Just four decades ago, community colleges and technical institutes were much smaller, much simpler institutions. They enrolled only 17 percent of students entering higher education -- and now they enroll almost half (45 percent, to be precise). Then, they concentrated on transfer to four-year colleges; now, their occupational purposes are considerably more important, and other "missions"--remedial or developmental education, community education, and workforce development among them--have complicated their purposes. The "landscape" of other workforce programs, like short-term job training and welfare-to-work programs, was almost barren; now, a confusing array of programs exist, sometimes overlapping with what community colleges do.
And with changes in traditional high school vocational education (clarified in the article The High Schools, They Are A-Changin') community colleges have come to dominate occupational education, conceived as preparation for the critical middle-skills occupations in the labor force. These occupations, representing about 60 percent of the workforce, are growing rapidly, and many believe that it is here that our country's efforts to be a world-class competitive power will be won or lost.
In this arena, the National Center has devoted considerable attention first to understanding the changes community colleges have been undergoing, and then to creating a "change agenda" of recommendations that community colleges can adopt, based largely on the successful experiences of their peers. This change agenda could also be described as "making connections" because many of these recommendations--reinforced by federal legislation including the 1990 Amendments to the Carl Perkins Act and the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994--provide ways of connecting practices and programs to make community colleges more powerful institutions and vital bridges among different practices and populations.
Based on several different national data sets, the Center's research has clarified that the economic benefits of completing Associate degrees and certificates are significant--not, of course, as large as the benefits of baccalaureate degrees that take two to four time as long, but substantial nonetheless, especially in some fields of study (business, technical fields for men, health occupations for women). Furthermore, the benefits are highest for those in occupational fields who find jobs related to their areas of study. In addition, transfer rates to four-year colleges are now as high from occupational subjects (like business, computers, and health fields) as they are from academic subjects. Therefore occupational programs are not by any means "dead end" programs.
Further, most community colleges do not attract students who might otherwise have attended four-year students. Instead they draw most of their students from groups who would not otherwise have continued to postsecondary education at all. The hypothesis of "cooling out" is therefore less important that the role of colleges in enhancing educational advancement.
To be sure, the potential economic benefits of community colleges are not always realized. Many students--perhaps too many--fail to complete credentials, and for them the economic returns are generally low and uncertain; the students who enroll for a course or two do not necessarily benefit. And for occupational fields, it's important for students to find jobs related to their fields of study -- and large fractions (40 to 50 percent of those with credentials, and even larger fractions of those leaving without credentials) fail to find related employment. Thus mechanisms to enhance completion and to connect colleges and their students more carefully with local labor markets are central to the success of occupational purposes.
While much of the evidence about economic benefits comes from national data, the Center has also promoted the development of data for individual colleges, using Unemployment Insurance wage records--so that individual colleges can see which of their programs are more and less effective. While it is too early for the results of such methods to be widely available, the results so far indicate that local findings are generally quite consistent with the national results: those who complete credentials fare well in the labor market, particularly in certain fields; those who fail to complete often do not benefit much; and finding related employment proves important.
A particular form of integrating academic and occupational education has paired remedial courses with occupational subjects. Many courses designed to improve the basic reading, writing, and math competencies of entering students are taught in conventional skills-and-drills format, with the content divorced from any applications and seemingly irrelevant to the occupations these students want to enter--and dropout rates are high as a result. But where remedial/developmental education is taught in concert with occupational content, motivation is likely to be higher as students understand the purposes of language and math courses, and as they learn the skills necessary for their chosen occupations.
This recent research on tech prep has uncovered some encouraging findings, as well as others that are unsettling. The tech prep concept is catching hold, since nearly two-thirds of the nation's high schools and most community colleges have some involvement with it. But exactly how tech prep initiatives affect teaching and learning at the classroom level is less clear. Most consortia support the notion of using tech prep as a foundation for or a strand of building school-to-work systems, and business/education partnerships and work-based learning opportunities are expanding for students participating in tech prep. These findings suggest promising trends, but several challenges lie ahead. In many cases tech prep programs have made greater changes in high schools than in community colleges, though participants sometimes say that the first students to enter community colleges will force changes there too because they are accustomed to more integrated and active forms of instruction. Many issues continue to cloud the image of tech prep. What is the fundamental structure of tech prep curriculum? How does it differ from existing vocational education programs? Who is tech prep attempting to serve? Local consortia that abide by the notion of serving the "neglected majority" may be particularly vulnerable when attention shifts to "all students" to accommodate the goals of STWOA or other educational reforms. Exactly how local consortia navigate these rough waters vary widely, producing uneven results.
The most promising of these "connecting activities" are the different forms of work-based learning, including internships, co-op programs, college-based enterprises, and less formal work opportunities. At their best--for example, in the well-developed co-op programs in the Cincinnati area described [*] by Center research--they provide more specific job preparation than colleges can offer, complementary to school-based learning; they also enable students to explore their job preferences, permit employers to identify the most promising new hires, and (most important of all) make the employer community highly aware of community colleges in the areas. They also facilitate many different mechanisms of connecting the school-based and the work-based components, including employer participation in setting curricula and student standards, greater instructor knowledge of work placements and current work processes, and seminars allowing students to explore the connections between school and work.
Yet another promising linkage to employers is the expansion of workforce development activities, providing relatively specific forms of training for particular employers. Economic and community development represent complementary but more diffuse efforts intended to improve the well-being of the communities that colleges serve, usually carried out in innovative ways others than providing coursework. The Center's research on these activities--in conjunction with the American Association of Community Colleges, the League for Innovation in the Community College, and the National Council on Occupational Education--has clarified the magnitude and importance of these efforts, and their value for creating links with employers. But dangers abound as well, since these high-profile activities could expand to the detriment of the regular degree-granting occupational programs. The solution, in the Center's research with seven leading colleges, is again to create connections between workforce development activities and regular credential programs, recognizing that each can strengthen the other and thereby create more powerful colleges.
The School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994 has provided additional funding for school-to-work programs that encompass many of these connections, including the integration of academic and vocational education, the tech-prep ideal of linking high schools and community colleges, and the incorporation of work-based learning linked to school-based learning through connecting activities. Unfortunately, most tech prep efforts have support high school rather than postsecondary initiatives, and the relatively trifling funds have often been spent in ways that do not enhance connections among these different elements. But the STW legislation still provides an ideal of occupational programs that comity colleges can emulate.
In general, the Center's research has clarified (as have several other summaries) how ineffective most short-term job training and adult education programs are: their economic benefits are small and short-lived, and even the most carefully-designed experimental efforts fail to get their clients out of poverty or off welfare. One approach, therefore, is to link these short-term efforts with each other to create "ladders" of opportunities, enabling welfare recipients and job trainees to progress into community college programs where the programs are more substantial, often better taught, and lead to larger and more enduring employment benefits. In this vision, community colleges become the critical point of connection between the "second chance" programs of job training and adult education, on the one hand, and the "first-chance" programs of the educational system. The Center's research continues to search for exemplars of such efforts, in order to show policy-makers and administrators the advantages of more substantial education and training as solutions to the problems of poverty, unemployment, and welfare.
Of course, the reform agenda established by the Center is substantial. It is all too easy to point out the familiar barriers to making these connections-- the restrictions in federal policy, the limited conceptions in some community colleges that continue to think of themselves as transfer institutions only, the disciplinary barriers to collaboration, the inattention to teaching in many "educational" institutions, the gulf between employers and educators in this country. But the Center's work has consistently sought to provide examples where these connections have worked, where they have overcome the familiar barriers. In the process the Center's work has provided an image of the community college as learning community, a name that suggests its coherence rather than fragmentation, its focus on educational outcomes rather than enrollments for their own sake, and on creating connections and creating communities across the many divisions in postsecondary education and training.
Deborah Bragg is a researcher at NCRVE's University of Illinois site. W. Norton Grubb is the site director of NCRVE's UC Berkeley site. Both authors have done extensive research in the areas of tech prep, work-based learning, and postsecondary education.
For more detail about Center research on programs in the Cincinnati area, ask the Materials Distribution Service (800-637-7652) for documents MDS-702 or MDS-1045.