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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

During the 1970s, the community colleges were finally able to realize the vocationalization project that visionaries in the junior college movement from Koos to Gleazer had favored for almost half a century. Since the 1920s, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, the advocates of junior college vocationalization pursued their project in the face of persistent student indifference and occasional overt opposition. But in the early 1970s, a complex concatenation of forces—among them, a changed economic context and an unprecedented degree of support for vocational education from key institutions—including private foundations, the federal government, and business—tilted the balance in favor of the vocationalizers. A key factor behind the sharp increase in vocational enrollments at the community college, we shall argue, was the declining labor market for graduates of four-year institutions. But the objective change in the structure of economic opportunities for college graduates was not, as the consumer-choice model would have it, the sole factor responsible for the shift in junior college enrollments; indeed, the impact of such objective changes is, of necessity, mediated through subjective perceptions—perceptions that, we shall attempt to demonstrate below, tended to exaggerate the economic plight of college graduates. Moreover, the community college itself, driven by a powerful organizational interest in expanded enrollments and in carving out a secure niche for itself in the highly competitive higher education industry, actively shaped its economic environment by pursuing those segments of its potential market—in particular, adults and part-time students— most likely to enroll in occupational programs. By almost any standard, the rise in vocational enrollments during the 1970s was remarkable. Between 1970—1971 and 1979—1980, for example, the proportion of A.A. degrees awarded in occupational fields rose from 42.6 percent to 62.5 percent (Cohen and Brawer 1982, p. 203). With respect to total enrollments (full-time and part-time) the picture was similar: between 1970 and 1977, the proportion of students enrolled in occupational programs rose from less than one-third to well over half (Blackstone 1978). In the midst of a long-term decline in the liberal arts, Cohen and Brawer (1982, p. 23) observed, “occupational education stands like a colossus on its own.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Since its origins at the turn of the century, the junior college has had a complex, and at times uneasy, relationship with a public that has looked to the educational system as a vehicle for the realization of the American dream. Despite its self-portrayal as “democracy’s college” and its often heroic efforts to extend education to the masses, the two-year institution has faced widespread public skepticism. For to most Americans, college was a pathway to the bachelor’s degree, and the junior college—unlike the four-year institution—could not award it. Moreover, the early public junior colleges were often tied administratively and even physically to local secondary schools, a pattern that compounded their problems in gaining legitimacy as bona fide institutions of higher education. The two-year institution’s claim to being a genuine college rested almost exclusively on its promise to offer the first two years of a four-year college education. Yet the junior college was never intended, despite the high aspirations of its students, to provide anything more than a terminal education for most of those who entered it; indeed, at no point in its history did even half of its students transfer to a four-year institution. Nonetheless, for at least the first two decades of its existence, almost exclusive emphasis was placed on its transfer rather than its terminal function. As the early leaders of the movement saw it, the first task at hand was to establish the legitimacy of this fragile institution as an authentic college. And this task could be accomplished only by convincing the existing four-year institutions to admit junior college graduates and to offer them credit for the courses that they had completed there. If the pursuit of academic respectability through emphasis on transfer dominated the junior college movement during its first decades, by the mid-1920s a countermovement stressing the role of the junior college as a provider of terminal vocational education began to gather momentum. Arguing that most junior college students were, whatever their aspirations, in fact terminal, proponents of this view saw the institution’s main task not as providing a platform for transfer for a minority but, rather, as offering vocational programs leading to marketable skills for the vast majority.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Through the later fifties and sixties, the California plan was adopted, with modifications, in state after state. The four-year colleges and universities were protected by a rapidly expanding network of community colleges, over 360 of which were established between 1958 and 1968. The national increase in public two-year enrollments approached 300 percent for the decade of the 1960s, close to triple that for overall higher education enrollments. In New York, two-year enrollments increased from 6 percent of total public enrollments in 1960 to nearly 50 percent in 1970. The increases in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut were as dramatic, from 4 percent to 26 percent, 2 percent to 28 percent, and zero to 20 percent respectively. By 1976, more than one third of all college freshmen and nearly 50 percent of those in public institutions were enrolled in community colleges. Due in no small part to this rapid increase in the number and enrollment of the community colleges, higher education had come within reach of the 1947 President’s Commission recommendations: nearly one-half of the college-age population was attending some institution of higher education. As the 1973 Second Newman Report—commissioned and funded by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare—proudly proclaimed, American higher education “by the middle 1960s began moving into . . . [an] egalitarian [period]. Increasingly the American public has assumed that everyone should have a chance at a college education.” Unfortunately for those offered that chance, the system, though opened at the bottom, remained as closed as ever on top. The new generation of students was not granted access to higher education in general but to particular institutions—the community colleges. And these colleges, though presented as transitional institutions to the four-year schools, were in fact designed to keep students away from the senior colleges. As Amitai Etzioni of Columbia University explained for the readers of the Wall Street Journal, “If we can no longer keep the floodgates closed at the admissions office, it at least seems wise to channel the general flow away from four-year colleges and toward two-year extensions of high school in the junior and community colleges.”

This chapter follows Simon J. Ortiz, an Acoma Pueblo poet, critic, and professor, as he developed his introductory survey of Native American literature between 1977 and 1979 for the Ethnic Studies program at the College of Marin in the California community college system. Before Marin, Ortiz had taught at several Native student-serving institutions, and wrote about course development and teaching in his journals. At Marin, he reckoned with how to teach Native American literature to non-Native students and with how to convey the diverse range of Native American literatures in a single-semester survey. After teaching a first version of the course—a traditional survey that moved from pre-contact oral literature through anthropologist-mediated life writing to the “renaissance of Native American literature”—Ortiz radically rewrote his syllabus. In his revised syllabus, each week triangulated traditional oral story, historical narrative, and contemporary fiction, replacing the traditional survey’s search for an authentic, pre-contact oral tradition with a vision of post-contact years as the center of Native American national literary tradition. Ortiz theorized this classroom-tested idea of a literature of survivance and continuance in his famous 1981 essay “Towards a National Indian Literature.”

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.

An atmosphere of amiable routine now surrounds North Shore Community College in the Boston suburb of Beverly. Still located on a main downtown thorough-fare, as it has been since it opened in 1965, the college serves an economically varied region, including both the affluent oceanside towns of Marblehead, Swampscott, and Gloucester to the north and the chronically depressed old mill towns of Lynn and Peabody to the southwest. By the mid-1980s, enrollments were heavily occupational, and both staff and students seemed to like it that way. “There’s more demand than there are seats in the technical programs,” said one counselor. “In allied health, there’s a very heavy demand—three or four to one. But generally in liberal arts, we can accept people until the first week of classes.” The staff tended to view the history of their college as a natural unfolding. “The original intent,” observed one dean, “was to provide something for everyone, and that’s what we’ve done.” But vocational education did not always predominate at North Shore. Indeed, in 1965, the college’s first year of operation, over 80 percent of North Shore’s students were enrolled in liberal arts-transfer programs, and many of the faculty were committed to keeping the college’s distinctively academic image. According to one long-time member of the faculty, “At first, some of the faculty . . . had the idea that we were some kind of elitist thing. For them, the important thing was having the smartest students. . . . Quite of few of them were from universities. They didn’t know anything about community colleges.” “Yes, there were some internal battles,” one dean acknowledged. “The occupational programs were a concern to some liberal arts faculty.” The faculty’s grumbling had little effect on Harold Shively, the first president of North Shore. Shively, a long-time associate of William Dwyer in New York, shared Dwyer’s commitment to building a vocationally oriented system, and he did not wait long to press his plans for transforming North Shore in the direction suggested by this commitment.

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.