Celebrate Educational Opportunity This Graduation

Community and Technical Colleges in the 1960’s and 70’s were often viewed as places created by legislatures to train technicians and service workers for local business and feed bright learners to local four year universities.

Most learners were the first in their families to attend college.  Open admissions policies were trumpeted as the great democratizer for minority groups, women and people who scraped through high school.  But taxpayers balked at paying for frills like dorms, athletics and intellectual gibberish.  Two years. Learn a skill.  Go to work.

Four year institutions, which might have felt threatened by the competition if they had seen the future, liked the idea that two year schools would teach boring introductory courses for them and sift through the hordes for those worthy of transfer.

In this shadow academic world, professors taught many hours of basic classes, and were recognized by their university peers as submissive, second-class citizens in second-class institutions.  Sadly, many who worked and studied in our two-year college institutions also believed that.

Then the world changed.  Two-year schools more than doubled in number in the 1970’s and the U.S. two-year college model was exported around the world.

Today, the educational philosophy of two-year colleges reflects a split consciousness between careers and ideas and between security and esteem.  This odd mixture is now a model for business and other non-educational organizations in our society.

Today, about half of all four year university undergraduates have attended two-year colleges, many claiming their education there was the best they ever received. 

Today, two-year colleges have more excellent learners than ever; they seek us out now.  More importantly, we celebrate the hard cases; they stretch our hearts. 

Today, we are the tension between the commercial and intellectual, the community and the academy, between how and why.  We more truly reflect our culture and society than do institutions with screened, more homogeneous populations.

Each day, we help to that first rung on the ladder of success, a few who were supposed to fail.  What we have done, that few anticipated, was to truly care about learners that others discounted.  This is not submission, but fulfillment.