Wick Sloane, a journalist who teaches writing at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, wants to be the new president of the AAAC (American Association of Community Colleges). He’d make a few changes, he tells Inside Higher Ed.
I’ll move my office into a trailer, no air conditioning, that I’ll park at the community college at the University of the District of Columbia. The 21st century AACC president cannot linger in the luxury of One Dupont Circle, aka The National Center for Higher Education, or The Death Star.
AAAC’s job description for the new president includes staying in the Big Six higher education groups. Sloane would break with the Five: the American Council on Education (ACE), American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU), and National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU). The Five’s colleges and universities hog nearly all the federal money, he writes, even though community colleges serve “the most students with the highest need.”
Stephen Burd of Higher Ed Watch thinks Sloane has a point, given the hostility of The Five to “the now-defunct American Graduation Initiative, a ten-year, $12 billion effort that was designed to boost the number of community college graduates by five million over the next decade.”
Initially part of student loan reform legislation, AGI would have provided funds for “community colleges to build stronger links with high schools and the workforce, expand their course offerings, improve their remedial and adult education programs, and upgrade and expand their facilities,” writes Burd.
In an e-mail to his members, David Warren, the president of NAICU, railed against the proposal before the president had even unveiled it. “There are some disturbing signs,” he warned, “that enthusiasm for expanding their [community colleges’] role may drive policy decisions that are both unfair and unwise.” The plans, he complained, “have the federal government providing funds to one sector of American higher education, to the exclusion of other sectors.”
Community colleges haven’t received their fair share of funding, writes Burd.
NAICU officials well know that the financial aid programs, largely designed over the last 40 years by New England lawmakers with lots of prestigious private colleges in their home states, as a whole tilt heavily in their institutions’ (and the public flagship universities’) favor. The private college group has successfully fought time and again to defeat efforts by policymakers to rewrite the campus based aid funding formula to ensure that the schools that predominantly serve the most disadvantaged students (i.e. community colleges) get their fair share of the funds. At the same time, private college lobbyists have not hesitated to lobby for generous tuition tax deduction proposals that provide little benefit to community college students but favor their sector’s students disproportionately.
Should commuity colleges go it alone?
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at 12:11 pm
[...] Community College Spotlight: How can community colleges get their fair share of federal funding? Critics say other higher education groups — ostensibly Big Six allies — are hostile [...]
at 1:20 pm
For your readers’ edification, this was NAICU’s response to Steve Burd’s piece:
It’s unfair to suggest that some sort of antagonism toward community colleges was the basis for NAICU’s concerns about several initiatives in the student aid reform bill. Our primary concerns with portions of the proposed bill followed NAICU’s long and consistent history of opposing efforts to grant states inappropriate control over colleges.
Under various versions of the bill:
(1) States could have become the standard setting forum for all sectors of higher education, through federal dollars. This new role would have been possible in both the community college section, and the state based graduation initiative. While all our public colleagues eventually shared our concerns, their concerns increased after NAICU had secured an exemption from the state-control issue for private colleges (which in essence would have allowed us to refuse to take any federal cash).
(2) A focused construction program for a single sector of higher education would’ve been funded from student loans. Since the creation of the Pell Grant program in 1972, federal higher education policy has focused on directing funds to students, not institutions. Construction funding is as antagonistic a debate in 2010 as it was in 1972, and Congress was right when it concluded 40 years ago that an institutional approach was not in the best interests of students.
NAICU has been among the associations leading the fight for Pell Grant increases, even though the program disproportionately benefits community college students. We partner closely with our community college colleagues in this effort. Simply put, we believe empowering low-income students to go to the school of their choice is the best possible public policy. The fact that community colleges disproportionately benefit from the Pell program has never dampened our efforts. And, besides, if we improve completion, today’s community college students become tomorrow’s four-year college students.
In the end, NAICU was one of the few major higher education associations that supported the House student loan reform bill, even when it proposed money for community college construction and state-based reform efforts to increase graduation rates. Despite other reservations about the House bill, it helped students while recognizing that private colleges are not governed by the states.
The final bill was stripped of the many new education programs because of the Senate Byrd rules governing budget reconciliation, not because of any doing on NAICU’s part.
All traditional sectors of higher education are under considerable financial pressures as they seek to continue to provide a high quality education to a growing number of low-income students. Public colleges are doing this with fewer state resources, community colleges are bursting at the seams, and struggling private, non-profit colleges increasingly are being targeted for buy-outs by for-profits.
Such a situation puts considerable strain on all of us. But to suggest the solution is for each sector to go its own way and abandon our collective voice is a dangerous proposition for students and for our nation.
Sarah Flanagan
Vice President for Government Relations and Policy
National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities
at 1:03 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Grayson Page, Joanne Jacobs. Joanne Jacobs said: Blog: If I ran the AACC . . . http://communitycollegespotlight.org/content/if-i-ran-the-aacc_535/ [...]