Back to First Principles

By Janice Castro

The Ford Foundation boosts academics at community colleges

Twenty years ago, the main goal of two-year community colleges was preparing students for eventual transfer to four-year state universities. They could get a start on higher education at bargain prices while living at home. Since then, the number of these schools just across the street or down the highway has nearly doubled, to 1,219; this fall some 5 million students, fully 60% of the nation's college freshmen and sophomores, are earning their credits on these campuses. But in the midst of expansion, the community, or junior, colleges strayed from their original academic purpose. Trying to be all things to all students, many of them de-emphasized the traditional curriculum in favor of such "practical" subjects as refrigeration mechanics and creative divorce. A decade ago, roughly two-thirds of all community-college students planned to transfer to four-year schools; today that figure is down to about one-third.

Educators and public officials are now trying to work out ways to get community colleges back to their basics. One driving force is the growing concern that students should have a solid grounding in the liberal arts and sciences. Another factor is declining budgets; many state legislatures, which provide 60% of the financing for community colleges, want to cut the frills. This week the Ford Foundation is helping the reform movement by honoring 24 community colleges in 19 cities for their efforts to prepare students for further study. Each institution will get $25,000, but the main award will be the prestige of being singled out for praise. Next year the foundation plans to give up to $250,000 to its award-winning innovative schools for developing projects that could serve as models for other institutions. The goal, says Ford Foundation President Franklin Thomas, is to help more students "to move through the higher-education pipeline and obtain the baccalaureate degree."

Neither the Ford Foundation nor anyone else is proposing that community colleges drop the impressive array of vocational courses that they have developed over the years. Indeed, the career training offered by the schools is considered more important than ever in the face of persistently high unemployment and increased industrial demand for workers with technical skills. But something clearly had to be done to improve academic instruction. All too often, students who do transfer to four-year colleges are poorly prepared. The University of California, for instance, has had 30% of its transfer students drop out before the end of their junior year.

The reasons vary for this poor record. Many community-college students must juggle responsibilities, like supporting families, that trouble comparatively few university freshmen. But more often the blame can be placed on the colleges themselves for stretching their resources too thin and neglecting serious students. Some schools are open seven days and nights a week, serving as walk-in educational shopping centers; they offer little counseling to students planning to pursue a four-year degree. Most community colleges do not even coordinate course requirements with the universities that accept their graduates. Thus many transfer students are dismayed to discover, after completing two years at a community college, that few of their credits will count toward a bachelor's degree. Says Alison Bernstein, the Ford Foundation program officer who is directing the new project: "We want to help ensure that community-college students will have the proper credentials to be accepted at four-year institutions and will be able to handle the work when they get there."

That same goal is being pursued by a number of financially strapped state legislatures, which are forcing the colleges to drop courses that do not lead to degrees. In Washington, where the community-college budget was cut this year by $45 million, or 10%, the 27 schools are discontinuing 4,500 classes and dropping 648 of 4,019 full-time faculty members. Even vocational courses are being thinned out on some campuses. Los Angeles Harbor College, one of the Ford recipients, has had to eliminate nearly 40% of its occupational classes because of budget cutbacks. Harbor and nearby Compton Community College, another Ford winner, will use their grants to counsel transferring students on the four-year degree programs available to them. In Phoenix, South Mountain Community College was recognized for assigning "faculty mentors" to work closely with small groups of students and help them solve academic problems that could slow their progress toward a degree.

The colleges singled out by Ford are in urban areas and have large enrollments of low-income and minority students. The foundation is particularly concerned about improving their chances for academic success; nationwide more than half of all black and Hispanic college students attend two-year institutions. Ford picked programs that are encouraging students to set their goals high: La Guardia Community College in New York City, for example, is helping its students prepare for Vassar.

About one-third of the 10,383 students at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College in Richmond, Va., another Ford recipient, are black students seeking a four-year degree are getting help in filling out college applications and financial-aid forms and in selecting courses from members of the school's newly formed alumni association. Reynolds' alumni are also visiting every public high school in the city, where the enrollment is 90% black, seeking to recruit students of promise. Says Richard Starling, president of the alumni association: "We're like a funnel. We want to move minority students from the high schools into the community college, and then we'll steer them to a four-year institution."

One impressive program that Ford selected for backing takes place under the vaulted gold arches of a former U.S. Mint building where the Community College of Philadelphia holds classes. Philosophy Professor Martin Spear and Sociology Professor Dennis McGrath caught the foundation's eye with an honors program aimed at the school's poor and minority students. Explains Spear: "We had to create a structure, a kind of intellectual community of students who would come to believe that we are doing something important." Seminars focus for a time on a particular century: its literature, its politics, its social movements. The students encounter Herodotus, the Renaissance and the Reformation; they also have to write papers for specific audiences described by their instructors.

Tangi Boston, 22, is one of the proudest students in the program. A former pharmacist's assistant, she says that the challenging curriculum at Philadelphia has changed her goals. Says she: "I never thought I could get anything but menial jobs. I want more than that now. I want a career." In January, Boston, who plans to study law eventually, will transfer to Philadelphia's La Salle College. She will be in an honors program there as well.

--By Janice Castro.

Reported by Jeanne-Marie North/New York and Judy Petsonk/Philadelphia, with other bureaus

With reporting by Jeanne-Marie North, Judy Petsonk This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.