Community College and Education

Community College Leadership Specializing as a community college leader is a good opportunity to enhance my degree path in Education.

By obtaining a doctorate in education and specializing in Community College Leadership, I can address some of the issues that impact students coming into the university for the first time as well as issues that affect other students who are looking for direction and needing assistance with applying their education to the real world (in terms of finding a career, for instance, or in just finding the right path forward for them).

Community colleges are known for being smaller-scale higher education settings as compared to larger universities that are famous across the nation for having high profile athletics programs or high reputation academic programs.

Community colleges tend to offer more affordable rates of tuition to students who are simply seeking an education at the university level without the fanfare of the bigger universities: these are students who tend to see college as a means to an end -- a better career in the real world or a stepping stone to a more rigorous program at a more high profile college.

In terms of addressing the issue of standards in K-12 education, this specialization is important because many incoming students at the college level will have been impacted by the standards utilized in their educations so far from K-12. As a community college leader, I will be responsible for helping them to adapt to the rigors of college and the academic expectations that university professors will expect of them.

Making sure that incoming students are able to meet these demands will be part of the role of being a leader on the campus. Students are impacted by standards in a number of ways -- and various issues such as social promotion, character education, and depth of learning affect them as a byproduct of standardization (Jimerson, Renshaw, 2012; Lickona, 1993; Dobbs, 2011). How K-12 schools develop and implement standards bears a large part on how a community college will have to orient itself to incoming students who graduate from these K-12 schools.

Their thought processes, learning depth, and character will have been formed by teachers using curriculum designed to meet the standards given them either by the local, state or federal level boards. Thus, everything is related in the field of education -- nothing exists in isolation. What happens in K-12 will have an effect on what happens in the community college where I plan to specialize as a leader.

How I orient myself as a leader for these students at the college level will depend on what these students have been exposed to in the K-12 levels. Therefore, I too should have a role in how standards are developed and implemented in K-12 schools as what is enacted at that level will ultimately bear directly on what happens at the college level. There should be considerable discourse and dialogue among all stakeholders in education -- not just among K-12 educators or standards specialists. Business persons,.