ImageIn July Dr. Jill Biden, a part-time, non-tenure track community college instructor, gave a speech to the UNESCO Higher Education conference extolling community colleges as one of America’s “best-kept secrets” and the “way of the future” for higher education in developing countries.  A week later the World Bank, hewing closely to their mission to keep the division between the first and third worlds intact, issued a report discouraging developing countries from trying to build “world-class universities” to compete with those in the United States and Europe.  Hard on the heels of that, and sticking to the summer education script, President Obama announced the American Graduation Initiative, a 10-year, $12 billion plan to invest in community colleges. 

All this national and international excitement about community colleges resonates with the situation here in Washington, where community college participation rates are among the highest in the nation, and state leaders, like Jill Biden, hail community colleges as a big part of the solution to our economic woes.  In the recent state budget reductions, the cuts to community colleges were not nearly as deep as those to the state’s 4-year universities.  In the hubbub surrounding those budget cuts, the community and technical colleges were labeled the portals for the people and the universities were identified as snobby sites of elitist indulgence. 

These two sectors of higher education should not be pitted against each other, but in this state they have been.  Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the Higher Education Coordinating Board’s System Design Study Group. 

ImageThe System Design Study grew out of two imperatives from the last legislative session: the usual longing in desperate times to squeeze more educational blood from an ever smaller stone and the need to impose some harmony on the cacophony of pork-laden higher ed proposals that roll into every legislative session.  Under the relentlessly reasonable leadership of HEC Board Executive Director Ann Daley, the committee has worked valiantly to come up with guiding principles for higher ed growth and to imagine a future time when money for that growth might actually be available.  But from the beginning, there have been tensions between the representatives of the community and technical colleges and the representatives of the four-year universities.

Those tensions busted out into the open last Monday at the meeting of the System Design Study Group at Pierce College in Puyallup.  As the group worked on its final set of recommendations, the representatives of the four-year colleges suggested a single line about encouraging more high school graduates to go directly to a four-year college.  The representatives of the community colleges insisted that this single line be changed to include both two and four-year colleges.  When a four-year college representative responded with some exasperation that Washington ranks 48th in the nation in 4-year college participation and that one of the main goals of the System Design Study is to find ways to produce more bachelors degrees, the game was on.  One community college participant announced that she found the four-year attitude “offensive,” another claimed that the four-year colleges were trying to “steal” two-year students, and the executive director of the State Board of Community and Technical Colleges said that he could live with the line in the report only if the “proportionality” between the two and four year colleges remained intact. 

There’s nothing like bad economic times to bring out this kind of crabs-in-a-barrel behavior, but it’s worth looking past the turf battle for a moment and exploring some of the larger issues beneath the 2-year/4-year split.

When people want to defend community colleges they talk about the percentage of baccalaureate degrees that begin at community colleges and when people want to kick community colleges they talk about very low graduation rates.  Both of those statistics depend very much on factors that go well beyond education and both are beside the point.  The point is what has and is happening to educational attainment in the United States.  We have reached a place where for the first time the next generation is likely to be less educated than the last, and if we’re going to talk about redesigning a system, we should try to systematically reverse that.

State-supported public universities and the community colleges that followed them were created, as Eugene M. Tobin writes, “to meet the social and economic needs of the states that chartered them, to serve as a great equalizer and preserver of an open, upwardly mobile society, and to provide ‘an uncommon education for the common man.’”  Flagship state universities like those in Berkeley, Madison, and Ann Arbor were supposed to give to large numbers of regular people state-funded opportunities that had previously been reserved only for those wealthy enough to attend private places like Harvard, the University of Chicago, and Columbia.  The economic trajectory of the twentieth century, especially after World War II, brought tremendous investment first in state research institutions like the University of Washington, and then in the transformation of normal schools into regional comprehensive universities like Western Washington University, Eastern Washington University, and Central Washington University, and finally in systems of community colleges.  The idea was a tripartite state-supported system that would allow anyone with the talent and drive to attain the highest level of education and the social and economic mobility that comes with it. 

Over the last thirty years, with dramatic state disinvestment in higher education, this system has been heading away from college as the breaker of class boundaries and toward college as the guardian of class lines.  Washington’s higher ed system of community colleges, regional comprehensive universities, and research universities most resembles California’s.  California ranks first in the country in the percentage of its higher education budget spent on community colleges and Washington ranks second.   Both systems have made access to the highest levels of education harder and harder.  Washington now ranks 48th in the United States in the percentage of its population that goes to its public 4-year universities, and California ranks only above Mississippi in sending high school seniors directly to four-year colleges.

In their recently published book, Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities, William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michael S. McPherson demonstrate convincingly that, all other things being equal, a student with baccalaureate aspirations has a much better chance of attaining that goal if he or she enters a four-year institution directly than if he or she enters a community college.  They also show that one of the biggest barriers to baccalaureate degree attainment is  “undermatching,” which is the phenomenon of students failing to attend colleges and universities in which they will be appropriately challenged (so the 2,000 qualified applicants that lack the resources to attend the University of Washington this year are less likely to succeed if they enroll in community college than if they would have enrolled at UW).  If Washington’s higher education system were still about economic development and social mobility, we would be funding it in a way that allowed students from any socioeconomic background to enter the system at an appropriate level.  Instead, we have increasingly defined community college as the only public good in the higher education system and thus made community college a barrier rather than a conduit to class mobility. 

Community colleges are indeed, as Dr. Biden says, “a great place to go for new training.”  As New York Times columnist David Brooks points out in an essay lauding Obama’s initiative, community colleges give hope to the “kid who messed up in high school” or “a 35-year-old former meth addict trying to get some job training.”  They provide invaluable open admissions and second chances.  But neither Dr. Biden nor President Obama nor David Brooks mention one of the main reasons why community college is so attractive to government policy-makers.

It’s cheap.    

The primary reason community colleges can operate so economically is that they are running faculty sweatshops.  Almost 70 percent of community college faculty in the United States are contingent, part-time workers, most of whose second jobs don’t come with the perks that Jill Biden’s does.  This kind of staffing is much more conducive to training students in the vocations that will allow them to take their places on the lower-middle rungs of the economy than it is to giving students the lower division general education they will need to succeed at a four-year university.  This is, of course absolutely in keeping with the desires of the leaders of Washington businesses, who don’t want to pay any more taxes for higher education and can recruit nationwide for their best jobs.  What they do want is a pool of people no further away than the end of the bus line who have been trained to fill their technical and vocational jobs.  This training has become the primary mission of Washington’s community colleges.

And even when heroic community college faculty are able to overcome the lack of resources (which they do on a regular basis) and prepare their students for four-year college, those students have almost nowhere to go in the state of Washington.  Whether you enter directly from high school or transfer from a community college, if there are limited spaces and increasingly high tuition (due to increasing skimpy state support), the odds are stacked more and more against you. 

If the System Design Study has shown anything, it is that Washington’s institutions of higher education are doing an incredibly good job.  Washington spends less per student and less per degree or certificate than almost any state in the country while turning out very high quality degrees.  The obvious conclusion to be drawn from all the data is that Washington needs to invest more money in higher education, especially in the four-year sector.  But since there is no money to invest, members of the study group continue to entertain the fantasy that things like on-line learning, three-year degrees, and two-year colleges offering four-year degrees will allow us to produce thousands more baccalaureate degrees without spending any more money.

The bottom line is that Jill Biden’s kids didn’t go to community college.  Sasha and Malia will never see the inside of a community college.  The kids of the people who run the World Bank aren’t going to community college.  The people who gathered in Puyallup last Monday were overwhelmingly white and all of them had four-year degrees.  Their kids aren’t going to community college.      

Washington is, unfortunately, completely in step with the rest of the world in its educational policy and budget choices.  From Paris to Puyallup, we’re lowering the educational possibilities for future generations and reinforcing the division of our society along the lines of race and class.