A Community of Interests

For lots of young people in today’s marketplace, the step to a four-year college is an insurmountable financial burden; for others, the path to higher education involves developing and immediately marketable skill-set, one that doesn’t take lots of expensive post-high school training and certification. Enter the unsung hero of our nation’s educational system: the two-year, community college.

With half this country’s college students enrolled in this second tier educational system, community colleges have become the backbone for job-training at higher, more “value-added” levels mandated by a shifting and highly competitive global economy. The Obama administration proposed the American Graduation Initiative to pump $12 billion into community colleges and add 5 million new graduates by 2020. According to thehe July 15^th Washington Post, to achieve that goal, Obama’s new initiative “includes $2.5 billion for construction and renovation at the nation's community colleges, $500 million to develop new online courses and $9 billion for ‘challenge grants’ aimed at spurring innovation at the colleges.”

The achievements of this underrated segment of higher education are equally impressive. The July 20^th edition of Time Magazine: “These institutions are our nation's trade schools, training 59% of our new nurses as well as cranking out wind-farm technicians and video-game designers — jobs that, despite ballooning unemployment overall, abound for adequately skilled workers. Community-college graduates earn up to 30% more than high school grads, a boon that helps state and local governments reap a 16% return on every dollar they invest in community colleges. But our failure to improve graduation rates at these schools is a big part of the achievement gap between the U.S. and other countries. As unfilled jobs continue to head overseas, Obama points to the ‘national-security implication’ of the widening gap. Closing it, according to an April report from McKinsey & Co., would have added as much as $2.3 trillion, or 16%, to our 2008 GDP.”

Community colleges can adapt to changing technologies, provide access to adult education at a reasonable price – essential as obsolescence and a bad economy terminate the value of so many job skills – and are reasonably spread out across the entire nation. The bad news is that many of these schools have had large funding cuts just as enrollments rise, and their graduation rates – a prerequisite to the job-value-creation – are abysmal.

Time: “Only 31% of community-college students who set out to get a degree complete it within six years, whereas 58% of students at four-year schools graduate within that time frame. Students from middle-class or wealthy families are nearly five times more likely to earn a college degree as their poorer peers are. In 2007, 66% of white Americans ages 25 to 29 had completed at least some college, compared with 50% of African Americans and 34% of Hispanics.” And this is where the growth is: “Two-year schools have been growing faster than four-year institutions, with the number of students they educate increasing more than sevenfold since 1963, compared with a near tripling at four-year schools. Yet federal funding has held virtually steady over the past 20 years for community colleges, while four-year schools' funding has increased.”

The emphasis on mentoring, perhaps from local companies, and paying more individual attention to these students are part of the effort that we need. Not having graduates is a waste, not only in human power, but in the educational resources that they consumed towards their personal “bridge to nowhere,” resources that could have been applied towards the other students and the general upgrade of the facilities and teaching staff. Encouragement and community support are as essential as the maintenance of the structures themselves. It’s time to understand the importance of this segment of our educational world to our future as a great nation.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.