleges are concentrated in seven states—California, Michigan, II- linois, Florida, Texas, Washington, and New York. ERIC calls these states “saturated,” or housing more than enough community colleges for today’s needs. Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Massa- chusetts are said to be approaching satu- ration. Indiana, Louisiana, West Virginia, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and the Dis- trict of Columbia still haven't enough space for their population, ERIC states. ALTHOUGH community colleges are springing up everywhere, many Ameri- cans know little about them. Often even their severest critics, who teach at four- year campuses, never have set foot in a two-year public college. The commen notion is that community colleges are overblown high schools and trade schools where minimally qualified teachers dish out a second-rate education to an ever- changing procession of ghetto dwellers and dropouts with learning problems —and that the colleges are small, under- funded, and poorly equipped. In fact, the average community college today enrolls about 2500 students; Long Beach City, in California, and Miami-Dade, in Florida, each have more than 30,000 part- and full-time students. A few com- munity colleges still rent space in the high school basement, but many have full-fledged, well-equipped campuses. Penn Valley College, in Kansas City, Missouri, which opened last fall, cost $30 million. Across the nation, about 8 percent of community college faculty hold doc- torates; 70 percent, master’s degrees; 10 percent, bachelor’s degrees, The re- mainder, who have not completed col- lege, teach primarily vocational subjects. The percentage of those holding docto- . rates is steadily rising—ERIC officials estimate it will be between 12 and 15 per- cent by 1980. However, not everyone sees “professionalization” as a promis- 2/9/74 * SR/ World