All during this century, the balance between the vocational and the academic content of education has been contentious. The battles over theoretical versus applied learning, over general education versus specialization, over "abstract" versus "concrete" approaches to teaching and learning, over broader "education" versus shorter-term "training," over "the head" versus "the hand" as the object of education--all these battles have reflected disagreements about the purposes of education as well as the balance of different elements within formal schooling. Well after the educational system has become the major form of access to most occupations, and schools and colleges have become vocational institutions in the most general sense, such debates continue to rage at virtually every level of the educational system. The current shifts surrounding academic requirements and the fate of vocational courses in high schools, the pressures for enhancing academic or transfer education over occupational education in community colleges, and the continuing debates over general education versus occupational (or disciplinary) specialization within four-year colleges are examples of a continuing and probably unresolvable discussion.
Recently, there has been a shift in favor of emphasizing more general or "academic" elements over the specialized or "vocational." Part of this has come from the educational reform movements of the 1980s, which attacked declining academic standards in high schools and the tendency toward over-specialization in colleges. In part, the pressure of the business community has been responsible. As the Committee for Economic Development (1985) declared, "Business, in general, is not interested in narrow vocationalism. It prefers a curriculum that stresses literacy and mathematical and problem-solving skills" (p. 15). The Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce portrayed the future starkly in the title of its widely-cited report as America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages! (National Center on Education and the Economy, 1990), and went on to forecast the skills need for a "third industrial revolution" including "foundation skills" encompassing
the demonstrated ability to read, write, compute, and perform at world-class levels in general school subjects (mathematics, physical and natural sciences, technology, history, geography, politics, economics and English). Students should also have exhibited a capacity to learn, think, work effectively alone and in groups and solve problems. (p. 69)
Even more recently, the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) (1991) of the Department of Labor outlined What Work Requires of Schools, complaining that "we are failing to develop the full academic abilities of most students" (p. vi) and arguing that "tomorrow's career ladders require even the basic skills--the old three R's--to take on a new meaning." Among the five competencies and three "foundation skills" advocated as part of "high performance schools," the report illustrated the need for greater competence in the conventional academic capacities like reading, writing, mathematics, and computational skills (SCANS, 1991).
In searching for ways to nudge the educational system toward more general and academic competencies, the Congress has revised its support for more overtly occupational education in a potentially important way. The 1990 Amendments to the Carl D. Perkins Vocational Education Act, providing federal support for vocational education, include the following prescription: "Funds made available . . . shall be used to provide vocational education in programs that . . . integrate academic and vocational education in such programs through coherent sequences of courses so that students achieve both academic and occupational competencies" (Section 235[c][1][B]). One way to interpret this legislation, then, is as an attempt to undo the differentiation between vocational and academic education, and to promote a conception of occupationally-oriented education in which general and specific elements are more nearly balanced than has been the case.
Unfortunately, Congressional language provides no guidance about what integration means in practice--about how educational institutions should change, how teachers should modify their curricula, or about what different courses students should take. At the secondary level, efforts to integrate vocational and academic education have been underway for several years, and different conceptions of integration are relatively clear (Grubb, Davis, Lum, Plihal, & Morgaine, 1991).[1] However, at the postsecondary level it has been unclear just what integration might mean. The lack of clarity about integration within community colleges and technical institutes is especially unfortunate because, with declining enrollments in secondary vocational courses (Clune, White, & Patterson, 1989), the locus of occupationally specific instruction has shifted to the postsecondary level.
The purpose of this monograph, therefore, is to explore what forms the integration of occupational and academic education might take within community colleges and technical institutes. To do so, we have relied principally on a telephone survey of community colleges and technical institutes, in which we asked instructional deans and faculty to describe their efforts to integrate vocational and academic education.[2] We supplemented the information from these telephone interviews, and the associated publications and materials sent by various occupational and academic instructors, with visits to four institutions that seem to be especially active in their efforts to integrate: Bunker Hill Community College, Boston; Southern Maine Vocational Technical College, Portland; Springfield Technical Community College, Springfield, Massachusetts; and LaGuardia Community College, Long Island City, New York. Finally, we searched the community college literature for descriptions of relevant programs, though this yielded little because the integration of vocational and academic education has not yet been a widespread concern.[3]
The results of these investigations reveal that there are many approaches to integration, which we describe in the first section, "Approaches to Integration." Given the different models, there is no consistent interpretation of integration, as we clarify in the second section, "The Different Conceptions and Purposes of Integration." For example, some approaches force the student to integrate material from vocational and academic courses that are otherwise independent of each other, while others place more responsibility on instructors to integrate material; some emphasize occupational applications as ways of teaching academic material in a "contextualized" way, while others bring new topics to occupational students. While they vary in their ambitions, each has something to offer students, faculty, and postsecondary institutions.
Many examples of integration are isolated efforts by individual instructors, or small groups of instructors, to develop novel approaches; there have been--with some notable exceptions--few efforts to integrate vocational and academic content systematically across several occupational areas or throughout an institution. As a result, many approaches to integration are comparatively rare. The reasons for this--the barriers to integration, described in the third section--are numerous; they also prove to be structural, rooted in the basic practices of community colleges and technical institutes. The implication is that certain approaches to integration are unlikely to be successful unless there is a concerted institutional commitment to changing long-established practices.
Given that integration is sometimes difficult to achieve, and that the argument for specialization at the postsecondary level is still strong, a legitimate question is whether integrating vocational and academic education is a good thing. Based on our interviews, however, a number of clear benefits to integration have emerged in those institutions that have tried it. A few institutions have collected evidence that integrated approaches increase retention and grades, and other instructors report improved progress of their students and better understanding of material. A cynic could correctly point out that there is no long-run evidence about the effects of integration on completion, subsequent employment, long-run earnings, or any other goal of postsecondary occupational programs. But there is almost never evidence of this sort about curricular innovations, and--given the origins of innovations at the classroom level--class-level measures of success are probably the most appropriate. Other institutional benefits--for example, greater collaboration among faculty--exist as well. In the final section, then, we examine more carefully the question of whether integrating vocational and academic education is worth doing, arguing that it has the potential to improve postsecondary occupational programs in many distinct ways. Indeed, the most powerful reasons for postsecondary institutions to move toward the integration of occupational and academic education--not the requirements of the Carl Perkins Act,[4] or the external pressure of various commentators for enhanced "academic" skills.
[2] Initially, we mailed letters to deans of instruction in a random sample of 295 community colleges and technical institutes that are members of the American Association of Community and Junior Colleges (AACJC). They were asked to return a postcard checking a box if they integrated academic and vocational education in any way, with space for a brief description of what they were doing and for the name and phone number of a contact person. Of 168 responses, 121 (72%) said that they integrated in some way. We then contacted by phone 45 campuses, concentrating on those with unusual or especially interesting descriptions, but not contacting every institution that mentioned the most common forms of integration (like general education requirements or applied academics courses). For each institution, we typically interviewed a dean of instruction and several faculty members. The telephone survey was not, of course, a random sample of postsecondary institutions (since the response rate to our initial inquiry was so low), nor can it be regarded as a census of integration efforts in any sense. However, it did enable us to uncover the major approaches to integration. We also think that the different approaches in our telephone survey roughly reflect their frequency in postsecondary institutions simply because there is such a substantial difference between the number of the most common practices--the reliance on general education requirements and the development of applied academics courses--and those we describe in models 3 through 8 below.
[3] However, see the articles in the special issue of the Journal of Studies in Technical Careers (Volume XII, Number 3, Summer 1990), which is devoted to the role of liberal education in technical training; papers by Raisman (1992) and Sessions (1991/1992) in a special issue on liberal education of the Community, Technical, and Junior College Journal; and the publications of the Shared Vision Task Force, National Council of Occupational Education and Community College Humanities Association (1989, 1991). Almost all these articles present arguments for incorporating academic education (or liberal education, or general education) into occupational programs, but they tend not to describe the integration efforts of particular institutions.
[4] In practice the requirements of the Perkins Act could be ignored because federal funds in postsecondary institutions are so small--roughly two to four percent of budgets for occupational education (Grubb & Stern, 1989).