Community Colleges: Educate More With Less

Community colleges are the Rodney Dangerfields of American higher education: They get little respect – even though they educate about half of the nation's college students.

Now community colleges are being asked to play a bigger role in retraining the workforce, educating low-income students and preparing students for four-year institutions. But they're being asked to do it with fewer resources and rising competition from for-profit colleges.

Gail Mellow, the president of New York's LaGuardia Community College, Rick Mattoon, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and Cassius Johnson, education policy director for the nonprofit Jobs of the Future, participated in Friday's EWA seminar panel looking at the challenges facing community colleges and what they need to help the country meet its educational goals.

Mellow said the recession has created record demand for classes at community colleges like LaGuardia, where two-thirds of the school's 50,000 students are from other countries. But the college in Queens doesn't have the resources to meet that demand.

“For the first time in 40 years, we closed our doors,” she said. “We simply could not put more people in.”

Meanwhile, for-profit colleges such as DeVry University and the University of Phoenix are siphoning off federal money that could go to bolster public colleges like LaGuardia. For-profits educate 10 percent of the nation's college students but receive 20 percent of federal student aid and report the highest default rates on student loans, Mellow said.

The panelists agreed the federal government rethink its approach to funding community colleges and measuring their progress. Right now, there isn't a good system for tracking students' academic careers or judging how well community colleges – as well as other institutions of higher education - are doing their jobs.

Mattoon, the Federal Reserve economist, said that community colleges' biggest strength is that they're closely tied to the regional economy and can quickly respond to the needs of local employers. He's suspicious of the federal government getting too involved in regulating the schools.

Johnson said the federal government should be careful not to create policies that cause community colleges to turn away low-income, underprepared or part-time students because they may drag down an institution's numbers.