I have to hand it to CC Daily; its article on the recent round of FIPSE grants had a killer closing sentence.
The recent round of grants from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education had focus areas in AI, accreditation and civil discourse. As CC Daily succinctly noted, “No community colleges received awards in the civil discourse category.”
None. Not one, out of over 1,000 institutions across the country. Zero.
I know it’s not for lack of applications.
They were well represented among the awards focused on workforce training but were shut out when it came to addressing larger social issues.
To be fair, FIPSE wasn’t alone in ignoring community colleges. As Karen Stout pointed out this weekend, The Chronicle’s quarter-century forecast drew on 50 experts from across higher education to talk about emerging trends; only one was from a community college. We have over 40 percent of the students in the country, but received 2 percent of the attention. Two is greater than zero, granted, but come on.
Who is at the table will affect what gets considered important. From the Chronicle group, for instance, you wouldn’t know that dual enrollment has quietly but steadily redefined the barriers between secondary and postsecondary education around the country and that the funding structures and academic policies in many states (cough Pennsylvania cough) haven’t kept up. That has consequences in myriad ways, ranging from faculty credential requirements to residency-based tuition to the impact on grad school applications for students who got B’s at age 14. Business models based on a previous reality struggle under the emerging one. That’s invisible to people at think tanks who focus on disciplining “the woke left,” but it’s real and it matters.
The civil discourse piece was just the latest in a long line of reminders that many policymakers see community colleges as workforce training centers and nothing else. Higher education, in their view, belongs to those who can afford it; our job is to produce skilled proles who will produce profit, do what they’re told and stay quiet.
Well, no. Community colleges are, among other things, colleges; they embody the belief that nothing is too aspirational for anybody, including people from lower-income backgrounds. Workforce training is a key component of the mission, but it isn’t the entire mission—and it shouldn’t be. Our students have just as much dignity, humanity and perspective as anyone else’s.
Last week I had the opportunity to see a new slate of officers of student government get sworn in. It’s always a happy occasion. Over the course of my career, though, I’ve seen the tone of those events shift. Twenty years ago, I heard students talk about making a difference. Ten years ago, I heard them talk about building their résumés. Now I hear them talk about making friends. That very human need for connection isn’t unique to four-year schools. Community colleges are, among other things, places where people from different backgrounds interact on equal footing, often for the first time. It’s where students learn to practice civil discourse on the ground. Interactions like those are crucial parts of educating a citizenry. That’s part of our mission, and I offer it without apology.
An old saying suggests that if you aren’t at the table, you’re on the menu. Community colleges deserve to be at the table. When we aren’t, the entire conversation is distorted.