School for All Through the Age of 20

Any high school senior in doubt about whether to seek a higher education, says Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz, faces an unflattering proposition: "The machine now has a high school education in the sense that it can do most jobs that a high school graduate can do, so machines will get the jobs because they work for less than a living wage. A person needs 14 years of education to compete with machines."

The trend toward more school after high school has this year reached the point where, for the first time, the span of education of the average U.S. jobholder tops twelve years, but automation and technology are rapidly making that level inadequate. At the same time, job competition is soaring swiftly: a million more 18-year-olds will enter the nation's labor market this year than last. Applications for college enrollment next fall are expected to leap by a dramatic 40% over 1964.

The convergence of these trends would strain the nation's system of higher education beyond capacity but for the remarkable growth of a uniquely American institution still so much in flux that educators cannot even agree on its name. Whether called the junior college, the two-year college or the community college, it is an institution that offers its students a three-track choice: preparation for transfer as a junior to a four-year college, general education for those who do not go on for more, and vocational training for such semiprofessional jobs as electronics technicians, engineering aides, laboratory assistants.

Taking the Heat Off. After years of trying to shake a too frequently justified image as only puffed-up high schools, the junior colleges have earned general acceptance as one of the most dynamic and useful assets of higher education. Last year 41 new two-year colleges, many boasting spectacular architecture and facilities (see following color pages), opened their doors, bringing the total to 719. Their enrollment has nearly doubled since 1950, is just over a million (1,043,000). One out of every five college students in the U.S. now goes to a junior college.

The pacesetter is California, which has 79 junior colleges and 152,000 full-time students. New York had 25 junior colleges in 1950, now has 69, placed so that 95% of all the people in the state are within 25 miles of one. Texas has 45, Pennsylvania 35, Florida 32. More new students enrolled in Illinois' 25 public junior colleges last year than in its public four-year colleges. When Florida's Miami-Dade Junior College opened in 1960, it had 1,300 students; today it has 14,000.

Obviously, that kind of growth takes much of the heat off the four-year colleges. California's master plan, for example, calls for its junior colleges to absorb 50,000 students by 1975 who otherwise would have qualified for entrance to the state university. But the statistics do not fully measure the true value of the junior colleges, which lies in their distinctive multiple functions.

"Democracy's College." In 1901, when University of Chicago President William Rainey Harper helped found Joliet Junior College, the nation's first public two-year college, he thought of it as a mere extension of high school: "Students should complete their basic education before coming to college." Now Edmund J. Gleazer Jr., executive director of the American Association of Junior Colleges, envisions "a new kind of college standing between the high school and the university--democracy's college of this century."

Part of the democratizing influence resides in the fact that most community colleges accept any resident high school graduate. The proximity of such a college can raise the percentage of a particular high school's graduates who enter college from 20% to 70%. A big attraction is low tuition (sometimes free, as in all of California's and some of New York's public junior colleges) and the relative cheapness of living at home. Particularly in an urban setting, these colleges are what Leland L. Medsker, vice chairman of the University of California's Center for the Study of Higher Education, calls the "opportunity college" for impoverished, ill-prepared youths and minority groups.

The community colleges are also attracting more affluent youths who want to avoid the huge, impersonal, lower-division classes on the big campuses, and many who may be able enough, but not mature enough, to compete at the university level. "On a university campus, a student sinks or swims," explains Dr. William G. Dwyer, president of the Massachusetts Board of Regional Community Colleges, "but on a community college campus, we try to teach him how to swim."

Funnel Function. This places unusual demands on the junior college, which often runs honors courses for gifted students at the same time that it offers remedial courses in English grammar and mathematics to salvage the lower-ranking high school graduate. And in its unique function as an educational funnel, it must counsel its students on which of the three broad paths each is best able to follow.

While the performance of specific junior colleges varies from dismal to superb, they are doing best in preparing their students for senior colleges. Medsker and California's Dr. Dorothy M. Knoell recently found that 75% to 80% of the junior college students who transfer succeed in earning their bachelor degrees, and that as a group, their senior college grades average only a shade lower than those of the students who spend all four years on the bigger campus.

Technical graduates perform well in their jobs, particularly when their training coincides with the needs of industries in the locality of the college. But Medsker contends that too many junior colleges tend to belittle their middle-track duty of providing a general education for the nontransfer, nontechnical student. Counseling is also often inept. The failure to give this type of student a meaningful broad education is a serious fault, since two-thirds of all students entering junior college profess an intention to continue to a senior college--but only one-third actually do.

This gap between intention and reality stems from a problem of social prestige: youngsters are under increasing pressure from parents and peers to enter the professions. Few will admit at the outset that they may not really be interested, are not bright enough, or lack the money for professional training. Probably more students should be steered into the technical track at the beginning. But too often the community college teacher is as prestige-conscious as his students, and tends to shun nonacademic assignments. "Psychologically, there's even more strain on the faculty than on the students," observes Lyman Glenny, associate director of the Illinois Board of Higher Education. "The faculty is more given to snobbishness among its liberal arts people."

Teachers Who Teach. The strain is so great that Medsker foresees a major decision within five years on whether the junior colleges will continue to perform both academic and vocational functions. He argues strongly for continuing the present system because a combined institution is more economical and avoids a "scarring" experience for the student who otherwise might flunk out of a four-year college, then enter a technical school. Flushed with their liberal arts success, some of the nation's junior colleges are already converting to regular four-year institutions --a trend that most educators earnestly deplore, since the community college then loses its own special functions, and too often becomes merely another second-rate four-year college.

Horace T. Morse, dean of the University of Minnesota's General College, sees the junior colleges as paradoxically good at teaching. The universities, he notes, "emphasize research to the exclusion of the teaching function. Undergraduates need the teaching of mature, seasoned and experienced major professors." The junior college--so long scoffed at as inferior (and still generally derided in private college-conscious New England)--often gets the inspiring classroom performers who love to teach and who consider paper-publishing strictly extracurricular. And while the universities have "fragmented and specialized" their liberal arts instruction, Dean Morse says, the field is wide open for the junior college to provide a much-needed "integration of learning" in more "pervasive" courses of instruction.

Federal Help. Despite the rapid growth of the community colleges, U.S. Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel finds that "they have not expanded at the dramatic rate needed for the increasing population of students-- we are just beginning." A considerably bigger boost will come from a 1963 education bill, just now being implemented, by which $232 million this year and $464 million next year will be granted to help build college facilities, 22% of it going to public junior colleges. While the bulk of financial support for such public colleges still comes from funds of local communities, state aid is generally increasing. At the same time, administration of these colleges is shifting away from the regular local school boards to independent college boards--a trend that provides a desirable separation from the high school.

Around 1900, in a historic shift of goals, U.S. education took to itself the task of sending every American through high school. The goal is already basically fulfilled, although almost one-third of all students still fail to graduate. Now, in a similar big lurch forward, the nation is raising its sights toward what the National Education Association calls "universal education for two years beyond high school." Reduced to its simplest terms, the deep significance of the junior college is that it changes the concept of the proper school-leaving age for the great bulk of Americans from 18 to 20.

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