The survey reveals several important features of connecting activities related to curriculum and pedagogy. First, the results suggest that connecting activities which require relatively minimal effort on the part of faculty are frequent, whereas those demanding relatively more effort are less frequent. Second, vocational faculty are more connected to the labor market: survey responses across items in Tables 5, 6, and 7 show vocational faculty far more likely to be involved in linking activities than academic faculty. Our results also indicate that business provides significant input into college curricula decisions. Third, full-time faculty are more connected than part time faculty. Part-time vocational faculty are more connected than academic faculty regardless of status, though in no case do part-time vocational staff report higher levels of connectivity than full-time vocational faculty. Fourth, a fairly large number of faculty do not engage in any linking activities; a few faculty are responsible for the bulk of the effort.
In terms of the extent of linkages and the level of effort required to build them, the results in Tables 5 and 6 seem to indicate a relationship. Faculty make widespread use of business applications in their classes to illustrate concepts (Table 6, item c), a fairly easy type of connection to make. The mean for both full- and part-time vocational faculty is over 4 on the 1-5 scale (1 = never; 5 = often). Using business case studies (Table 6, item d) is much less likely to occur, and assignments that require students to interact with local business, government, or community organizations (Table 6, item e) are relatively infrequent (mean = 2.3 for all faculty) presumably because these require a large degree of planning and preparation. Given the amount of work involved, very few faculty appear to have "personally developed new internship, apprenticeship, or cooperative education programs" (Table 5, item g), the modal response being zero times during the academic year for all types of faculty except full-time vocational.
The survey suggests that few faculty provide students with exposure to work settings--few had either taken their students to visit local businesses or provided guest speakers from local business within the past year (Table 5, items e and f). The latter was more common than the former, though in both cases the mean indicates such activities occurred between zero and five times during the course of an entire academic year. Table 7, item i, also suggests only around 15% of vocational faculty and 5% of academic faculty had co-taught a course with business, government, or community representatives. (Item j indicates that fewer than 15% of faculty had co-taught a course with a member of another department in the college over the course of the academic year.)
The results clearly indicate that vocational faculty are more likely to be linked to the labor market than academic faculty. Further evidence is provided from various survey items pertaining to influence of various stakeholders over the curriculum (not reported in tables here), and confirmed informally in our case study visits. This suggests that in academic fields they are of little consequence; in vocational fields they are important. Asked to "describe the impact of various groups on the curricula and programs" of their institution from weak (= 1) to strong (= 5), including "business and employers" (and "community organizations"), the means for full-time academic and vocational faculty were 2.83 and 3.42 respectively for business/employers (statistically different at the 1% level). (There was little difference between academic and vocational faculty as to the influence of community organizations, with an overall mean of around 2.5.) Overall, on the survey, vocational faculty rated their own influence and that of business higher than did academic faculty, who felt that they, followed by administrators, were the most important players in determining curricula and programs.
Table 7 (items d and e) shows the proportion of faculty who had asked an employer directly to either comment on a syllabus or review a departmental curriculum. As one would expect, these indicate the stark differences between academic and vocational programs at two-year colleges. More than half of full-time vocational faculty had sought such direct employer input during 1994-1995, while only around 15% of full-time academic faculty had. More than two-fifths of full-time vocational faculty had asked (and more than one-quarter had convinced) local employers for funds or equipment for their college (Table 7, items f and g).
On some of the CP survey items reported in Tables 5 and 6, such as use of business case studies and assignments requiring interaction with business, there are statistically significant differences between full- and part-time vocational faculty. The tables are clear in indicating that vocational full-time faculty report being most connected, usually followed by part-time vocational faculty. The fact that full-timers are more connected than part-timers is not surprising. On the one hand, it could be argued that since survey items suggest part-time vocational faculty have lower counts of connecting activities than full-time vocational faculty, they are unequivocally less connected. However, the fact that such faculty work fewer hours at their college and are less attached to that institution, does not necessarily imply that these faculty should not make important connections to the labor market. The result is difficult to interpret since many part-timers hold other jobs which themselves represent a connection to the labor market. Similarly, if one could "adjust" responses for hours worked (which one cannot formally do on anything other than an arbitrary basis), it could be argued that part-time vocational staff are fairly highly connected, since their reported level of connectivity is not much lower than full-timers on some measures. Further, some part-time respondents on our survey may have implicitly normalized their effort in this way; there is no way to be certain this is the case, however.
Finally, the underlying frequencies (Appendix A, Appendix Table 2) reveal that of all faculty, 63% never or almost never developed such assignments during 1994-1995; in contrast, only 21% of all faculty never or almost never used business examples to illustrate concepts during the same period. This suggests that there may be a few faculty who actively build linkages, with most doing almost nothing. This is strongly related to discipline, but our case studies also suggested that there was variation in the degree of effort expended by academic and vocational faculty which was not predictable on the basis of discipline alone.
The integration of labor market and community linkages into curriculum and pedagogical practice was shown to be uneven in both our survey results and at all four schools we visited. To a large extent, differences are more a function of departments, disciplines, or programs than institutions. Vocational departments are more strongly connected than academic departments, many of which appear to make no effort to develop labor market linkages. Among the vocational programs, at the high end of the connectivity continuum are those disciplines that require clinical experience, internships, and practica, particularly the health professions (e.g., nursing, respiratory therapy, psychological technicians, physical therapy, emergency medical services) and child care, although many others also include such experiences (e.g., tool and die, welding).
Contributing to this variation across fields of study are state licensing regulations that require students to spend a minimum number of hours in approved work sites. Institutions may add their own requirements, and two of the four schools we visited could point to at least one program where the number of work hours that the institution requires of students exceeds the state licensing regulations. In addition, some training programs in each school we visited offered voluntary apprenticeships, which enable those who participated to gain a higher level of certification (e.g., an apprenticeship in a midwestern welding program was required for eligibility to work on high-rise buildings).
Another means of integrating workplace linkages into curriculum is illustrated by one west coast institution which offers students the opportunity to earn credit toward a vocational degree or certificate through a "work experience education" program that includes independently arranged, on-the-job training opportunities. Participating students are required to identify a faculty supervisor, who is expected to observe the student at the work site at least twice during the semester. Similarly, one school offers an elective "Exploration Course" within their sewing program that included field trips to fifteen local employers.
Our site visits suggested a variety of mechanisms through which curricula were influenced by local employers. In many cases, the linkage was via formal program advisory committees (we discuss these further under institutional activities below). Some faculty suggested that such committees were a formality and simply a way of keeping local representatives abreast of developments at the college, while others stressed their importance as part of an ongoing two-way dialogue aimed at improving the content and rigor of the curriculum. Certainly the more energetic and committed faculty we spoke with appeared to be in almost continual contact with major local employers and with their program's graduates who had successfully gone on to work placements.
It must be noted that all four colleges design courses and curricula closely linked to business needs through their non-credit and continuing education programs. Two of the four schools visited offer on-site training for large local employers, and all four offer courses customized to employer needs on campus. Relatively few full-time faculty, however, teach in these programs. As a result, this form of college-community link has little impact on most faculty even as it becomes an increasingly important component of institutional activities and goals.