Books Worth Reading
By Huber, Mary Taylor
Defending the Community College Equity Agenda. Edited by Thomas Bailey and Vanessa Smith Morest. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, 328 pages, $45.00 hardcover. Minding the Dream: The Process and Practice of the American Community College. Gail O. Mellow and Cynthia Heelan. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008, 352 pages, $49.95 hardcover.
“The President’s Commission on Higher Education has been charged with the task of … re-examining the objectives, methods, and facilities of higher education in the United States in the light of the social role it has to play.” These words introduced the Truman Commission Report on Higher Education for Democracy in 1947, a document widely credited with leading to the creation of comprehensive community colleges as stewards of the American Dream. The two books reviewed here examine what that charge means in today’s economy and the challenges that community colleges face as they update their stewardship role. Both books agree that access to college, once the centerpiece of the community college’s “equity agenda” (Bailey and Morris) or “dream” (Mellow and Heelan), is no longer enough. It is now necessary to attend also to what happens once students are in college and to what helps or hinders them from reaching their educational goals.
Although the two books frame this issue in similar ways, they represent different genres and have different temporal horizons. Defending the Community College Equity Agenda is a collection of reports on an ambitious collaborative research project conducted under the auspices of the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Teachers College, Columbia University. In Minding the Dream: The Process and Practice of the American Community College, Gail Mellow and Cynthia Heelan, long-time community college leaders, issue a call to arms. The CCRC researchers focus on developments that appeared to challenge the “equity agenda” when their project was conceived in the late 1990s, while Mellow and Heelan explore issues that seem most critical for “minding the dream” today. That these challenges and issues are not quite the same suggests how rapidly change has occurred in recent years and how the significance it has for community colleges has evolved.
Defending the Community College Equity Agenda, edited by Thomas Bailey and Vanessa Smith Morest, stands out from most academic essay collections. The editors-director and assistant director of the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia- along with the other nine authors, were all participants in an extraordinary research project involving extensive fieldwork at fifteen community colleges (rural, urban, and suburban) in six states. At each campus in this study, the team interviewed administrators, faculty, counselors, students, and clients, allowing for “triangulation across a variety of college stakeholders” (p. 23). As the editors point out in their introduction, “the book is the result of a collective process and reflects a collective perspective” (p.23). It is a richly documented, artfully presented, and highly readable work.
The rationale for the research-and for the structure of the book- is presented in Bailey and Morest’s introduction. As economic opportunity in the United States has come to depend more and more on “at least some college education” over the past several decades (p.1), the concept of equity in higher education has expanded as well. It is now best characterized as having three parts: preparation for college, access to college, and students’ success in reaching their goals. While “it is the premise of this book … that a student’s income or race should not be a significant determinant of his or her educational achievements,” it is unfortunately the case that “higher education remains inequitable for each of these three components” (p.2).
Bailey and Morest review the special role community colleges play in providing access to college through low cost and open-door admissions and in addressing preparation for college through their vast developmental education programs and new relationships with high schools, as well as (because of low graduation rates) their “more difficult and more controversial” role in promoting college success (p.3). The principal challenges faced by community colleges in improving their performance are long-standing and well known: “Within the system of public higher education, they have the least money and the students with the most difficult problems” (p.12). Moreover, as the book shows, they also face a rapidly changing environment and pressures to offer education services that respond to certain community needs but do little to advance the access, preparedness, and achievement of low-income and minority students.
Assessing the implications of various developments for the community college equity agenda is the task for the eight main chapters of this book. Three examine perceived threats to the agenda. Two of them look at the growth of vocational programs in community colleges and find that they are not doing the damage that some observers feared. Morest, for example, finds little basis for concern that noncredit vocational courses might swamp credit and transfer courses. But she worries about a “new schism in community college programs, whereby credit programs are for younger students with bachelor degree aspirations and noncredit programs are for older, working adult students,” and calls for designs that connect noncredit with credit programs (p.48). Chapter authors Jim Jacobs and Norton Grubb conclude that trade-school-like programs preparing students for information technology certification have not taken deep root in community colleges. The authors consider this a good thing for the equity agenda, because of the high price, educational specificity, and decline of employer demand for such training after the dot-com crisis. Finally, Bailey looks at the growth of for- profit competitors and finds “little evidence that [they] … are either threatening the enrollments of community colleges or pushing the colleges to actions that would weaken the equity agenda” (p.108).
Three chapters focus on developments that have not (at least yet) met their potential to advance the equity agenda: performance accountability (Kevin Doughterty and Esther Hong), distance learning (Rebecca Cox), and dual credit at community colleges and high schools (Morest and Melinda Mechur Karp). Each has its subtleties. Performance accountability, for example, has spurred greater attention on the part of colleges to the success of their remedial (or developmental) education programs and to their retention and graduation rates. However, the positive effects appear to be “only moderately strong” because of a number of obstacles, including “poorly designed measures of success; funding that is unstable and does not keep pace with increasing enrollments; and inequalities in institutional capacity” (p.81). At first blush, distance learning promised greater access to college, but it developed with too much emphasis on the technology and too little on course design and pedagogy to really benefit less well-prepared students. What’s needed to do better, Cox argues, is for “colleges to provide greater organizational support for faculty learning and move beyond their reliance on the efforts of individual instructors” (p.127).
A most interesting (and disappointing) story concerns the equity effects of programs that allow high school students to take community college courses for college credit. Clearly, these efforts could advance the equity agenda by giving students an early start on the path to a degree and by helping them understand better what college work entails. However, while reaching a somewhat larger population than high school AP or honors courses, many dual- enrollment programs have admissions requirements that appear to exclude “middlerange and academically disadvantaged students” (p.242). To really enhance access, Morest and Karp argue, these programs would need a “pathway of developmental coursework culminating in a college credit dual enrollment course.” (pp.242- 243).
Developmental (i.e. remedial, pre-collegiate) education and guidance counseling, although not “new” in the same sense as other issues examined in this book, are so central to the community college equity agenda that each gets a chapter as well. While data suggest that nationally, around 40 percent of entering community college students enroll in one or more remedial courses, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. As Perin and Charron note, “Course enrollments underestimated the need for reading, writing, and math skills … . The presence of academically underprepared students in degree-credit classrooms meant that the problem extended beyond developmental education and spilled out to the whole college” (p.191). The National Field Study colleges-like others-have been struggling to find better ways of organizing and teaching these courses, but most of their many modifications and innovations have yet to be systematically evaluated. Indeed, while all agree that good counseling services are an essential component of success for developmental (and other) community college students, this too is an under-resourced, under-planned area, which seems, at most colleges, “to have developed piecemeal, without careful thought about what different students need” (p.219). In their superb concluding chapter, editors Bailey and Morest place all this turbulence in historical context. “At the turn of the [twenty-first] century, when this project was conceived, there was widespread anxiety among educators in community colleges concerning various developments in the higher education system that might threaten the health of community colleges and their equity agenda” (p.248). They take us back to the days of dot-com madness when it seemed like all that is solid could melt into the virtual air, to the millennium as a “time at which higher education institutional boundaries and control seemed to be challenged” (p.248). While their study showed that the anxieties raised by developments like the growth of for-profits, information technology certification, vocational programs, on-line education, and performance accountability were “exaggerated” (p.249), the equity agenda itself is not off the hook. Indeed many of today’s emerging challenges were prefigured in the millennial ones but have been given a new twist by today’s fiscal constraints on public higher education, which could lead to an even greater concentration of low-income students in community colleges.
Where Defending the Community College Equity Agenda leaves off, Minding the Dream begins. Conceived in 2004, while the authors-Gail Mellow, president of La Guardia Community College, and Cynthia Heelan, former president of Colorado Mountain College-were attending the first U.S.- China Community College conference, this book picks up on a new set of issues on which the future of the community college now seems to turn. This is not a report on original research but an analysis and meditation drawing on the literature and “almost 60 combined years of service” concerning where the “process and practice of the American Community College” are and are not serving to make “high-quality education available to all” (p. 277). Most chapters carry this flag through their particular territory with sections on “The Dream,”"The Unfulfilled Dream,”"The Real Story,” and “Challenges to the Field.” Minding the Dream would have benefited from more careful editing, but its vision and passion are appealing.
Readers will hear strong echoes of the Bailey and Morest book throughout Minding the Dream, especially in its treatment of such basic functions as developmental education; transfer, credit, and noncredit programs; and economic and workforce development. But Mellow and Heelan also devote whole chapters to finance, governance, pedagogy, leadership, international connections, English as a Second Language, and diversity. The authors’ understanding of the historical moment is key to this wide coverage. As they note, “waves of national and increasingly international forces continue to shape America’s community colleges,” which must remain locally grounded while also responding “to the American need to retain a middle class as we compete in a world arena” (p.11). Yet even as educational requirements and student numbers rise, community colleges stand “at the end of a long line of outstretched hands when it comes to public, private, or philanthropic support ” (p. 48). What, Mellow and Heelan ask, does the fact that these colleges receive “less than 20 percent of the dollars spent on higher education” (p. 50) mean for their capacity to serve all comers, and in particular, to make a difference for the most disadvantaged who enter their open doors?
Indeed, many of the chapters will be eye-openers for people not fully immersed in the community college world. For example, we learn (if we didn’t already know) that a large number of community college leaders, “steeped in the understanding of the community college as a movement for social justice and democracy” are nearing retirement age (p.136). This has created a leadership crisis, as new people enter the ranks without that background as a moral compass to help steer a course amid the many directions their college’s multiple missions open to them. The chapter on international connections underlines nascent possibilities for increasing global awareness and connections for the benefit of students in colleges here and to help expand opportunities for the disadvantaged abroad.
The excellent chapter on pedagogy takes up the challenge that minding the dream poses for faculty. If students are to achieve at the levels necessary for full participation in today’s society, they will need an “innovative, inquiry-based liberal education” (p. 276). This means that community colleges will have to provide intellectually engaging opportunities for professional development and an environment more open to serious conversation about teaching and learning. As Mellow and Heelan remind readers, the idea of a paradigm shift from teaching to learning emerged within the community-college context [Editor's note: see Barr and Tagg, Change, November/ December 1995]. Even there, however, “our knowledge exists [but] our practice and the funding for implementation lag far behind.” (p. 277).
When it comes to recommendations, Defending the Community College Equity Agenda and Minding the Dream are not really far apart. Of course, each provides many specific suggestions. However, two general themes, present in both books, stand out. First, there’s the call to create better pathways for students to achieve the degrees they’ll need for middle-class lives by creating more connections between community college programs themselves (for example, non- credit/credit, developmental/college-level, workforce training/ general education) and for aligning these programs more closely with high schools and four-year institutions. Second, there’s a call to find better ways than enrollments to measure community college effectiveness, including the capacity to track students’ progress for purposes of evaluating innovations, improving programs, and publicizing the good work these colleges are doing.
Reading these books together is a reminder that the very comprehensiveness that makes modern community colleges so central to higher education’s equity agenda also gives them wide exposure to often competing pressures for change. The anxieties that accompanied the dot-com bubble may have shifted into concerns about sagging public support and the displacements of a globalizing economy-and will surely shift again. It is only by attending closely to what’s happening, as all these authors call on us to do, that community colleges will be able to keep faith with “the dream” through future ups and downs.
Assessing the implications of various developments for the community college equity agenda is the task for the eight main chapters of [Bailey and Morest's] book.
While data suggests that … 40 percent of entering community- college students enroll in one or more remedial courses, that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
As Mellow and Heelan remind readers, the idea of a paradigm shift from teaching to learning emerged within the communitycollege context.
Mary Taylor Huber is a senior scholar at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where she directs the Integrative Learning Project and works closely with the Carnegie Academy of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. She has written extensively about changing faculty cultures in U.S. higher education and is coauthor, most recently, of The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons (2005).
Copyright Heldref Publications Sep/Oct 2008
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