By Professor Doom
“Come to the community college! We’re
cheap!”
--typical
promotion for a CC
Unlike
universities, community colleges can spring up very quickly. You don’t need
departments, you barely even need faculty. All you need are some administrators
to hire cheap adjuncts, cut-and-paste the curriculum used at a nearby
legitimate school…and you’re basically set.
This simple set up
does allow for cost-cutting, and students are quite justified in expecting, and
getting, lower prices for their courses and degrees. Of course, the savings
here are illusory: the coursework often doesn’t transfer (some
80% of students are victimized like this), and even whole degrees
from a community college can be of no value.
It doesn’t take
long to see the author here has thought about the kind of money being wasted on
community colleges:
…the next time there’s a public event to
celebrate the opening or expansion of a community college, it might make sense
to bring both: cut the giant check with the giant scissors to signify the money
being wasted.
I hope someday someone sits down and does
the math on these things, as the money spent is extraordinary. I don’t know for
sure, but it’s quite possible, if, in lieu of a CC, the community simply
erected a mosquito breeding ground and paid the associated health costs of
mosquito-borne diseases, that it would come out better off than the sheer waste
of a community college.
A big problem of
what happened to higher ed was our “leadership” turned into plunderers. Yes,
absolutely, there was a time in the not-too-distant past where community
college represented a real opportunity to move ahead in a cheaper and more
convenient way than going to university.
Our leaders
plundered that reputation, and many CCs are now
unhinged, with most of what goes on in the classrooms outright
fraudulent, and the courses which honestly admit what they cover are 90% high school level or lower, and
accreditation does nothing because they’re in on it. Meanwhile, the leaders
rake in the loot as reward for “growth” of the school.
While CC admin
say they’re doing a great job, the real world knows otherwise:
Employability is a huge problem for associate
degrees. The more problematic associate programs are for students who don’t plan
to end there; over 80 percent of students who enroll in associate programs
at community college intend to transfer to four-year institutions. Of course,
only 32 percent actually do within six years, and fewer than
15 percent earn a bachelor’s degree in that time frame. The trouble is
transfer. A GAO report from
last summer revealed that students who transfer lose 43 percent of credits
they’ve earned, which means even more time for life to get in the way.
Goodness, such
miserable percentages…how can any community think of a CC as a boon when the
facts say otherwise?
Another trick
CC’s use to make their communities think they’re a benefit are dual enrollment
programs, i.e., programs where the high school students get college credit by
going to the CC. Sounds great, right? How’s that work out?
Dual enrollment has the same fundamental
challenge as free community college: It may be free, but where does it get you?
Again, if the
credits don’t transfer, or at least transfer meaningfully, there’s no benefit
to teaching the high school kids with adjuncts instead of high school
teachers…well, beyond paying a bunch of CC admin $100,000 a year apiece to crow
about how great they are.
I’m close to
finishing up the first 50% of the brutal chemo that gives me a chance of
survival…I can’t help but draw parallels between the futility of fighting this
cancer for decades now and fighting the immense fraud of our typical community
college system.
Yes, I know,
someone will chirp in with “but CC really helped me out!” but much like with
that one guy who actually recovers from cancer…it’s something of a fluke, and
at some point we need to take a more realistic look at what we’re doing here,
to see if we yet have the will to fix things.
Somehow, I
suspect that time is not yet here.