At the same time, for the past decade employers have been criticizing the work readiness of those they hire, complaining that many graduates of high schools, community colleges, and even four-year colleges do not possess the basic educational skills needed to learn on the job (Grubb, 1996a; SCANS, 1991; Van Horn, 1995; Zemsky, 1994). Every level of the educational system, including community colleges, has been called upon to be more practical; more connected with the market for labor; and more in touch with the practical applications of research, technology, and basic academic disciplines (Guthrie, 1991). Over the past several years, one way in which community colleges have responded to the pressures to meet this human capital imperative has been the many efforts to integrate academic and occupational education--that is, to incorporate more "basic" or academic content into occupational programs so that graduates will have both the basic reading, writing, and mathematical skills and some of the "higher-order" or problem-solving skills demanded by the business community and various educators. We have written extensively about many different approaches to integration (Grubb, Badway, Bell, & Kraskouskas, 1996; Grubb & Kraskouskas, 1992), and there appears to be a growing interest among community colleges in these innovative practices.
However, there is a serious problem with the conventional statement from employers about the skills missing in the workforce. As others have noted (Grubb, 1996b; Hull, 1993), employers are often unclear about specifically which competencies are inadequate in their workers; they frequently glide from complaints about basic academic skills--reading and math--to complaints about work habits and motivation, even though the two are quite different and must be remedied in distinctly different ways. The skills employers stress are, not surprisingly, centered on their own needs, and they neglect a number of competencies that are crucial to the students involved. When we look more carefully at both the demands of employers and the needs of students trying to make their way through community colleges, we can see that the competencies necessary for students to master and for community colleges to convey are much more varied than either basic academic skills or the kinds of skills articulated by employers--often referred to as SCANS skills because of their description in the 1991 report from the Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills. In the first section of this introduction, then, we briefly outline seven competencies required by all students for career preparation. In effect, we argue throughout this monograph that community colleges need to consider all these competencies, not merely the basic academic skills and the job-specific technical skills that have been the subject of conventional occupational and academic courses, respectively.
Having identified these seven domains of competency, the problem facing community colleges and technical institutes is how to provide all the experiences--coursework, work-based learning, labs and workshops, and other nontraditional learning activities--that will convey these competencies.[1] Because so much confusion exists over the ways in which community colleges can address workforce education, we have examined the practices in place at a variety of colleges across the nation. (We describe our efforts to find out about these practices in the Appendix.) Efforts to integrate academic study and career preparation vary greatly. We found many ambitious efforts in modules and courses that addressed some aspects of career preparation, some pockets of creativity in assembling programs that address multiple work-related competencies, and a scant group of campuses in which the fundamental purposes of education and its degree components have been reexamined in the light of today's changing workplace and social demands. Throughout this volume, we draw upon the practices we uncovered to illustrate how other community colleges and technical institutes might adapt novel practices for the benefit of their own students. Of course, there is always a danger in describing exemplary practices in any institution: other campuses may have implemented similar practices but were not included in our survey; practices may have altered by the time this is read because personnel or regulations have changed; campuses operate under vastly different conditions, so that innovations in one college may be inappropriate for another; or we may have failed to ask the right questions of the programs we examined. Even so, with apologies for incomplete data collection and with anticipation that environments shift, we describe a number of select programs that illustrate the possibilities for career preparation that is truly multidimensional and that inform our understanding of the capacity of the community colleges to respond to a changing society and economy.
In presenting these innovative practices, we take two approaches. In Chapters 1 - 6 of Volume I, we describe the practices associated with each of the domains of career preparation--except the domain of specific technical skill, which is already well represented in occupational courses. However, these are our descriptions, not those of the instructors who have devised them. Therefore, in Volume II of this Sourcebook, we include the course syllabus, descriptions, and other materials that these instructors have devised and we refer to these materials throughout this first volume (see "Directions for Using Volumes I and II" at the end of this Introduction). While the two sets of materials can be used independently of each other, we have found that they are complementary: the course materials in Volume II provide more vivid illustration of what these novel approaches accomplish, while our analysis of these materials in Volume I places them in the larger national and institutional context.
Finally, in Chapter 7, we outline some of the ways of getting from here to there--of beginning the process of reforming the ways community colleges and technical institutes go about devising their programs. The area of innovative workforce programs is an excellent example of where the community college must work together as a community: both administrators and their support, and instructors and their wholehearted participation--both top-down and bottom-up strategies, so to speak--are necessary for these innovations to develop, endure, and spread. But we stress that the potential benefits are enormous because the results would be two-year colleges that can provide their students, and the employers for whom they will work, the full range of competencies required in the modern world.
[1] The community college serves a variety of students requiring a variety of curriculum. Kantor (1994) distinguishes among the emerging workforce learner (yet to be employed; training for a first career), the entrepreneurial workforce learner (small business owners who demand applied knowledge), the transitional workforce learner (displaced or disenfranchised workers requiring immediate, short-term training), and the existing workforce learner (employed, with a natural setting in which to apply knowledge). See also Bailey, 1987.