Community Colleges
Pointers
1. History of community colleges
- Vocational schools / junior colleges / normal schools / ???
- California master plan
- Post-industrial America
2. Current status of community colleges
- About 1,000 public, 100 private non-profit, 500 for-profit 2-year institutions (compared with about 3,000 total 4-year institutions) Chronicle Almanac 2007, p. 4
- About 6 million students (compared with about 7 million at 4-years), ibid.
- Low transfer-rate to four-year schools (about 18% in California)
- Open admission policies
- Lack of extracurricular and social life
- Awareness in surrounding communities (CCSF, Vista, Cabrillo)
3. Where to: defining the purpose
- Lower-division coursework
- Vocational programs
- Non-traditional students
- Open enrollment
- Students with disabilities
4. Supplementing the "bare purpose"
- Developing a social life on campus
- Marketing the college to the surrounding community
- Enrollment
- Development $$
4. How to design a community college from scratch?
Quotes
The time has come to make education through the fourteenth grade available in the same way that high school education is now available. This means that tuition-free education should be available in public institutions to all youth for the traditional freshman and sophomore years or for the traditional 2-year junior college course.
To achieve this, it will be necessary to develop much more extensively than at present such opportunities as are now provided in local communities by the 2-year junior college, community institute, community college, or institute of arts and sciences. The name used does not matter, though community college seems to describe these schools best; the important thing is that the services they perform be recognized and vastly extended.
Such institutions make post-high-school education available to a much larger percentage of young people than otherwise could afford it. Indeed, as discussed in the volume of this Commission's report, "Organizing Higher Education," such community colleges probably will have to carry a large part of the responsibility for expanding opportunities in higher education.
--Truman Commission Report, 1947
Said public junior colleges shall offer instruction through, but not beyond the fourteenth grade level including, but limited to, one or more of the following: (a) standard collegiate transfer to higher institutions, (b) vocational-technical fields leading to employment, and (c) general, or liberal arts courses.
--A Master Plan for Higher Education in California, 1960 - 1975 (p. 2)
The junior colleges admit both high school graduates and nongraduates. Education Code Section 5706 requires junior colleges, assuming residence requirements are met, to accept “any high school graduate and any other person over eighteen years of age . . . capable of profiting from the instruction offered.” The results of a questionnaire circulated at the request of the Technical Committee, to which 56 junior colleges replied, indicate that (a) 50 admit anyhigh school graduate; (b) 36 admit any person over eighteen years of age; (c) 30 admit some students on a probationary basis.
--MPHEC (p. 74)
Links
1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education
Community Colleges in Wikipedia
California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office
Truman Commission Report
2003 Completion and Transfer Rates for California CC's
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