America's two-year colleges play a pivotal role in providing millions of students with the education and training they need for success in the modern economy. Nearly half of all adults take at least one course in a community college, and about 45 percent of all undergraduates enroll first in a two-year college. The community college is the one educational institution simultaneously providing initial preparation for work, retraining and upgrading the skills of older workers, and second-chance training for individuals who need some combination of basic academic education and technical skills. In the following three documents, NCRVE researchers assess current conditions in America's two-year colleges, focusing on how these institutions can address workforce preparation while fulfilling traditional education goals. (The following excerpts have been edited slightly.)
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For the past decade employers have been criticizing the work readiness of those they hire, complaining that many graduates of high schools, community colleges, and even four-year colleges do not possess the basic educational skills needed to learn on the job. Every level of the educational system, including community colleges, has been called upon to be more practical, more connected with the market for labor, and more in touch with the practical applications of research, technology, and basic academic disciplines. Over the past several years, one way in which community colleges have responded to the pressures to meet this human capital imperative has been the many efforts to integrate academic and occupational education--that is, to incorporate more "basic" or academic content into occupational programs so that graduates will have both the basic reading, writing, and mathematical skills and some of the "higher-order" or problem-solving skills demanded by the business community and various educators.
However, there is a serious problem with the conventional statement from employers about the skills missing in the labor force. As others have noted, employers are often unclear about specifically which competencies are inadequate in their workers; they frequently glide from complaints about basic academic skills--reading and math--to complaints about work habits and motivation, even though the two are quite different and must be remedied in distinctly different ways. The skills employers stress are, not surprisingly, centered on their own needs, and they neglect a number of competencies that are crucial to the students involved. When we look more carefully at both the demands of employers and the needs of students trying to make their way through community colleges, we can see that the competencies necessary for students to master and for community colleges to convey are much more varied than either basic academic skills or the kinds of skills articulated by employers. In the first section of this introduction, then, we briefly outline seven competencies required by all students for career preparation. In effect, we argue throughout this monograph that community colleges need to consider all these competencies, not merely the job-specific technical skills and the basic academic skills that have been the subject of conventional occupational and academic courses, respectively.
Community colleges in the United States are a critical but understudied part of the educational and training system. These institutions perform a multitude of tasks including preparing millions of young Americans for direct entry into the labor market as well as transfer to four-year colleges, retraining and upgrading the skills of older workers, and providing basic education for adults. In an era of structural economic transformation, when the job skills required for success in the labor market are changing rapidly, community colleges play an ever more significant role in facilitating students' school-to-work transition. If they are to be successful in this labor market preparation role, there need to be close links between institution, faculty, and the labor market in terms of program offering, content of those programs, and subsequent placement of students into jobs. This has been one of the premises (sometimes implicit) in recent changes to vocational education policy reflected in federal legislation such as the Perkins Act (II) of 1990 and the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994, as well as other state and local reform initiatives. Community colleges have responded with a range of programs, such as tech prep, school-to-work, service learning, and cooperative education, which emphasize coupling classroom work to applied experience in local business, government, or nonprofit settings. Such efforts demand that postsecondary vocational instructors have high-level, up-to-date technical skills, and are keyed in to changing labor market needs.
Although recent studies have collected some information on the development and effectiveness of work-connected programs in two-year colleges, few studies (if any) have focused explicitly on the types and intensity of formal and informal linkages or connections which individual faculty members have to the workplace. Our study is designed to fill this gap in the literature. Our premise is that faculty linkages are critical to the success of vocational education reform, and required to integrate work experience with traditional classroom education. Our overriding goal is to understand how faculty are linked to their local labor markets and communities, how strong these links are, and what factors--at both individual and institutional levels--can explain these links. In particular we are interested in what institutional policies and strategies seem to promote linkages among faculty, and what the barriers to building labor market connections are.
This monograph describes two innovations that have considerable support and, while subsequently enhanced by federal funding, have emerged independently of it. They are the integration of academic and occupational education and tech-prep programs that link community colleges with secondary schools. The monograph seeks to illuminate the many forms the innovations take and to clarify their benefits to students, employers demanding higher-order skills, and community colleges themselves.
Both curriculum integration and tech prep have multiple benefits. They can enhance the content of both secondary and postsecondary coursework, responding to the demands of employers for higher-order competencies. They can prepare secondary students better for the demands of postsecondary education and provide community college students with the range of competencies they will require on the job and in other walks of life. Both innovations are multi-faceted and flexible, able to incorporate a variety of goals and to reflect different local conditions.
The continued development of these innovations in workforce preparation depends on institutionalizing the changes made so far, extending them beyond the smaller numbers of trail-blazing teachers, coordinators, district administrators, volunteers, and enthusiasts who have participated in the initial stages. In turn, this will require stability in both the funding and the climate of reform that has led to these reforms. Administrative leadership is a final requirement, since few changes can be carried out by individual faculty; only administrators can provide the coordination among faculty and the institutional commitment necessary for these reforms. But the rewards can be substantial in helping community colleges fulfill their promise as innovative, teaching-oriented, learning-centered, nontraditional institutions responding to their multiple missions with flexibility and foresight.