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Show I i jZ, 'if i PI fter several years of decline, en-- 4j rollment in community leges nationwide rose 3 percent last year to more than 5 million, a record high. But as state legislatures continue to trim funding, doubts r public grow about whether do to it all: procolleges can continue vide academic courses for students interested in transferring as well as vocational training for those who want to prepare for jobs. Critics charge that community colleges are leaning too heavily on partnerships with government and industry, which helps them attract students but may force them to expend too much effort promoting the economic growth of their regions. As a result, community colleges are struggling to redefine their role as places of higher education. Two-yea- r y institutions are a having begun phenomenon, as private, junior colleges. Today only 162 junior colleges still exist, while 1,062 community colleges saturate almost every state. Community colleges have succeeded spectacularly in extending study to some minorities and older students who might otherwise never attend college; about 43 percent of all blacks and Asians in higher education are in a community college; for Hispanics and Native Americans, the percentage is 54. In recent years, the transfer rate of Associate of Arts degree students to four-yea- r schools, however, has hovered around 20 percent. And now some educators worry that instead of providing a doorway to the baccalaureate, community colleges have become a dead end. To guard against schools must maintain this, two-yetheir educational purposes, according to a commission headed by Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which has been studying the future of community colleges for the past 18 months. Among other recommendations, the report, due in late April, will ask that all community colleges require every associate-degre- e student to complete a core curriculum. general-educatio- n col-ITi- X v. v,v iff i I J; two-yea- 1 1) . Places I It ADO li ' PHOTOS BY LARRY CONBOY have left for work: as: Spokane Falls Community College campus on the west side rj r J - of town 20th-centur- n r 5 1 1 I w post-seconda- l 1 , mi 5' r f "WSb Students .'11 18 to 80: f. Vtt rr Hotel and restaurant management class learns 20, they have no idea what to do with their lives. Breen graduated from high school with a 2.0 GPA, which was too low to meet university admission requirements. And since he didn't particularly like high school, says Breen, "I really didn't know if I was going to like college and I didn't want to spend thousands of dollars finding out." As it turned out, he loved SFCC. He recently received an A.A. in business and is now working for a local retail store that will pay his tuition for one class per semester at Eastern Washington, where he hopes to earn a B.A. If he had gone at once to a university, Breen says, "I would have gotten lost in the shuffle and probably dropped out of school." Indeed, research shows that there are MAY 1988 J i meat-cuttin- g differences between students at a community college and those at a university. "A university freshman typically would be able to more independent and use the library and find out information on his own," says Arthur Cohen, professor of higher education at UCLA. About half the school goes on in instruction at a four-yea- r the classroom, authorities say, and the rest in residence halls, libraries, lecture series and events that go on around the campus. At commuter schools like community colleges, says Cohen, "90 percent of the learning takes place in the classroom the rest is made up by a counseling center." Because the students in any given class come with such a broad range of academic preparedness, ability and experience, self-startin- g, ry ar C. L. NEWSWEEK ON CAMPUS 21 |
