“When you take classes at a community college like this one and you learn the skills that you need to get a job right away, that does not just benefit you; it benefits the company that ends up hiring and profiting from your skills. It makes the entire region stronger economically. It makes this country stronger economically.”Carey outlines at least three facets of a community college mission: “continuing education for adults, job training for local labor markets, and the first two years of a baccalaureate education.” Shining a spotlight on that mission and asking colleges to increase their productivity and flexibility isn’t a bad thing, but it has been accompanied by unprecedented resource cuts in state legislatures across the country. Calls for community colleges to do a better job are matched with slashed budgets, rather than with the investment and support that are needed for successful reform.
For decades, we’ve been working to expand access to higher education, while simultaneously trying to improve student success rates. Rising costs and reduced public investment are now threatening to reverse hard-won progress in higher education access and success. A new report by Gary Rhoades of the Center for the Future of Higher Education reveals that as enrollment caps expand and the number of educational programs narrow, many lower-income students and students of color are losing access points to postsecondary education. Rhoades explains:
“In a complicated ‘cascade effect,’ higher tuition and enrollment limitations at four-year institutions have pushed middle-class and upper middle-class students toward community colleges. This, in turn, increases competition for seats in community college classrooms at a time when funding for community colleges is being slashed and fees are increasing. As community colleges draw more affluent students, opportunity is being rationed and lower-income students (many of whom are students of color) are being denied access to higher education.”Pushing low-income students out of the educational pipeline can only further entrench an increasingly immobile class system. A New York Times column from last month assembled some alarming data on the relationship between education and inequality. In 1970, 6.2 percent of students from low-income families attained a bachelor’s degree by the age of 24, compared to 40.2 percent of students from high-income families. By 2009, 82.4 of students from high-income families had completed a bachelor’s by age 24, but only 8.3 percent of students from low-income families were able to do so. Given that workers with a bachelor’s degree earn 82.8 percent more annually than workers with only a high school diploma, low-income youth are increasingly fated to remain low-income for their entire lives.
Remember, the Truman Commission warned us about this in 1947. When education is “prerequisite to occupational and social advance,” but is available only to the affluent, it will “become the means, not of eliminating race and class distinctions, but of deepening and solidifying them.”
With just over half of all entering community college students requiring developmental education courses, dev ed remains a main point of access to higher education. As we continue our push to improve the outcomes for students in these programs, we must not allow these programs to be rationed or slashed. Well-structured reforms can lead developmental education programs to accomplish what they are intended to do: help students, regardless of background and level of preparation, obtain a credential or degree and put them on the path to economic stability. As Carey explains, “opening the doors of higher education to ever more Americans is a perpetually unfinished project. But it’s a tragedy that we are simply choosing to watch some of those doors swing shut.”
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