Search Results

Middle-class Losers?: The Role of Emotion in Educational Careers in Hong Kong

Yi‐Lee Wong

in Growing Gaps: Educational Inequality around the World

This chapter focuses on some so-called middle-class losers: seventeen students of a middle-class origin selected from a qualitative study of community-college students in contemporary Hong Kong. They ... More

This chapter focuses on some so-called middle-class losers: seventeen students of a middle-class origin selected from a qualitative study of community-college students in contemporary Hong Kong. They all failed in their previous attempts to follow a traditional route to a local university—passing the required local public examinations—and instead chose an unconventional alternative that became available in Hong Kong in 2000, studying for an associate degree in community college, in the hope that they would transfer later to a university. Based on their personal accounts of educational achievements and failures, the chapter explores the role of emotion in their educational careers to see what we can learn from them in understanding educational inequality.Less

Estimating the Productivity of Community Colleges in Paving the Road to Four-Year College Success

Scott E. Carrell and Michal Kurlaender

in Productivity in Higher Education

The distinct mission and open-access nature of community colleges and the diverse goals of the students they serve make it difficult to assess differences in quality across community college ... More

The distinct mission and open-access nature of community colleges and the diverse goals of the students they serve make it difficult to assess differences in quality across community college campuses. In this paper, we investigate institutional differences in both the extensive and intensive margin of the transfer function across California’s 108 community college campuses. Importantly, due to the richness of our dataset, we are able to adjust our estimates for a host of observed student differences, including scores on 11th grade math and English standardized tests. Results show there is significant variation in community college quality for both the probability of transfer as well as outcomes measuring how well students perform after transferring. Additionally, we examine whether any observable characteristics of the community college are significantly correlated with transfer productivity.Less

“To Meet the Training and Retraining Needs of Established Business”: Community Colleges in the Northeast and Southwest

Charles Dorn

in For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America

This chapter explores community colleges. The community college is the workhorse of American higher education—and it has never been more popular. Yet community colleges have received relatively ... More

This chapter explores community colleges. The community college is the workhorse of American higher education—and it has never been more popular. Yet community colleges have received relatively little attention from historians, an unfortunate shortcoming both because the community college is the single form of higher education that Americans can lay legitimate claim to having “invented” and because the institution has undergone a remarkable historical transformation. Beginning in the early twentieth century as “junior colleges,” community colleges were designed to provide the first two years of undergraduate study leading to the bachelor's degree. Over time, however, many became training grounds for individuals seeking occupational certification while also serving as resources for small-business development and agents of small-scale technology transfer. The chapter then looks at the cases of the Community College of Rhode Island and Santa Fe Community College to illustrate how a rising ethos of affluence guided the transformation of community colleges.Less

The OAH and the Community College Professoriate

Charles A. Zappia

in The Organization of American Historians and the Writing and Teaching of American History

This chapter focuses on “the purest teaching institutions in the world of higher education: the community colleges.” A professor in one of those colleges, the author here, narrates the inclusion of ... More

This chapter focuses on “the purest teaching institutions in the world of higher education: the community colleges.” A professor in one of those colleges, the author here, narrates the inclusion of these teachers in the early 1990s and efforts by the Organization of American Historians, beginning at the end of that decade, to break down walls between community college historians and other members of the historical profession.Less

Concrete macro culture and psychology

Carl Ratner

in Macro Cultural Psychology: A Political Philosophy of Mind

Concrete, political features of contemporary culture are articulated. A key example is the formation of the community college system in the United States. The political economic character and ... More

Concrete, political features of contemporary culture are articulated. A key example is the formation of the community college system in the United States. The political economic character and function of this system is related to the educational psychology of students. Concrete culture today is capitalist. Features of capitalist culture are explored. Its class structure is emphasized. The importance of this for psychology is explored. A concrete feature of contemporary capitalism is consumerism. Consumerism is presented as a concrete cultural factor whose effects on psychological phenomena are explored. Consumer psychology is presented as concrete cultural psychology that recapitulates consumer capitalism. Consumer psychology is shown to include a set of perceptions, sensitivities, sensations, reasoning, memory, self, and sexuality which all bear concrete features of consumer culture.Less

The New Skill Production System: Policy Challenges and Solutions in Manufacturing Labor Markets

Andrew Weaver and Paul Osterman

in Production in the Innovation Economy

This chapter draws on results from chapter 2 and additional fieldwork to suggest policy responses to the state of employment skills demands in blue-collar manufacturing. The authors argue that ... More

This chapter draws on results from chapter 2 and additional fieldwork to suggest policy responses to the state of employment skills demands in blue-collar manufacturing. The authors argue that strengthening labor market intermediaries, improving community college and high school performance, and reducing volatility in manufacturing employment will stimulate the flow of new employees. The new skill production system in the US places training outside the firm, meaning that intermediary institutions need to play the roles that in-house actions once did. The chapter gives examples of employer-driven, workforce board, and non-profit intermediaries as well as successful community college models.Less

Refocusing Community College Programs

Robert Cherry and Robert Lerman

in Moving Working Families Forward: Third Way Policies That Can Work

This chapter focuses on the general education policies at community colleges. Left liberals underline the need to provide access to four-year degree programs for everyone, as they fear that shorter ... More

This chapter focuses on the general education policies at community colleges. Left liberals underline the need to provide access to four-year degree programs for everyone, as they fear that shorter occupational programs will drive students into low-wage, dead-end jobs. However, left liberals often ignore important unintended consequences: if public colleges do not provide these occupational programs, many students will choose to go to for-profit proprietary schools. This then leads to increased student loans and insufficient training for students to obtain certification or employment. Left liberals also often ignore the data about how many young adults do not have the basic skills necessary to be successful in academic programs. For this reason, there may be justification in directing students into occupational and credential programs provided by the community colleges.Less

Pathways to Success Through Career and Technical Education: Developing and Evaluating Community College Career Pathways Initiatives

Lauren Eyster

in Career Pathways: From School to Retirement

Career pathways has become a popular career and technical education strategy, especially among the nation’s community colleges. This chapter discusses how community colleges have built career ... More

Career pathways has become a popular career and technical education strategy, especially among the nation’s community colleges. This chapter discusses how community colleges have built career pathways programs during the past two decades, with the support of the federal government and foundations, and the evidence on how well they work to improve educational and employment outcomes. Early evidence shows that community college career pathways help individuals succeed in completing an initial step in their education and the workforce. However, more needs to be known about what works for their students, how community colleges can scale their current efforts, and supporting advancement along a career pathway. Policymakers and community college leadership should consider how successful programs can be sustained and scaled and better support advancement to middle- to higher skill jobs.Less

“An Advocate for the Students”

Diane C. Fujino

in Samurai among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life

This chapter focuses on Aoki’s career in the East Bay community college system. Aoki spent his twenty-five-year career in the community college system, using his positions as instructor, counselor, ... More

This chapter focuses on Aoki’s career in the East Bay community college system. Aoki spent his twenty-five-year career in the community college system, using his positions as instructor, counselor, and intermittent administrator to help the working-class students and staff around him to achieve some measure of fulfillment and equality. Aoki resolved the duality of the education system by teaching about critical social issues, providing leadership to his colleagues, and providing academic counseling to marginalized students. He also found ways to work with people with varied methods and diverse political beliefs for creating change. In the end, Aoki was proud of the ways he translated his strivings for freedom and justice toward enabling working-class youth, students of color, and the faculty and staff around him to attain some degree of equality.Less

Community Colleges: A Place for Community Psychology in Action

John M. Majer

in Diverse Careers in Community Psychology

Community psychologists typically work in various settings, such as universities, community-based organizations, and/or as independent consultants. This chapter describes the experiences of one ... More

Community psychologists typically work in various settings, such as universities, community-based organizations, and/or as independent consultants. This chapter describes the experiences of one community psychologist who found a niche within a community college, including some material on his transition from graduate school to community college faculty and progression to tenured professor. This chapter describes how some community psychology values and competencies (i.e., human diversity, advocacy, mentorship, community-building) are practiced in this unique setting.Less

College Aid

David Deming and Susan Dynarski

in Targeting Investments in Children: Fighting Poverty When Resources Are Limited

Students who enter college but drop out without a degree are an important target for those who wish to increase educational attainment. Dropout rates are especially high at community colleges, where ... More

Students who enter college but drop out without a degree are an important target for those who wish to increase educational attainment. Dropout rates are especially high at community colleges, where poor students are concentrated. Interventions that increase persistence in community colleges are therefore a sensible focus if the goal is to increase the educational attainment of the poor. The Opening Doors demonstration projects provide strong evidence that pairing financial incentives with support services can increase college persistence among low-income students attending community colleges. This chapter reviews the evidence from experimental and high-quality quasi-experimental studies on a key tool available to policy makers: reducing college costs.Less

Restructuring the University System

William A. Link

in William Friday: Power, Purpose, and American Higher Education

This chapter describes how Bill Friday was engaged in a battle to alter the external structure of the multicampus University of North Carolina (UNC). First came the Carlyle Commission, an attempt to ... More

This chapter describes how Bill Friday was engaged in a battle to alter the external structure of the multicampus University of North Carolina (UNC). First came the Carlyle Commission, an attempt to rationalize public postsecondary education in the state by establishing a system of comprehensive community colleges, upgrading the teachers' colleges, and solidifying UNC's position. Then, in the mid-1960s, powerful forces upset the equilibrium attempted in the Carlyle Commission's plan and undermined UNC's political influence in the General Assembly. By the latter half of the 1960s, UNC's power was openly challenged, as higher education became a major issue in North Carolina politics. University restructuring was the product of considerable confusion, beginning in the 1950s, in public higher education in North Carolina.Less

Grassroots Leadership: Making the Invisible Visible

in Enhancing Campus Capacity for Leadership: An Examination of Grassroots Leaders in Higher Education

This book presents the results of a three-year case study involving interviews with hundreds of faculty and staff grassroots leaders across almost every sector of higher education. It identifies five ... More

This book presents the results of a three-year case study involving interviews with hundreds of faculty and staff grassroots leaders across almost every sector of higher education. It identifies five typical campuses of varying type (liberal arts college, community college, research university, public regional college, and technical college) and follows different change initiatives ranging from diversity to innovative pedagogies, environmentalism, staff equity, child care centers, wellness, student success, campus and community partnerships, anti-capitalist movements, immigration status, and democratic governance initiatives. While the book focuses on postsecondary educational leadership, the study has implications for the general study of leadership and organizations.Less

The Final Transformation in Massachusetts: Market Pressures, Fiscal Crises, and Business Influences, 1971-1985

Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel

in The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 1900-1985

The focus of this chapter is on the shift toward predominantly vocational enrollments in the 1970s, brought on by the combined pressures of market decline, ... More

The focus of this chapter is on the shift toward predominantly vocational enrollments in the 1970s, brought on by the combined pressures of market decline, state fiscal crisis, and the political ascendance of conservative business leaders. Nevertheless, it would be misleading to suggest that contrary forces were not in evidence at least in the first few years of the 1970s. The most important of these contrary pressures was the sheer growth of the community college and university systems, which, for a time, encouraged an increase in the absolute numbers of transfers. The community colleges in Massachusetts proved to be at least as attractive in a period of economic retrenchment as they had been in better times. Low-cost, close-to-home two-year colleges were a practical alternative to more expensive higher education. Between 1970 and 1973, the community colleges’ full-time enrollment increased by over one-third, and the other two tiers grew slightly less rapidly. As the system became more vocational in the late 1960s, it also grew. Because of this growth, the absolute number of community college students who transferred to four-year colleges increased, even though the transfer enrollment rates were slowly declining. The number of community college students transferring to the University at Massachusetts at Amherst, for example, increased from just 80 in 1964, when only seven community college campuses were open, to 425 in 1970 and then to 950 in 1972, when twelve campuses were operating at full capacity. In 1973, at the peak of transfer enrollments, 1,165 public two-year college students enrolled at the University of Massachusetts; 680 enrolled in the state colleges; and 525 enrolled in four-year private colleges in Massachusetts.2 Although never more than a small fraction of total community college enrollments, transfer rates did rise dramatically, from approximately 12.5 percent of the sophomore class in 1964 (a rate congenial to the original planners) to nearly 30 percent of the sophomore class in 1973 (Beales 1974). The nationwide decline in the market for college-educated labor in the early 1970s hit Massachusetts with slightly greater force than in other states, being reinforced by a recession in the newly emerging high-technology belt around Boston that was related to the winding down of the war in Southeast Asia. Less

Women’s Work: In which Brown is released from prison and becomes a prison activist

Daniel Burton-Rose

in Guerrilla USA: The George Jackson Brigade and the Anticapitalist Underground of the 1970s

As her time at Terminal Island ran down, Rita Brown's mind turned from the daily grind of the institution to her life after release. The most obvious question mark was DJ, who had been her girlfriend ... More

As her time at Terminal Island ran down, Rita Brown's mind turned from the daily grind of the institution to her life after release. The most obvious question mark was DJ, who had been her girlfriend for three years at the time of her incarceration. Brown's question about the status of the relationship was answered ten days before she was released from Terminal Island, when she received a “Dear Jane” letter from DJ. Brown left the prison in April 1972, with five months of parole still ahead of her. She then decided to get her life in order. Brown went to the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation (DVR), where she was certified as a “social deviant” eligible for rehabilitation money. With tuition from DVR, she went to Seattle Central Community College. In the summer of 1973, Brown and Therese Coupez formed a group to support women prisoners. They called it Women Out Now. This chapter recounts how Brown became a prison activist after her release from prison.Less

The Making of a Teenage Service Class

Ranita Ray

in Making of a Teenage Service Class: Poverty and Mobility in an American City

This chapter describes the complex and vacillating trajectory between higher education and low-wage work that defines the coming-of-age experiences of marginalized youth. Open access to certain ... More

This chapter describes the complex and vacillating trajectory between higher education and low-wage work that defines the coming-of-age experiences of marginalized youth. Open access to certain institutions of higher education allow youth to postpone degrees indefinitely while claiming to be invested in college through isolated community college classes. This also reinforces the belief that social mobility through higher education is feasible. At the same time, emotional labor involved in the performance of low-wage service work opens up opportunities for autonomy and creativity as it generates more nuanced understandings of expertise and skills. Youth are able to creatively link the wide array of skills they deploy to satisfy their customers to a larger skillset they imagine they are developing through their isolated college classes. The big companies youth work for also convey the idea that workers at the bottom are part of the industry and can climb up the ladder to white-collar jobs through hard work and training. In the end, marginalized youth are channeled into the disposable labor force as they continue to work multiple part-time jobs at low wages while participating in higher education through isolated community college classes.Less

Moving from Disconnected Systems to Communities of Care

Lauren J. Silver

in System Kids: Adolescent Mothers and the Politics of Regulation

This concluding chapter provides an update on the federal, state, and local legislative landscape concerning SIL and services for youth in care, and proposes some ideas for innovating SIL. The broad ... More

This concluding chapter provides an update on the federal, state, and local legislative landscape concerning SIL and services for youth in care, and proposes some ideas for innovating SIL. The broad legislative landscape appears to have improved since the completion of this research. The federal government now grants states the option to provide services to youths in the child welfare system until the age of twenty-one through the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008. For the improvement of SIL, the youth aging out of care, including young mothers with their children, could be placed in college communities, and different types of suites could accommodate a young family, a single youth, and those living with roommates. Youth residents in care could simultaneously attend college; those who are not yet ready for college could attend high school in the local community or a General Educational Development (GED) preparation program.Less

Designs for Comprehensive Community Colleges: 1958-1970

Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel

in The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 1900-1985

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 ... More

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. Less