Today, President Obama unveiled his newest counting odyssey—to make America competitive by producing “5 million more” community college graduates by 2020. (Presumably, he was ready for a new challenge now that Uncle Sam has done such a bang-up job creating those 3.5 million new jobs).
The president proposes spending $12 billion over the next decade to boost graduation rates, improve facilities, and develop new technology. Three-quarters of the money will support an “access and completion” fund intended to boost completion rates. Another $2.5 billion is to pay for renovations to community colleges, which administration officials have indicated are outdated, short on space, and ill-equipped to handle modern technology.
In fact, the administration has already hinted that attention to reform is secondary. In a conference call yesterday, Martha Kanter, Obama’s undersecretary of education (and a lifelong community college bureaucrat), said the administration is “very concerned about providing access and opportunity during this terrible fiscal climate.” That sounds dishearteningly similar to how Kanter’s boss, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, talks about its $110 billion in education stimulus, where the “reform” elements have been hard to find and which has thus far primarily helped states and districts forestall tough choices. Indeed, the bulk of the money in the community college proposal serves not to encourage efforts to promote rethinking, but to help them process more bodies.
The most surprising thing about Obama’s proposal may be its bland confidence in the ability of community colleges to deliver results and spend the money well. There is no hint that the rickety architecture of these systems, built half a century ago, may not provide the optimal platform for 21st-century job training.
After all, community colleges maintain networks of campuses opened when the Internet was a science fiction conceit, when distance learning entailed mail correspondence, and when private providers like the University of Phoenix were a curiosity. These are teaching institutions that prefer to pay a premium to hire Ph.D.’s—even though the Ph.D. is a research degree that doesn’t have much to do with community college instruction.
Instead of fresh thinking or “tough choices,” the president appears set on pumping more dollars into outmoded systems so that they can give credentials of uncertain value to more students. Are community colleges up to the challenges they face? Are there better ways to support essential training and instruction? These are questions the president leaves untouched—meaning that the billions to produce “5 million more” graduates is less likely to prove a blueprint for transformation than a subsidy of the status quo.