Virtually every community college operates a placement office, and this too provides a potential source of information for students and an additional connection to employers. However, most placement offices are woefully understaffed, with most institutions having at most two or three individuals (or several work-study students) for colleges enrolling up to 25,000 students. Moreover, most placement efforts concentrate not on employment of students leaving the institution but on part-time work for students to support themselves during their education--"stay-in-school type jobs," as one placement director called them. Similarly, a number of employers mentioned that they would post notices of temporary jobs at community college placement offices--"specifically targeting college students for whom these temporary, part-time, or evening jobs would be convenient"--but distinguished such jobs from regular, full-time positions for which they recruited in different ways. As a result, the quality of jobs available through placement offices is low; many jobs posted appeared to be barely above minimum wage in fast-food restaurants and other unskilled occupations. More to the point, most jobs handled by placement offices are unconnected to the occupational programs of the college itself.[44]
Some employers routinely send notices of job vacancies to local community colleges as part of their general publicity, but even here, employers and placement officials report some discouraging experiences. Several employers reported contacting local community colleges about job vacancies and meeting with little enthusiasm and no action except the posting of notices--that is, no efforts to refer well-qualified students. Of course, these incidents might reflect idiosyncratic incompetence or rare failures in what are otherwise smoothly-functioning placement offices.[45] However, a more likely interpretation is that a placement office which considers itself as helping continuing students find part-time work is simply unprepared to execute the screening function that these employers requested. In still another kind of breakdown, a new director of a placement office reported consistent failure in trying to institutionalize connections to vocational departments so that the office could refer appropriate students to employers when they called for referrals. In this case, vocational departments were simply unconcerned with placement--in fact, a rational response for any department and institution that is enrollment-driven and whose enrollments are adequate. Many educators stressed that students are responsible for their own placement--a confirmation of the oft-mentioned declaration that community colleges are "educational institutions, not placement bureaus."[46]
In addition, there is an imbalance between the interests of placement offices and those of employers that might limit the effectiveness of this matching function. As the manager of a machine shop for a very large employer in Cotooli described,
When we hire for the apprenticeship program, we try to stay away from [community college] people who counsel because their objective is to place people and our objective is to be very careful about selecting people who will be successful in this environment. We believe that we've got a better skill at it, at interviewing and evaluating applicants for our particular needs.
Were placement offices to make more strenuous efforts to link students with employers, they would be placed in a difficult dilemma: To stay credible with employers, they would have to recommend only the most capable students; but by construction, that would make them ineffective in placing weak students. The only solution to this dilemma is to have all students be capable--but in nonselective and noncoercive institutions like community colleges and in employment situations where many dimensions of ability (like motivation and persistence) are beyond the capacity of community colleges to affect, this becomes difficult to achieve.
There are some exceptions to the weakness of placement efforts. In Cotooli, placement offices are better staffed and we heard many more favorable reports from employers about placement offices. This may be partly a result of state policy that requires programs with less than seventy-five percent placement be considered for closure; and since the placement offices conduct the follow-up surveys necessary for this determination, departments are in a sense beholden to placements offices. The co-op programs in Cotooli also seem to have more strenuous placement efforts partly because of the desire of educational providers to establish co-op programs and to find co-op placements for their students. In another example, the short-term job training center of Frankton Community College has a placement office that includes several "job developers"--individuals responsible for maintaining regular contact with employers who might hire the program's completers and active in "developing" job opportunities rather than waiting for employers to request students. However, this program is funded partly though JTPA and JOBS, with their greater emphasis on placement. These exceptions have developed in conditions where there are incentives to increase placement. Otherwise, the placement efforts of community colleges are uncertain ways of strengthening connections to employers.
[44] On the tendency for the various parts of the community college to be independent from each other, even those with related concerns, see the comments on the community college as an archipelago of disconnected islands in Grubb and Kraskouskas (1992).
[45] One problem in working with employers is that they appear to be unforgiving, so an idiosyncratic error can have permanent consequences. In the case of the Frankton manufacturer, one poor experience with the community college colored his entire perception of the institution.
[46] For other examples of this view, particularly in contrast to the greater efforts within JTPA and the JOBS program to fund placement efforts, see the report on cooperation among postsecondary vocational programs, JTPA, and JOBS in Grubb, Brown, Kaufman, and Lederer (1990).