Caryn McTighe Musil

Even in the twenty-first century, sex-based job segregation can seem as intractable as it was in the Victorian era, when the doctrine of “separate spheres” determined women’s life options in Europe and the United States. As community colleges have gained reputations for being women-dominated, female-friendly spaces, it’s not unreasonable to ask if a new “separate sphere” has arisen—and if, as popular thinking goes, that sphere will automatically suffer lost stature and depressed wages as it “tips” to majority female.  After all, a full professor at a community college makes only 60 percent of what a full professor makes at a doctoral institution (Hagedorn 2009).          

But is this wage differential a matter of veiled gender and sector discrimination now that community colleges have tipped? Or might there be more to the story?

The data we found when editing A Measure of Equity: Women’s Progress in Higher Education are irrefutable: Community colleges welcome more women students (first-generation women, women of color, older women), and employ more women faculty, women senior leaders, and  women presidents than four-year institutions. To specify only one statistic, 29 percent of presidents at community colleges are women, compared to 14 percent at doctoral institutions (Touchton 2008). Should data like these automatically discredit community colleges, as epicenters of “women’s work” have so often been discredited? Or might they suggest that four-year institutions could learn something from their Cinderella stepsisters?

Lessons to be Learned 

In this OCWW issue, Christine C. Iijima Hall refers to community colleges as “the Avis of higher education.” She suggests that just as Avis’s advertising campaigns stressed service over size, community colleges operate on “an alternative barometer,” valuing inclusion rather than exclusion, marking students’ potentials rather than stamping them “not qualified,” and providing practical education grounded in liberal education. She portrays these institutions as nestled in the heart of the community they serve instead of perched on the hill overlooking it.

I observed these characteristics firsthand when I visited a New England community college in the late 1980s, at the height of the canon wars. My host explained to me that battles over the literary canon were hardly ever fought at community colleges. “Our standard of excellence,” she explained, “is to use the literature that best reaches our students and ignites their intellectual engagement. That means we experiment, are open to including a range of authors on our syllabi, and spend our time identifying what makes good teaching rather than what might make good repartee in an intellectual tactical attack waged against professional colleagues.” 

I saw this student-centeredness at work when I sat on the board of the Women’s Community Education Project (WCEP) in Philadelphia many decades ago. The project had grown out of a Lutheran settlement program in the multiracial, working-class, and poverty-pocked Kensington neighborhood and would eventually become a satellite campus of the Community College of Philadelphia. Like so many community colleges, its raison d’être was to serve students. Its founders understood that women, already fighting expectations based on their gender, class, and culture, would not have registered for courses or stayed in school were the institution not smack in the middle of their neighborhood, offering child care, and promising some kind of eventual employment. WCEP provided all three essentials.

But the people at WCEP wanted even more for their students, so they made sure they offered more to them. Characteristic of community colleges, WCEP began where the students were, met them there fully, and showed them horizons beyond their imaginations. In giving students what they needed, WCEP affirmed their worth and promise. Instead of filtering students out of the institution, WCEP built them a home within it.

What My Doctoral Education Never Taught Me

I assumed my first teaching job, at Wright Junior College in Chicago (now Wright Community College), right after completing my master’s degree in English at the unseasoned age of twenty-three. Most of my students were older than I was, and I needed to find a way to reach them, so I learned to reject the lecture-only format of my own postsecondary educational training. In the process, I whetted a lifelong passion for student-centered learning and determined that I wanted to earn my doctorate so I could become “a real professor.” 

I am embarrassed to admit that when I went back for my PhD, it never occurred to me—nor was I ever encouraged by my professors—to consider returning to a community college setting, despite the fact that community colleges kindled my love affair with teaching. Doctoral institutions didn’t then, and by all accounts do not now, pay much attention to community colleges. But while no one was noticing them in their unlit corner of higher education, community colleges began to educate America.

They did so by being ahead of the curve in anticipating which populations had unmet educational needs. Their common profile soon became the norm at many four-year institutions. Community colleges educated returning adults (primarily women) long before continuing education programs became commonplace at four-year schools. They were the go-to place for first-generation students and racial minorities where they could gain access without the threat of Supreme Court decisions provoked to dismantle affirmative action and limit access at competitive four-year schools. New immigrant populations continue to flock to community colleges, whose graduation ceremonies typically use colorful flags to honor graduates’ countries of origin. In the process of serving these underserved students, community colleges became the most demographically globalized arena in higher education. They are working hard today to create a global curriculum to match their global student body.

Because community colleges’ “alternative barometers” measure success by placing students at the center, they have a lot to teach four-year institutions about how to close the “promise gap”: that is, how to reconcile inadequate college preparation with the potential for college-level achievement. In today’s educational environment, where 40 percent of students in four-year colleges and 53 percent overall take some remedial courses (Greater Expectations National Panel 2002), these are urgent lessons to learn.

Shining a Light on Community Colleges

Despite their successes, community colleges continue to face huge obstacles. Seventy percent of their faculty members are adjuncts (Hagedorn 2009). Already underresourced, they now face the steepest cuts in most state budgets. The Obama administration has lifted up community colleges as some of the most important gateways to opportunity and is directing significant federal funds to them. But a good proportion of these funds may be dedicated to supporting narrowly construed workforce development programs, implying that shovel-ready education is the funding criteria.

Community college students deserve more. Like all students, they need the kind of liberal education that undergirds specific job credentialing and will better prepare them for the unforeseen turns of the economic roller coaster. Narrowly defined vocational education programs have limited utility in an era marked by rapidly shifting markets that thrive on reinvention. The vast majority of community colleges recognize this and long ago rejected vocation-only training, moving toward offering broadly defined educations that accelerate transfer to four-year schools and better prepare graduates for long-term success. Current economic pressures should not be allowed to threaten that hard-won reconfiguration of mission.

Community colleges are much like “the little engine that could” from the well-known children’s story. In Watty Piper’s version, the little train that finally pulls the cargo up the hill—chanting the mantra “I think I can”—is described as “she,” in contrast to her unsuccessful but more formidable “he-train” rivals. Community colleges have constructed spaces where women can succeed and thrive, whether as presidents, senior leaders, faculty, or students. They are reminding us, as Sue Rosser demonstrated when she created “female-friendly pedagogies in science,” that what is good for women is typically good for the overall population. It is definitely time for four-year institutions to pay attention to community colleges, who thought they could—and did.

References

Greater Expectations National Panel. 2002. Greater expectations: A new vision for learning as a nation goes to college. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Hagedorn, L. S. 2009. Only a light jacket needed: The climate for community college faculty. On Campus with Women 38 (2).

Piper, W. 1930. The little engine that could. The Platt and Munk Co., Inc. www.childrensbooksonline.org/Little_Engine_that_Could/pages/05_The_Little_Engine_that_Could.htm (Accessed October 13, 2009).

Touchton, J. 2008. A measure of equity: Women’s progress in higher education. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.