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Of all the changes in American higher education in the twentieth century, none has had a greater impact than the rise of the two-year, junior college. Yet this institution, which we now take for granted, was once a radical organizational innovation. Stepping into an educational landscape already populated by hundreds of four-year colleges, the junior college was able to establish itself as a new type of institution—a nonbachelor’s degree-granting college that typically offered both college preparatory and terminal vocational programs. The junior college moved rapidly from a position of marginality to one of prominence; in the twenty years between 1919 and 1939, enrollment at junior colleges rose from 8,102 students to 149,854 (U.S. Office of Education 1944, p. 6). Thus, on the eve of World War II, an institution whose very survival had been in question just three decades earlier had become a key component of America’s system of higher education. The institutionalization and growth of what was a novel organizational form could not have taken place without the support and encouragement of powerful sponsors. Prominent among them were some of the nation’s greatest universities—among them, Chicago, Stanford, Michigan, and Berkeley—which, far from opposing the rise of the junior college as a potential competitor for students and resources, enthusiastically supported its growth. Because this support had a profound effect on the subsequent development of the junior college, we shall examine its philosophical and institutional foundations. In the late nineteenth century, an elite reform movement swept through the leading American universities. Beginning with Henry Tappan at the University of Michigan in the early 1850s and extending after the 1870s to Nicholas Murray Butler at Columbia, David Starr Jordan at Stanford, and William Rainey Harper at Chicago, one leading university president after another began to view the first two years of college as an unnecessary part of university-level instruction.

At the end of World War II, a sense of expectancy pervaded America’s colleges and universities. Enrollments had dropped during the war years, and many institutions looked forward to the return of millions of veterans. These veterans were themselves eager to get ahead in civilian life after the hardships of war, and the nation was eager to reward them for the sacrifices that they had made. Already in 1944, as the war was coming to a close, the prestigious Education Policies Commission of the National Education Association and the American Association for School Administrators came out with a report entitled Education for All American Youth. Though focused more on secondary than higher education, the report sounded some themes that were to shape thinking about education for veterans as well. Perhaps the most powerful of these themes was the belief that the war had called on all of the American people to make sacrifices and that efforts must be made to see that no segment of the population would be excluded from the rewards of American society. For higher education, in particular, this meant that new measures would be required to realize the traditional American dream of equality of opportunity. Alongside the idealistic impulse to extend to veterans unprecedented educational opportunities, there was also the fear that the nation’s economy would be unable to provide work for the millions of returning soldiers. The massive unemployment of the Great Depression had, after all, been relieved only by the boost that war production had given the economy. The end of the war therefore threatened—or so it was widely believed at the time—to send the economy back into a terrible slump. With so many soldiers returning home, the possibility of such a downturn frightened policy elites and the public alike, for it was almost certain to revive the bitter social and political conflicts of the 1930s. Together with more idealistic factors, this concern with the effects of the returning veterans on domestic stability led to one of the major higher education acts in American history: the G.I. Bill of 1944.

No analysis of the history of the community college movement in Massachusetts can begin without a discussion of some of the peculiar features of higher education in that state. Indeed, the development of all public colleges in Massachusetts was, for many years, inhibited by the strength of the state’s private institutions (Lustberg 1979, Murphy 1974, Stafford 1980). The Protestant establishment had strong traditional ties to elite colleges—such as Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Williams, and Amherst—and the Catholic middle class felt equally strong bonds to the two Jesuit institutions in the state: Boston College and Holy Cross (Jencks and Riesman 1968, p. 263). If they had gone to college at all, most of Massachusetts’s state legislators had done so in the private system. Private college loyalties were not the only reasons for opposition to public higher education. Increased state spending for any purpose was often an anathema to many Republican legislators, and even most urban “machine” Democrats were unwilling to spend state dollars where the private sector appeared to work well enough (Stafford and Lustberg 1978). As late as 1950, the commonwealth’s public higher education sector served fewer than ten thousand students, just over 10 percent of total state enrollments in higher education. In 1960, public enrollment had grown to only 16 percent of the total, at a time when 59 percent of college students nationwide were enrolled in public institutions (Stafford and Lustberg 1978, p. 12). Indeed, the public sector did not reach parity with the private sector until the 1980s. Of the 15,945 students enrolled in Massachusetts public higher education in 1960, well over 95 percent were in-state students. The private schools, by contrast, cast a broader net: of the nearly 83,000 students enrolled in the private schools, more than 40 percent were from out of state (Organization for Social and Technical Innovation 1973). The opposition to public higher education began to recede in the late 1950s. Already by mid-decade, a large number of urban liberals had become members of the state legislature, and a new governor, Foster Furcolo, had been elected in 1956 on an activist platform.