Community colleges in the United States are a critical but understudied part of the educational and training system (Cohen & Brawer, 1989; Dougherty, 1994).[1] 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 are called upon to 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 the institution, faculty, and the labor market in terms of program offerings, 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 of 1990 (Perkins II) and the School to Work Opportunities Act of 1994, as well as other local and state reform initiatives.[2] 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 information on the development and effectiveness of work-connected programs in two-year colleges (e.g., Bragg, Layton, & Hammons, 1994; Stern, Finkelstein, Stone, Latting, & Dornsife, 1994), few studies (if any) have focused explicitly on the types and level of effort 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. We take as given the premise 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.
To achieve this goal, we pursued both a quantitative and qualitative data collection strategy. First, in fall 1995, we administered a survey to approximately 3,500 community college instructors in about 100 public institutions nationwide. This survey, with its large-scale and national coverage, gives us a unique opportunity to generalize with some confidence about the behaviors and attitudes of community college faculty. To our knowledge, this survey provides the first systematic evidence on the issue of labor market connections. Second, we conducted intensive case studies of four colleges (selected on the basis of survey results), which included interviews with senior administrators and both academic and vocational faculty.
The survey reveals that linkages requiring a relatively low level of effort (such as using business examples in the classroom) are widespread among all types of faculty. Faculty are less likely to undertake more proactive measures (such as taking students to visit local business, government or community organizations or developing new programs with work components), which are time consuming and labor intensive. The linkages that do exist tend to be focused on career assistance. The survey confirms what we anecdotally expected to be true: academic faculty are less likely than vocational faculty to engage in all types of linking activities. Part-timers are also less connected than full-timers. Institutional linkages do not automatically mean that faculty are connected to labor markets, or that students benefit from these linkages. These results were backed up by our interviews and observation in our case studies.
We find that most faculty believe building connections between employers and colleges is important, and that employers are generally interested in such linkages. Traditional boundaries between programs and disciplines and the competing demands on faculty time emerge as critical barriers to building connections. We also find that there is little institutional support for building linkages, particularly in the realm of formal incentives, due to constrained resources.
The remainder of the paper is set out as follows. In the next section, we elaborate on the underlying premise of the report: that strong linkages to the labor market by faculty and institutions are important for the implementation of vocational education reform and a necessary ingredient to improving the nation's education and training system. We also provide a framework for defining and explaining labor market connectivity. In the section entitled, "Data," we describe our survey and case study methodology. In the sections entitled "The Nature and Extent of Labor Market Connectivity" and "Explaining Faculty-Labor Market Linkages," the results are presented and discussed. The former maps out the type and extent of faculty-labor market linkages, and the latter seeks to explain these patterns. The final section provides some conclusions and recommendations.
[2]The emphasis on connectivity between educational institutions and the labor market is not simply a U.S. phenomenon. McFarland and Vickers (1994), in a review of trends in several OECD countries, argue that "in the context of rapid technological, structural and social change, there is an ever greater danger of mismatches between what schools do and what firms need. Because of this, the interest in creating strong and effective links between educators and employers increases when the rate of change is substantial. Business partnerships can also help smooth youth's transition from school to work" (p. 4) and that "the practical implementation of `votec' reform depends on cooperative links among public and private sector institutions" (p. 5).