Community Colleges in America: History, Teaching, and Access

Introduction: Excellence and Criticism in American Education

In 1983 and 1984, a dozen major reports on United States schools were published, all stressing the need for "excellence" in education. These reports are the subject of Excellence in Education: Perspectives on Policy and Practice. The reports pertaining to higher education were published by the Business-Higher Education Forum, which saw higher education as "unable to train skilled managers and technicians that they believed industry needed" (Altbach 32). These reports essentially claim that student achievement has declined at technical schools because schools "do not demand enough of their students, do not apply stiff criteria for promotion, do not test students enough, and particularly in high school, provide students with too many choices about what subjects they study" (Altbach 32).

These reports are somewhat dated in that they compare American students with Japanese students and focus on technical proficiency versus the intuitive grasp of problems and methodologies for solving them — a quality since cited as a strength of American workers. The reports hold that graduates are mediocre at best, and that this mediocrity — directly produced by the schools — is responsible for high unemployment rates and America's decline in defense and world trade. The Paideia Proposal and the College Board Reports claim that colleges have slackened their admissions requirements, admitting a larger proportion of unqualified applicants. These reports argue that schools can address this by teaching more English and foreign languages, focusing on the sciences at the high school level, and using aptitude tests to measure performance at the college level. They also fault schools for failing to encourage students to enroll in math-related or biology programs.

History and Mission of the Community College

In A Handbook on the Community College in America, Baker, Dudziak, and Tyler provide a comprehensive study of the history and development of the two-year college, current teaching methodologies, and how these colleges function in an urban setting. In "Part 3: Curriculum and Instructional Development in The Community College," Albert Smith details the teaching practices utilized in American community colleges. The chapter includes "a brief history of instructional innovation and change in U.S. community colleges, describe the increasingly diverse student body that now attends U.S. two-year colleges, and consider the future, including a discussion of some learning principles, a learning theory, and research on community college faculty that should be useful to community college faculty in future years" (Baker, Dudziak, and Tyler 206). The book not only addresses teaching methodologies at two-year schools but also dedicates sections to the history of community colleges and how they interact with the urban learning environment.

In "The Community College: Educating Students at the Margin Between College and Work," Thomas Kane and Cecilia Rouse "survey the available evidence on the impacts of community colleges on educational attainment and earnings" (Kane and Rouse 63). The authors comment on the changing nature of teaching at these institutions: "Originally, junior colleges focused on what is termed the 'transfer function': students would complete two years of a general undergraduate education and earn an associate's degree at the two-year college, and those who wanted and were capable would transfer to a four-year college to complete a bachelor's degree. Since then, two-year colleges have broadened their mission to include vocational degree programs, continuing adult education programs, and workforce, economic and community development programs. In addition, community colleges have traditionally striven to increase access to higher education through an open admissions policy — often not even requiring a high school diploma — and low, or no, tuition" (Kane and Rouse 65).

Joseph F. Kett's The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750–1990 traces the evolution of adult education across American history. It begins with self-education as portrayed before formal institutions existed — the first universities did not appear in the United States until the late 1800s. Kett also examines the class and social differences produced by the limited availability of adult education, while noting that the advent of industry ultimately necessitated its development. Moving into the twentieth century, he reviews contemporary innovations including the advent of junior colleges and eventually community colleges as they exist today. He also reviews industrial education as it was introduced at the turn of the century, later refined as workers faced domestic and international competition, and ultimately adapted to a working environment that constantly demands skill updates. Throughout, the author draws comparisons between modern innovations and those that predominated in the nineteenth century.

Teaching Methodologies and Learning Styles

Richard Miller, Charles Finley, and Candace Shedd Vancko's Evaluating, Improving, and Judging Faculty Performance in Two-Year Colleges focuses primarily on improving teacher performance, though it is less reliant on new methodologies than many comparable works. The authors look to the institutional culture of these colleges as a model for teachers. Their perspective contrasts with that found at four-year schools, where professors are often revered and the administration is frequently viewed as poorly organized.

The book by Dunn and Griggs, Practical Approaches to Using Learning Styles in Higher Education, explores stages in improving the teaching environment of two- and four-year colleges. These stages involve a comprehensive audit of practices known as PEPS — the Productivity Environmental Preference Survey — which is used to "identify individual and group patterns among students' learning-style preferences and then develop teaching strategies to respond to those patterns" (Dunn and Griggs x). After learning style preferences are identified, students may recognize their own strengths and weaknesses. The system is also designed to empower students to study through their learning-style strengths, with some components offering computer-generated prescriptions for studying and doing homework that suggest instructional approaches tailored to individual rather than group learning styles (Dunn and Griggs, Chapter 14). Professors then design instruction to address both global and analytic processing styles, as illustrated by Robin Boyle, Karen Burke, Shirley Griggs, and Nancy Montgomery. Drawing from Howard Gardner and others, the system also incorporates multimedia learning, requesting that professors "develop course content to accommodate a variety of perceptual preferences — auditory, visual, tactual, and kinesthetic" (Dunn and Griggs x). Most contributors to this volume focus on developing ways to cater to more individualistic learning styles, both at the collegiate and graduate school level. At one point, the book advises that a teacher act as a facilitator, guide, and coach — advocating what it calls a "constructivist philosophy" (Dunn and Griggs 54).

In "The Naturalistic Approach to Learning Styles," Tony Grasha questions the utility of self-report personality tests, opinion surveys, and attitude surveys in determining student learning preferences. Grasha has spent over eighteen years conducting research on the Grasha-Riechmann Student Learning Style Scales, a questionnaire designed to "elicit information about student tendencies toward competition, collaboration, independence, dependence, participation, and avoidance" (Grasha 106). He develops profiles of several different student types, categorizing them based on interviews conducted according to a defined methodology. Typical student attitudes he identifies include: compliant, anxious dependent, discouraged worker, independent, hero, attention seeker, silent student, and "sniper" (Grasha 107).

In "Rethinking Achievement Goals," Judith M. Harackiewicz, Kenneth E. Barron, and Andrew J. Elliot examine the adaptation of achievement goals for college students. These authors argue that "the types of goals that students adopt in educational settings and the consequences of those goals on two important educational outcomes — performance and intrinsic motivation — are discussed." The authors evaluate the theories of other investigators and consider the possibility that "some commonly accepted conclusions about the effects of achievement goals are premature" (Harackiewicz et al. 1). They describe a theoretical model of intrinsic motivation that has guided their own work and provide recent experimental results, ultimately returning "to the college classroom environment and examining the consequences of goals for both performance and intrinsic motivation, offering a broader analysis of success in college courses" (Harackiewicz et al. 1).

Joseph Rychlak defends the use of logic as a teaching methodology in Logical Learning Theory: A Human Teleology and Its Empirical Support. Drawing heavily on classical philosophers such as Kant and Hegel as well as modern educational theorists, Rychlak's central premise is that post-secondary instruction lacks causation and suffers because students are not given a precise understanding of the foundational concepts underlying what they are taught. Rychlak advocates a re-emphasis on teleology in learning, beginning by "examining the differences between mechanical and logical processing and then moving on to a number of topics providing a clearer description of the latter" (Rychlak 92). He argues that many of the problems evident in today's students result from illogical thinking (Rychlak 282), and claims that "predication is a logical process of affirming, denying, or qualifying precedently broader patterns of meaning in sequacious extension to narrower or targeted patterns of meaning. The target is the point, aim, or end (telos) of the meaning-extension" (Rychlak 282).

Eunsook Hong and Roberta M. Milgram's Homework: Motivation and Learning Preference focuses on a new direction in homework research — one that "distinguishes between learning at school and at home, and focuses not on the homework itself but on the child doing the homework" — as it applies to students at the high school, community college, and university levels (Hong and Milgram 4). The book presents "the conceptual framework for our approach to the study of homework," providing background for understanding the research studies the authors conducted that led to the crystallization of their current conceptualization of homework (Hong and Milgram 4).

In Failing the Future, Annette Kolodny, a former university dean, addresses learning styles through the concept of "Cognitive Diversity" in Chapter 6. She contrasts cognitive diversity — differences between learning styles — with ethnic or racial diversity. She begins with the example of herself and her siblings, who, despite similar scores on proficiency tests, experienced different degrees of success in a traditional school setting. She finds it nearly ironic that such an important aspect of education — differences in the ability to learn among people who think differently — has been overlooked amid the push for racial and ethnic inclusion that has been ongoing since her undergraduate years. Drawing on Howard Gardner and others, Kolodny approaches education from multiple angles and incorporates multimedia in the classroom: "I now punctuate my lectures with visual materials — slides, film clips, graphic handouts — and put key words or outline concepts on the chalkboard. I assign all students to small-group projects in which they independently research a topic related to the course materials (a topic of their choosing) and then present their research to the entire class" (Kolodny 171).