Both survey and case study results suggest that institutional governance structures may inadvertently hinder faculty from building strong connections with local labor markets. Multivariate analyses of our connectivity measures suggests that faculty in multi-campus districts are less likely to be connected relative to other types of campuses, holding our set of individual and institutional characteristics constant. Further, investigation of the determinants of responses to questions about barriers (Table 9) suggests that faculty in colleges in multi-campus districts are more likely to agree that they have no time to develop links (item a) or do not know how to develop links (item b), ceteris paribus. In contrast, faculty in single-campus districts are far more likely to disagree (relative to faculty in other governance settings) with the statements that their department or their college discourages them from building links (items e and f). They also tend to disagree more that there is no need for links. Some clues as to why these differences exist were found in our case study institutions.
One institution we visited was part of a multi-campus community college district spanning a broad metropolitan area. Not only did the need to gain district approval for program changes and resource reallocations add another layer of bureaucracy to the decision-making apparatus, but the central district was not always responsive or supportive of the goals, needs, and concerns of this college. The highly politicized nature of governance in this district, and the historically confrontational nature of employee/faculty union--administration relations, as well as competition among the district's colleges for scarce resources--contributed to a generally adverse atmosphere. This was compounded by recent funding cutbacks.
Even those schools that did not have to contend with a district office were sometimes blocked from responding to community needs, however. In particular, all the community colleges we visited noted that considerable time was needed to start up new certificate or degree programs, generally involving justifications to the state and applications for supplemental funding. (Although state approval is not needed for non-credit programs, such programs generally offer shorter and less comprehensive training.) The approval process, while obviously important for accountability and quality control purposes, nonetheless hinders colleges from providing rapid responses to workplace needs. Similarly, colleges experience considerable difficulty in shutting down programs that are no longer needed or are not performing well, often due to strong political pressures to maintain such programs. As a result, the institutions are unable to reallocate funds to programs that might be more responsive to the needs of the local labor market.
Respondents in all four schools noted the difficulty of offering degree or certificate programs that did not conform to the academic calendar. Rather than develop short training modules that would enable working people to enter the program at multiple times during the year, most programs offer only one to three "start dates" per year, conforming to the structure of the academic calendar. Similarly, some respondents suggested that training in twelve- to fifteen-week blocks (the length of an average quarter and semester, respectively) does not offer sufficient flexibility. Although two schools we visited were experimenting on a small scale with certificate programs that did not conform to the traditional academic calendar, such changes pose numerous challenges since planning and decisions regarding faculty workload, staffing, funding, assignment of credit, and so forth are all based on the academic calendar.
The advisory committees, described elsewhere in this report, are the primary source of linkages between vocational programs and employers. However, the quality of these committees varies widely. At best, they are a valuable sources of input and commentary on program quality. At worst, they meet infrequently, have weak community representation, are inadequately informed about the program, and/or rubber stamp department decisions. Unfortunately, institutional administrators may not know whether an advisory committee is functioning as intended. In short, departments can conform to the letter of the law by holding committee meetings as required but may not conform to the spirit of the law by engaging committee members in a critical review of departmental programs and quality.
Finally, vocational faculty in two of the four schools visited felt that they did not fare well under their institution's shared governance structure. In both cases, academic departments, which had more full-time equivalents (FTE) and whose faculty had lighter workloads, dominated the academic senate. In one school where the senate had the responsibility to allocate new faculty FTE to departments, the vocational faculty complained that the senate routinely allocated more FTE to the academic rather than vocational departments, thereby perpetuating the inequities between them. This in turn ensured that vocational faculty would continue to face heavy workloads with little time for other activities, including participation in shared governance and connecting with the community.
Our survey and site visits suggest that within colleges, boundaries among programs and teaching fields limit the extent to which faculty collaborate. Differences between academic and vocational faculty have already been highlighted. Our mean survey responses to items on institutional climate and policies, shown in Table 10, reveal that there is departmentalization of faculty, and little collaboration between faculty or in shared teaching (items a, b, and c), with only slight differences among types of faculty. (The underlying frequencies show that 60% of all faculty said that the statement "academic and vocational faculty are housed in separate departments" describes, or very much describes, their institution; fewer than half of the faculty believe there is collaboration between academic and vocational staff in curriculum development.) These results corroborate the findings of other researchers, noted in the "Background and Framework" section, which describe the separation of programs and departments (Grubb & Kraskouskas, 1992).
Further, governance structures and departmentalization likely contribute to the fact that many faculty view building links as the responsibility of other people in the college (Table 9, item c). The mean of 2.3 (5 = strongly disagree) for academic faculty indicates perhaps that they see linking as the responsibility of vocational faculty; the low mean for both academic and vocational staff suggests faculty think administrators have an important role to play at the college level in building connections to the labor market.
Yet information about the labor market does not appear to come from college administrators or colleagues (be they within or outside the respondent's department).
Table 10 (items d, e, and f) implies that building connections to labor markets and communities is primarily an individual responsibility. Our case studies also revealed that faculty had difficulty obtaining information that could help them build linkages. In addition to descriptive information about local employers, some faculty wanted details that were not easily available. For example, a business computing instructor lamented that she did not know which local employers used the computers on which her students were trained. If she could obtain that information, she could increase the efficiency of her students' job-seeking efforts while also obtaining valuable feedback from the employers about how to best train the students. Similarly, a faculty member in an environmental safety program said that he had little information about the kinds of toxic substances local employers used; if available, such information would enable him to customize training to the local environment.
In addition to differences between departments, our case studies revealed a sharp boundary between for-credit vocational programs that grant certificates and degrees and non-credit programs. Because the latter are often delivered under contracts with local firms, the non-credit organizations within all four community colleges visited had strong linkages to local employers. These divisions are better able to build linkages to local labor markets because they are relatively unencumbered by bureaucracy, can respond very quickly to emerging labor market needs, and develop programs customized to the needs of particular employers. However, all four schools we visited reported that the state provided less reimbursement for non-credit than for-credit courses and course enrollments. Thus, unless demand for non-credit courses is so strong that such courses can be self-supporting, the colleges prefer to offer for-credit rather than non-credit courses. This places limits on the degree to which colleges can take advantage of the rapid response time and flexibility that non-credit courses provide.
Unfortunately, the linkages reflected in the non-credit divisions of community colleges have little to no spillover to the for-credit divisions. The divisions typically have very different reporting lines, so there is little opportunity for information exchange. In addition, faculty rarely teach in the non-credit programs because they have full-time teaching loads in their departments. (Some moonlight in the non-credit area, but this was unusual in the schools we visited.) Moreover, although in theory the non-credit courses can serve as gatekeepers to for-credit programs, there is little concerted effort to market for-credit programs in this way, and the impression of most vocational faculty is that they do not attract students from non-credit programs.
Organizational boundaries also hinder faculty from seeking support from local employers. Three of the four schools visited had development offices, which are responsible for fund raising. Faculty are discouraged from independent initiatives in this area, since such efforts might conflict with those of the larger institution. As a result, faculty did not feel empowered to ask their community contacts to help them meet their needs for equipment or funding.