Two-year college students get no respect

Community college students get no respect, writes UCLA Education Professor Mike Rose in Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education. Adult students at community colleges and remedial programs want job skills — but they also want an education, Rose writes.

Self-improvement is an American tradition, notes Jay Mathews in the Washington Post.

. . . Rose crafts rich and moving vignettes of people in tough circumstances who find their way; who get a second, third, or even fourth chance; and who, in a surprising number of cases, reinvent themselves as educated, engaged citizens.

. . . Rose bristles at the way experts talk about students who drop out of community college programs. . .  “People will leave once they develop sufficient skill to get a job,” he says. “This has a positive economic impact [but] . . . is often cited as an illustration of poor people’s inability to delay gratification and form long-term goals. In my experience, most of the people taking those immediate jobs do so because the rent is due, children need to be fed, members of the family are sick.”

Rose worries that remedial education is turning to modules and computer labs, breaking academics into bite-sized skills instruction and multiple-choice quizzes. He wants community college students to “enjoy the best of a liberal education,” Mathews writes.

“Rose’s idealism is the best kind: informed, tough-minded, self-aware,” writes Jim Cullen in a review on History News Network.

(Rose) advocates a more richly contextualized approach attentive to the lived experiences, social capital, and intellectual curiosity even the least prepared students bring to the classroom. (Such an approach would require comparable attention paid to the faculty for such courses, who are typically poorly trained and compensated for such work.) He argues for a similarly integrated approach to vocational training, with literacy and numeracy woven into the fabric of instruction.

Rose ” insists on the civic dimensions of even the most utilitarian of educations,” Cullen concludes.

Colleges will teach cultures, democracy

Bridging Cultures to Form a Nation: Difference, Community, and Democratic Thinking will ”infuse questions about difference, community, and democratic thinking into transfer courses in the humanities” at 10 community colleges. The Association of American Colleges and Universities and The Democracy Commitment: An American Community College Initiative announced the curriculum and faculty development project, which will be funded by a three-year National Endowment of the Humanities grant.

In the face of ever increasing diversity, intensified globalization, and hardening political polarization, it is more urgent than ever that higher education—and the humanities in particular—offer vehicles through which students expand their knowledge of each other’s cultures and develop skills to work across differences toward shared goals. As a microcosm of our nation’s diversity, community colleges are the ideal public space to infuse such learning, and the humanities—steeped in the practice of entering imaginatively into other people’s lives and worldviews through literature, history, and philosophy—are particularly well-suited to cultivate these capacities.

Ten community colleges will lead the Bridging Cultures project: Chandler-Gilbert Community College (AZ), City University of New York –Kingsborough Community College (NY), County College of Morris (NJ), Georgia Perimeter College (GA), Kapi’olani Community College (HI), Miami Dade College (FL), Middlesex Community College (MA), Mount Wachusett Community College (MA), Lone Star College –Kingwood (TX) and Santa Fe College (FL).

Educating citizens, not just workers

Pressured to prepare graduates for the workforce, America’s higher education system must not forget its civic and democratic mission, asserts A Crucible Moment, a report released today by U.S. Department of Education and the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Too few graduates are prepared to be active citizens of a democracy, writes Carol Geary Schneider, president of the AAC&U, in a guest post on College Inc.

American colleges and universities—and yes, our community colleges too—were created first and foremost to ensure the future of our democracy.

Concerned about global competition, “many public leaders now are actively promoting witheringly reductive versions of college learning” that treat  ”history, world cultures, anthropology, philosophy, literature and the other humanities” as an “unaffordable luxury,” Schneider writes.