While it has been exciting to discover the many innovative practices in community colleges and technical institutes, the gloomy side has been the realization how rare many innovations are. The dominant approach cited as integration--general education--is hardly a novel idea, and other approaches to integration (aside from applied academics courses and Writing Across the Curriculum) can be found in only a few institutions. Even in those institutions where innovations exist, they are typically the inventions of a few highly motivated faculty members, acting as individuals without much institutional encouragement; their innovations have typically not been emulated by others even within their own institution. Some approaches to integration--particularly the multidisciplinary courses emphasizing occupational concerns--have been supported largely with outside funds, and have tended to disappear once external funding is withdrawn.
In cases of success with integration, a similar pattern of innovation seems to have emerged. Effective leadership and a genuine interest in reform among instructors--that is, both "top down" and "bottom up" strategies simultaneously--improve the chances for innovations to survive, as do the provision of institutional resources. At LaGuardia Community College, for example, one cause of the failure of the early college-within-a-college was that a "top-down" decision was not accepted by faculty members. However, when an administrator then used Perkins funds for staff development programs focused on active learning techniques, the participants developed the idea of pairs and clusters and then became the leaders in generating new ideas and applications. Similarly, the popularity of Reading Across the Curriculum in Metropolitan Community College was the result of faculty committees which developed ideas, selected the book, and generated a broader base of interest. This approach to change--administrative leadership coupled with the transferal of responsibility to faculty, with institutional resources allocated to innovations as necessary--is relatively common in a variety of different areas.[33]
However, there are some particular barriers to integration of occupational and academic education cited over and over by the instructors and administrators who have developed novel approaches--most of them quite familiar, to be sure, but worth clarifying as indications of what changes need to be made for other institutions to reform. Most obviously, the disciplinary specialization which affects virtually all of education is a principle barrier to integration. Many instructors are wedded to their own disciplines, and some are uninterested and unprepared to make links to related fields. Innovators often report their colleagues unwilling to consider novel approaches, unwilling to leave the security of a traditional syllabus, content, and textbook, and sometimes unqualified to venture into new areas; administrators complain about the difficulty they have getting instructors to follow new visions. The unwillingness to try new approaches is expressed in different ways: Academic instructors often complain about pressures to "water down" the curriculum, occupational instructors express concern with teaching sufficient occupationally specific skills,[34] and everyone is worried about enough time to cover what they consider the most important topics rather than making room for someone else's subject--what we might label the "tyranny of coverage."[35] This problem is not peculiar to community colleges, of course: Efforts to develop interdisciplinary approaches in four-year colleges have routinely failed because of the power of the disciplines (reinforced by research interests), while efforts to integrate vocational and academic education in high schools have also foundered on these shoals.
The general problem of fragmentation among fields is especially powerful in community college because of the deep split and the status differential between academic education--with its link to the high-status transfer function and four-year colleges--and occupational education, often designated by the unfortunate label of "terminal" education and usually viewed as leading to lower-paying, lower status jobs than the baccalaureate. Within community colleges, the weaker position of vocational faculty--who are more likely to be part-time or temporary instructors, and are usually less active in the governance of the institution--also makes it difficult for them to relate to academic faculty as equals. Long after many community colleges have become predominantly vocational institutions,[36] their administration continues to be dominated by the academic side, and concerns about the transfer function seem to dominate those about the vocational mission. Even if there weren't a status differential between occupational and academic faculty, the fact that each group views the mission of the community college in such different terms makes collaboration more difficult. In one extreme case--a community college so divided into different camps that they do not consider themselves a single institution--the dean of occupational education declared, "we're a vocational school housed in a community college."
The conventional fragmentation of disciplines and the split between vocational and academic purposes is reinforced in several ways by institutional practices and policies. One is simply the organization of most community colleges into departments along conventional occupational and academic specialties. This means that routine communication among faculty--never especially good in any two- or four-year college--tends to occur along departmental lines rather than involving several disciplines. One might hope that curriculum integration would therefore be more common in institutions with unconventional organizational structures--for example, vocational and academic departments organized into one unit. However, we saw no evidence that this is true. In some community colleges, the cultural and status separation of occupational and academic instructors is reinforced by physical separation: The occupational departments, with greater needs for workshop space, are located in buildings separated from the classroom buildings used by academic instructors. State certification requirements for instructors also hamper cooperation in some cases: The requirement that only instructors certified in English or history teach courses with specified titles makes it difficult for a vocational instructor with interdisciplinary interests to teach (or team-teach) a hybrid course, and in some states applied academics courses must be taught by academically certified instructors.
A more practical and often overwhelming barrier is simply the lack of resources for cooperation. Full-time instructors complain that they have no time to spend with their colleagues developing new and difficult courses; and part-time faculty, which include many vocational instructors, often don't spend enough time on campus for much collaboration to take place. The economics of community colleges and technical institutes, which are usually funded on the basis of attendance or enrollment, means that the costs per pupil compared to revenues are carefully calculated.[37] Team teaching and release time for developing new courses escalate costs dramatically, particularly for courses whose enrollments may be uncertain. We found, then, almost no team teaching, and little release time; most multidisciplinary courses have been developed with special funding, and instructors teaching tandem courses and clusters frequently complained about the limited time they had for coordination.
However, most community colleges and technical institutes can find the resources for initiatives that they deem compelling. For example, with the recent alarm over declining transfer rates, many have been able to fund transfer centers and honors programs. One reason for the lack of institutional support for curriculum integration, and curriculum innovation in general, is simply the lack of leadership. The administrators who set priorities in these institutions seem relatively indifferent to the teaching reforms we have discussed; in only one institution, LaGuardia Community College, is there an institutional culture that supports widespread collaboration, one that has developed partly from the leadership of a few individuals including the first president of the college and the administrator who first proposed tandem and cluster courses. Elsewhere, instructors instituting reforms operate largely on their own, with little recognition that whatever reforms they might develop would be spread to other programs, or that innovations they introduce with grant money would eventually be supported from regular funds. Indeed, the lack of institutional support seems to be a problem for various curriculum innovations. For example, many Writing Across the Curriculum programs we reviewed were initiated by highly-motivated faculty without institutional support, but their continuation and expansion has depended on institutional resources once enough interest has emerged. In many cases, however, institutional support fails to materialize and innovations die. Even though community colleges trumpet their commitment to teaching, many of them undertake little systematic inquiry into the quality of teaching and few efforts to improve instruction.
The final barrier to integrating vocational and academic education is simply a larger statement of those we have already noted. As the community college has developed, it has added new and different (and even contradictory) purposes. To the early "academic" emphasis on preparing students to transfer to four-year colleges, occupational education has come to be a critical mission, even dominant in some states; remedial or developmental programs have expanded enormously; community service courses of various kinds constitute important components; customized training and other firm-specific instruction come to play a crucial role, particularly in linking community colleges to the Holy Grail of economic development; some community colleges provide adult education in their states or regions, adding a variety of non-credit programs and new populations; and many have extensive responsibilities for serving particular groups like the disabled, JTPA clients, and welfare clients in the JOBS program. Most community colleges have responded to these responsibilities by adding new divisions,[38] and communication among the various divisions is sometimes quite poor.[39] As a result, we tend to view the community college as an archipelago of independent islands, each serving one mission but with limited communication among them. While there are obvious pedagogical reasons for linking several of the missions--occupational and academic instruction, conventional occupational programs with customized training, remediation with the occupational and academic programs students are preparing to enter--this seems to happen only rarely. The result is an institution which often operates less as a community of interest than as a collection of disparate missions.
But this obviously need not be the case. The example of LaGuardia Community College indicates that a college can establish an atmosphere where faculty regularly collaborate with one another in the development of integrated clusters and communities. The many local efforts at collaboration we have seen provide other visions of integration, and some evidence of success. Specifically in the area of integrating occupational and academic education, the Perkins Act provides resources which must be dedicated to such integration efforts, as well as the imperative to do so with federal funds. More generally, the ideal of creating true communities within community colleges and technical institutes is one with widespread support. The Commission on the Future of the Community College (1988) titled its report Building Communities, and argued throughout for ways in which community colleges should be not only community-serving institutions but also internally-cohesive communities. There are, then, many reasons for integration and many ways of going about it, and the barriers to integration we have identified need not persist.
[34] This may be an especially difficult problem in occupational areas like health occupations where there are rigid requirements established by state licensing agencies. For example, one institution seeking to integrate humanities into all programs found resistance to adding another course, with the nursing program being the most recalcitrant.
[35] Our thanks to Judith Warren Little for pointing out this problem.
[36] It is difficult to declare the community college predominantly vocational or academic because student intentions are so unclear and unstable, and it is difficult to infer anything from course-taking patterns. However, based on data from the 1990 National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey (NPSAS), seventeen percent of students enrolled in community colleges did not report themselves as either vocational or academic; this group might include "experimenters" undecided about their course of study as well as remedial and avocational students. Of the remaining students who did declare a field of study, sixty-one percent were in vocational fields and thirty-nine percent in academic fields. Of course, the relative emphasis on occupational and academic goals varies greatly among states: North Carolina limits enrollment of transfer students to fifteen percent, while states (like Minnesota) that have both community colleges and technical institutes have more transfer-oriented community colleges.
[37] In our experience, most community colleges know their break-even enrollments rather precisely--the enrollment required per course for tuition plus state aid to equal average instructional costs. Many of them operate as "profit" maximizers, eliminating courses with low enrollments or high costs and diverting resources to high-enrollment, low-cost courses--a move they can always justify as responding to student demand. Necessary as such decisions may be in the current tight fiscal situation, they undermine the possibilities for innovative teaching patterns.
[38] In an extreme case, one college has three math departments: one for applied math, one for remedial math, and one for transfer students. In part, this division is a holdover from the merger of a community college and a technical institute that took place twenty years ago.
[39] We know of no systematic reporting about the organizational independence of community college missions. However, in addition to the clear split between occupational and academic faculty we noted in the interviews for this report, we have previously identified a split between the remedial or developmental faculty and the rest of the institution (Grubb, Kalman, Castellano, Brown, & Bradby, 1991), and between customized training and the rest of the institution (Lynch, Palmer, & Grubb, 1991); the programs serving JTPA and welfare clients are sometimes distinct from regular courses (Grubb, Brown, Kaufman, & Lederer, 1990); and credit and non-credit courses are often organized in different divisions.