By JOHN M. CRISP
Scripps Howard News ServiceEveryone who works at a community college -- as I do -- enjoys hearing this American institution mentioned in a speech -- as President Obama did during his State of the Union address the other week.
Obama pictured these low profile two-year institutions of higher education as important assets for a country that, with a diminishing manufacturing base and a struggling economy, needs to find ways to educate more of its citizens.
And community colleges are good places to make this happen. The people who would ordinarily go to college anyway will always find a way to get there. It's the ones who have traditionally been left out of higher education, generally the non-white and the poor, who benefit the most from having a two-year institution in their communities, and the communities benefit from providing a place for them to extend their educations.
Students have responded to this opportunity. In many states -- like Texas -- half of all students enrolled in public higher education are attending community colleges; in California, community college students outnumber university students by about 2 to 1.
Still, community colleges -- and their students -- get mixed messages. For example, ordinarily states fund community colleges at a much lower level than four-year public colleges and universities, largely because of the assumption that community college costs, by definition, are meant to be borne partially by tax dollars from local communities.
Often, however, community colleges find themselves in the middle of a tug-of-war between two equally reluctant contributors -- the state and the local community -- both that benefit from the existence of the colleges, but who would both prefer to let the other pay the bulk of the cost.
In Texas, for example, according to the State Comptroller, from 2002-07 state funding for university and four-year college students was cut by 20 percent in real dollars; for community colleges the cut was 35 percent. The shortfall was generally not absorbed by local communities.
At the same time, implicit in the mission of most community colleges is the notion of ready access, which implies affordable tuition and fees, often around a third of the cost at a public four-year college or university.
However, as state and local funding sources wither, community colleges are forced, reluctantly, to look to students for increased contributions to their educations if the colleges hope to maintain the same level of service.
Nevertheless, community colleges have generally been modest in their increases: again using Texas as a typical example, from 2002-06, in the face of diminishing state support, universities increased their tuition and fees by 61 percent; community colleges managed to hold the increase to 51 percent.
The shorthand version of all this? Much of the unsung, in-the-trenches, hard labor of higher education occurs in community colleges, but they enjoy less recognition and, more important, less public financial support than four-year colleges. Nevertheless, given their resources, they do a fine job of producing the educated workforce -- from welders to registered nurses -- that is essential to a healthy economy.
In addition, community colleges do a good job of identifying smart people who don't have the financial resources to attend a four-year college or university and of providing them not only with increased academic capacities but also with the vision to imagine that they can rise above the circumstances into which they were born. And many of them do.
In spite of all this, community colleges, stepchildren of higher education, have never managed to achieve much clout with legislators or with the public, partly because they generally lack the cachet of football and fraternities and partly because of their clientele, a segment of society that is used to getting less attention.
So it's refreshing to see President Obama cast a glance in the direction of community colleges. Let's hope that it translates into concrete public support for these essential institutions.
