ing trend. Frank Newman of the HEW Task Force on Higher Education says that one of the community colleges’ strengths is that faculty members have one foot in the world of work and none in an ivory tower. He also notes that community college faculty spend nine- teen to twenty-three hours a week in the classroom. The four-year-college aver- age is six to nine hours a week. Sampling a community college cur- riculum is like stepping up to a smor- gasbord. The basic dishes are vocational: computer management, data processing, offset printing, medical-laboratory tech- nique. Often the courses are closely. re- lated to local job opportunities and may even be planned in cooperation with lo- cal employers. At Santa Ana College in Santa Ana, California, for example, a full schedule of courses is offered in such subjects as insurance underwrit- ing, actuarial mathematics, and policy preparation, because a large number of Tegional insurance company headquar- ters have congregated in Orange County. Civil-service courses also are popular for bureaucrats who wish to upgrade them- selves. Evening classes offer many non- credit adult “recreational” subjects. Courses in the Santa Ana catalog in- clude patio cooking, sewing for men, ice-skating, coed volleyball, auto care for women, and the making of men’s hairpieces. But that side of the gurriculum can be exaggerated. Three out of five fresh- men still sign up for the “transfer” pro- gram, the academic curriculum that pre- pares them for third- and fourth-year study and an eventual bachelor’s degree. The course offerings here correspond roughly to the first two years of a four- year college. The attrition rate in transfer programs is high—more than 50 percent fail to finish the first semester. But the 20 percent who stay the full two years, receive an Associate of Arts or Asso- ciate of Applied Science degree, and then go on to upper-division study do just as well as those who went to four-year campuses in the first place. “The records show you can't distinguish them from the natives,” says Arthur M. Cohen of ERIC. As for the students, it is almost im- possible to generalize about a group that numbers nearly 2 million—or about their motives. During a recent visit to a “learning center” on one Southern Cali- fornia two-year campus, desks were oc- cupied by three women in their forties, a retired military officer, a black truck SR/ World * 2/9/74 driver, two young Chicano girls, two long-haired boys who \would have been at home on any campus, and a recent immigrant from Nicaragua who was practicing English with a tape recorder. “Well, the children are grown, and my husband travels a lot, and I decided, ‘Edith, it’s time you leaned something’; so here I am,” one of the housewives explained. The truck driver was a grade- school dropout who way there primarily to learn mathematics and improve his spoken English: “I found I couldn't get out from behind that wheel until I did.” The Nicar4guan had been a college stu- dent in his homeland anc| hoped to learn his new language well enough to resume his studies. Demographically, what L. Patricia Cross of Educational Testing Service has called “the new learners” are older, blacker, and poorer thar previous gen- erations of students. Half the community college freshmen.are oyer twenty-one (and the Carnegie Commission predicts that by the year 2000, half will be over thirty). Two out of three are men; nearly half have families and hold full- time jobs. Three out of five in urban colleges have family incomes of $10,000 or less. At least one study has shown that com- munity college students are drawn in almost equal proportions from all four quartiles of academic ability in the gen- eral population: Many bright students choose community colleges because they can live at home, hold a job, and save money. As a whole, however, community college students have been shown to be less academically oriented than four- year-college students. The students are shrewd enough to recognize the economic value of a col- lege credential, however, and they want a meaningful diploma. College after col- lege that has attempted to water down standards has run into resistance from students who want to feel they have achieved something. Two-year students have insisted that even the newest and most urban campuses must “feel” like the colleges they have seen in the movies. “A guy who could perfect a strain of ivy that would grow in three days could make a million dollars selling it to com- munity colleges,” says Arthur Cohen. But the most striking feature of the two-year schools is not the absence of ivy—it is the absence of moss. To be sure, there are many conservative insti- tutions among the community colleges whose educational methods could not be distinguished from those of the most hidebound four-year college—or high school. But others have been far bolder than most four-year colleges. Many changes have been purely administra- tive: For example, Miami-Dade operates a “Weekend College” for students who can't come to class during the week. But many of the changes adopted by community colleges are more basic. Many schools, for instance, operate on “the systems approach” to education. That means student and instructor work out a series of objectives for the course —what the student hopes to know and to be able to do with his knowledge when he is finished. The use of all educational resources—texts, technology, lectures, conferences—is described. All of that is reduced to a written contract, which a “I gave up chasing women when I noticed they were slowing down to let me catch them.” {2 DOUGLAS PA hod COLLEGE LIBRARY