The Institutionalization of Community Colleges in the United States
This is the Preface to my book, Gateway to Opportunity? A History of the Community College in the United States, which was published in 2011.
“Can an institution which was ‘born subordinate’ as the lower-level holding pen for the university overcome its own legacy and develop into a truly meritocratic and democratizing institution? ”
At the dawn of the 21st century some 30 percent of American adults have earned a bachelors degree or higher. This is the highest percentage of Americans earning a higher education in this country’s history; however, higher education is still not equally available for all American citizens and the returns to a college credential still brings differential earnings based on ethnicity, sex, and class. Access to institutions of higher education and the knowledge and economic returns of a college education is not for everyone. It continues to be restricted to a minority of the American population, although this educated minority has grown significantly over the past century.[i]
It took the United States almost two centuries to grant all citizens full political rights, but at the start of the 21st century not all citizens have equal access to the political process, nor equal claim on their political representatives. Centuries of social and political struggle have enabled a large minority of American citizens to gain a measure of economic, educational, and political success, but the sacred principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence have yet to become a reality for all citizens, let alone the millions of immigrants and foreigners living in this country: not all Americans are living free and equal in their pursuit of happiness, nor is the government (which was supposedly instituted by and for the people) equally responsive or just in protecting the rights and safety all citizens.[ii]
It is questionable whether conditions will improve for the majority of Americans in the 21st century, especially given the global economic collapse of 2008-2010. Will most citizens have increased access to and success in higher education? Will most citizens have increased access to and participation in the political process? Will most citizens experience a more just and equitable distribution of income? Will most citizens be able to rely upon quality social services and safety nets, like public schooling, affordable health care, and retirement benefits? And how much access will immigrants have to participate in American society, higher education, and the political process?
Peter Drucker, an influential business scholar, predicted in the 1990s that a new elite class of “knowledge workers” would form. With higher education credentials and specialized technological skills, these knowledge workers would one day foment a “new class conflict” in America. According to Drucker, this new socio-political order would not only be inevitable, but also “right and proper” because those citizens privileged enough to become educated deserved to rule. Drucker’s message was clear: American citizens must either scramble up the competitive ladder of success by earning college degrees and gaining technology oriented skills, or they shall rightfully fall beneath a new class of technocratic elites.[iii] Drucker’s version of the American dream reformulates what was once a mythic hope, and turns the ideology of Americanism into a dystopic threat: better yourself or else! For those citizens of the United States who hold sacred the democratic principles outlined in The Declaration of Independence, this dark and foreboding prophecy betrays the very hope this nation supposedly embodies. But in order to make an accurate assessment of future social, educational, and political possibilities, the past must be revisited and understood in order to contextualize the complexity of the present.
But complex understandings of history rarely inform public policy in this country. Even when policy makers are aware of history, rarely does historical knowledge impact the political process through which public policy is fought over, negotiated, and compromised. As Deborah Stone has argued, the policy making process is about power and “the struggle over ideas,” as politicians rhetorically dance in the many political fires of competing interests. Policy makers seek to “control interpretations” by framing, or spinning, present problems under the rhetorical guise of what is legitimate, what is feasible, or what is good. But rarely do policy makers consider the historical complexity of how the past might inform the present. Under constricted political conditions, history is valued to the extent that it can be fashioned into useful political tools. In most instances this amounts to the denial of history and the creation of “myth” – policy history almost always becomes a quasi-fictional “political narrative” shaped by the powerful to legitimate their power and, thereby, secure social, political, and economic resources.[iv]
Higher education policy in the U.S. rests on the foundational myth of meritocracy and equal access to higher education, but neither narrative has much concrete historical validity. A look at the history of higher education in the U.S. and the changing dynamics of student access confirms this. History reveals some expansion of access and equity in terms of increasing amounts of post-secondary education for a broader swath of Americans, but inequality remains constant. Traditionally underserved populations, like the economically disadvantaged and non-white ethnic/racial minorities, still struggle to achieve equality of opportunity in American society and its institutions of higher education. Financial returns for postsecondary degrees are still lower for women and non-white minorities because regional labor markets continue to perpetuate a long history of institutionalized discrimination. As the U.S. moves into a post-industrial “knowledge economy” in a highly globalized world, the issue of student access to higher education has become one of the most pressing political problems for those concerned with both socio-political equity and economic development. The educational and economic success of the student and the economic development of the nation have become intertwined political issues. Can the U.S. keep its dominant economic position in the highly competitive world economy with only 30% of the American population holding bachelor’s degrees? If the majority of U.S. citizens lack access to higher education, can the U.S. live up to its democratic principles and preserve its political institutions?
At the center of these questions is the policy issue of access to higher education. Who has access to what forms of higher education at what cost? For most Americans, access is restricted to the open-access, low-cost American community college. This institution enrolls around half of all first-time freshmen in the U.S. Most students who enroll in community colleges have the goal of transferring to a four-year college or university in order to earn a bachelors degree, but the vast majority of these students will never earn any degree. Community colleges have been praised for almost a century as an efficient way to handle the vast surge of Americans looking for access to higher education and as an economical path for social mobility. However, it is unclear if this institution actually helps students, let alone how it might help. Scholars have never been able to completely agree on the mission of the community college and, therefore, have never been able to adequately determine what it is the community college is supposed to do, not to mention how it is supposed to do it.
The junior college, later renamed the community college in the 1960s and 1970s, was originally designed to limit access to higher education in the name of social efficiency. But students and local communities utilized the democratic rhetoric of Americanism and the promised made by junior college leaders to refashion this institution as a tool for increased social mobility, community organization, and regional economic development. Thus, this institution, much like the country itself, was born of contradictions and continues to be an enigma. These contradictions have been sewn into the very fabric of what has become a celebrated, yet beleaguered, institution of higher education. This institution has promised for over a century to be the foundation of increased access to college and to the middle-class, as well as a host of other lofty goals. But what has this institution actually done? Unraveling the institutional complexity and contradiction of the community college will be the central focus of this historical study. At the heart of this study is the policy issue of access to higher education: Does the community college offer increased access to higher education and social mobility, or is this “semi-higher” institution just a diversion keeping the economically disadvantaged and ethnic minorities from realizing the American Dream?
But a word of warning: Even at the end of this study the reader will find no clear answers to these questions. However, the broad trends of history will reveal some hope that these questions might be more definitely answered in the near future.
What is an Institution?
This study is an analysis of the creation, institutionalization, and politicized debate over the American community college. It is a study of an unique American institution, which developed over the course of the twentieth century. But in order to understand the community college as an institution, we need to understand the basic theory of social institutions. The study of social institutions reaches back to the 19th century, deriving its origins within the disciplines of history and sociology. Given the concept’s long life, this term’s meaning has greatly varied in usage and definition. However, there does seem to be an analytical core to this word: institutions are the “self-evident” and “taken for granted” social or organizational structures found within a particular human society. Institutions as social structures can be described as the “organized, established, procedure(s)” that structure a whole society or particular parts of society. Institutions can also be described as the “constituent rules” of a society or part of society. The early historical-sociologists, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber, each studied different constituting rule systems and social structures of Western society so as to understand the underlying logics that established the social, political, economic, and religious rules, organizations, procedures, rituals, and ideas that ordered the modern Western world. Such institutions included: capitalism, Christianity, property, individualism, the state, bureaucracy, rationality, and education.
This study focuses specifically on the institution of the American junior college, which later became the community college. This study seeks to uncover the historically conditioned rules, procedures, rituals, and ideas that have ordered and defined a particular type of educational structure. Institutions are human creations, so to study institutions is to study the actions, ideas, and organizations of human beings. At the core of this study are those individuals, organizations, ideas, and other social phenomenon that have contributed to defining the junior/community college’s educational missions and have enabled or constrained this institution from enacting those missions: What have been the purposes of the junior/community college? Who conceptualized these purposes and why? How has this institution been able to achieve these purposes? How have these issues changed over time?
Of course embedded in these questions are unexamined political assumptions: Who has the right or power to define this institution’s mission? Who has the responsibility for supporting and enacting its roles? And whose values are to be used to judge this institution?
But there are also deeper assumptions embedded within all scholarly research and public policy. The taken for granted rationality of modernity claims that human individuals have enough knowledge and power to control society, the people in that society, and the institutions that define and structure that society. But this hypothesis continues to be unproven, and important questions remain unanswered: how rational are human beings? How much do human beings control their psychological, social, and physical environments? Do human beings have the power to control and change social institutions?[v] Academic scholarship on institutions has only begun to ask these questions, unearthing the grounding assumptions of modern rationality.
We will only briefly discuss these issues of rationality and social institutions here in this preface. Examining these important assumptions would take a sustained, interdisciplinary study that far exceeds the more limited parameters of this book, narrowly focused as it is on the institutionalization of the community college. However, it is important to discuss these issues because our understanding of human institutions, historical change, and the future of the community college in particular, rests upon our assumptions of individual rationality, the power of human agency, and the capacity for social change.
The concept of social institutions hurdles a social-scientific dualism that has been unresolved for the past century. At the center of the social sciences has been a central debate over how societies and social institutions are constituted and how they change. Societies and social institution can be seen, on the one hand, as the “product of human design” and the “outcome of purposive” human action, but they can also be seen as the “result of human activity,” but “not necessarily the product of conscious design.” One of the paradigmatic examples of this dualism is language. Human beings are born speaking a particular language with pre-defined words and a pre-designed grammar; however, individual human beings are also able to adopt new languages, create new words, and change the existing definition of words or grammatical structures. But is any individual or group of individuals in conscious control of any particular language? The obvious answer is no, but each individual has some measure of effect; however, just how much effect is subject to debate. For the past quarter century or so, scholars have rejected the idea that societies, institutions, and organizations can be reduced to the rational decisions of individuals. The new theory of institutions focuses on larger units of analysis, like social groups and organizations “that cannot be reduced to aggregations or direct consequences of individual’s attributes or motives.” Individuals do constitute and perpetuate social structures and institutions, but they do so only half aware, and not as completely or as freely as they often imagine.[vi]
The new institutional theory has focused mainly on how social organizations have been the locus of “institutionalization,” which is the formation and perpetuation of social institutions. While groups of human beings create and sustain social organizations, these organizations develop through time into structures that resist individual human control. Organizations also take on a life of their own that sometimes defies the intentions of those human beings “in charge” of directing the organization. While institutions can sometimes begin with the rational planning of individuals, the preservation and stability of institutions through path dependent processes is often predicated on ritualized routines, social conventions, norms, common sense, and myths. Once an institution becomes “institutionalized,” the social structure perpetuates a “stickiness” that makes the structure “resistant” to change. Individual human actors, thereby, become enveloped and controlled by the organization’s self-reinforcing social norms, rules, and explanatory myths, which are solidified through positive feedback mechanisms that transcend any particular human individual. These organizational phenomena, thereby, shape individual human perception, constrain individual agency, and constitute individual action. As one institutional theorist has argued, all human “actors and their interests are institutionally constructed.” To a certain extent humans do create institutions and organizations, but more immediately over the course of history, institutions and organizations create us! Many millions of individuals have consciously shaped the English language, but as a child I was constituted as an English speaking person without my knowledge or consent. It is perhaps more accurate to say that English allowed for the creation of my individuality than it is to say that I have shaped the institution of English.[vii]
But if all human thought and action is constituted by previously existing institutions, do human beings really have any freedom to shape their lives or change society? This is actually a very hard question to answer and it remains at the center of longstanding debates. Durkheim and Parsons seemed to solidify a sociology that left no room for individual volition. Marx stressed human control, but seemed to put agency in the hands of groups, not individuals. Weber discussed the possibility of individual agency, especially for charismatic leaders, but he emphasized how human volition was always “caged” by institutions and social organizations. Michel Foucault conceptualized human beings as almost enslaved by the various modern institutions of prisons, schools, and professions.[viii]
Some recent neo-institutional theorists have left open the possibility of individual rationality and freedom. Human agency sometimes defined as the mediation, manipulation, and sometimes modification of existing institutions. Human beings can also refuse institutionalized norms and procedures, thereby, highlighting another type of agency. Humans can also exploit contradictions between different institutional structures, and use one institution to modify another. Ronald L. Jepperson argues that there can be “degrees of institutionalization” as well as institutional “contradictions” with environmental conditions. This means that certain institutions can be “relative[ly] vulnerab[le] to social intervention” at particular historical junctures. Jepperson is one of the few institutional analysts who conceptualizes a theory of human action and institutional change, which allows for “deinstitutionalization” and “reinstitutionalization.” But Jepperson does not validate rational choice theories of individual agency. He argues instead that “actors cannot be represented as foundational elements of social structure” because their identity and “interests are highly institutional in their origins.” However, this position does not disavow institutionally mediated individual choice and action. As Walter W. Powell has argued, “individual preferences and choices cannot be understood apart from the larger cultural setting and historical period in which they are embedded,” but individual actors have some freedom within institutional environments to “use institutionalized rules and accounts to further their own ends.” Roger Friedland and Robert R. Alford argue that “the meaning and relevance of symbols may be contested, even as they are shared.” “Constraints,” Powell paradoxically argued in one essay, “open up possibilities at the same time as they restrict or deny others.”[ix]
The anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner has developed a more comprehensive theory of human agency that allows individuals more power to consciously participate in and, thereby, shape and modify institutions. She defines the individual agent as in a “relationship” with social structures. This relationship can be “transformative” on both parties: each acts and shapes the other. While the individual is enveloped by social structures, there is a “politics of agency,” where individual actors can become “differentially empowered” within the layered “web of relations” that make up the constraints of culture. Individuals can act through a process of reflexivity, resistance, and bricolage. Humans use an awareness of subjectivity and negotiate their acceptance and refusal of the status quo. Through this process, humans can re-create existing social structures by reforming traditional practices and also by introducing novel practices. Ortner conceptualized the process of agency as the playing of “serious games,” utilizing a metaphor originally deployed by Wittgenstein. She argued forcefully that existing cultural structures and social reproduction is “never total, always imperfect, and vulnerable,” which constantly leaves open the possibility of “social transformation” to those who dare to act out against the status quo.[x]
Traditionally, social scientists have assumed an inflated notion of rationality, agency, and control for human individuals. Neo-institutional theory has sought to correct these fallacies. But traditional social science has also assumed these same qualities for social organizations as well: societies, political states, and economic corporations. Structural functionalist sociologists, using classical organizational theories, often conceptualized modern society as a highly structured and rationalized field populated by various bureaucratic organizations, with specific and clearly defined social functions. It was assumed that social organizations were driven by rationalized processes, efficient technologies, and controlling managers. Organizations were seen as a totalizing social structure that “use[d] human beings to perform organizational tasks.” Organizations were also seen as insulated structures, which were clearly differentiated and autonomous from the larger society.[xi]
Later organizational theorists, still embracing a structural functionalism, pointed out how organizations were only quasi-rational and largely constrained by other social structures. These new organizational theorists also pointed out that the functions of an organization were often “loosely coupled” or in “conflict” with its actual operations. Organizational actors could be “limited in their knowledge and in their capacities,” and thus, merely “’subjectively’ rational,” which meant that individuals, even corporate managers, were not in complete control of themselves, let alone their organizations.[xii] This led some organizational theorists to describe social organizations as “anarchical,” because nobody seemed to be in complete control, but yet the organization did seem to function because it was not falling apart. Organizations also came to be seen not as isolated entities, but as connected to and influenced by other organizations and larger social structures, like the state or the regional economy.[xiii]
The new institutionalism took this quasi-rational and constrained line of analysis even further. New research has shown that social organizations are more often structured by “the myths of their institutional environments” then they are by the functional “demands of their work activities.” In fact, the supposedly functional technology of modern organizations in the post-industrial West have come to be seen as not very functional and not very efficient. Instead of an objective system of rationality, organizations are now seen to be ordered by “myths” of rationality that “codify” various “institutional rules” based on the “authoritative” normative design and isomorphic power of “rationalized bureaucracies.” Thus, neo institutional theorists argue that organizations are driven by social “legitimacy” and “survival” within an “institutional environment,” instead of rationality and productivity, especially organizations like schools and churches, which operate in highly “institutional environments.” Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell have argued, “Organizations compete not just for resources and customers, but for political power and institutional legitimacy, for social as well as economic fitness.” Under such circumstances, managers do not necessarily control production or efficiency, but instead are often “ceremonial” figures who preside over a “loosely coupled” organization driven by the assumption that “everyone is acting in good faith.”[xiv]
The notion of rationality and control was also assumed to play a large role in the transmission of social structures and social ideologies. Many traditional institutional studies have generally explained how “social knowledge” becomes institutionalized, thereby becoming “part of objective reality,” and then transmitted “directly” as an object. But such accounts seem to de-legitimize and overly reify ideas in a Marxian type base/superstructure duality, whereby, ideas seem to have value only as objective structures. Instead, Friedland and Alford argue, “Institutions must be reconceptualized as simultaneously material and ideal”: institutions are not only material practices or objects that can be reproduced, but they are also “symbolic systems, ways of ordering reality, and thereby rendering experience of time and space meaningful.”[xv]
The new institutionalism has developed this more complex theory of ideology from combining the insights of cultural anthropology and the sociology of knowledge. An ideology is a cultural system, whereby, people share “common ideological orientations,” a notion of “common sense,” and a shared, “taken for granted” understanding of “the social reality of everyday life.” As the cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict argued in the early 20th century, “No man [sic] ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.” But many institutional researchers seem to fall into the totalizing trap of a homogenized cultural anthropology, whereby, power and socio-political conflict is ignored in favor of a monolithic, functional cultural system of common sense. Ortner is one of the few theorists who acknowledges the power of structural constraints, but still allows for the possibility of a limited form of human agency.[xvi]
Some institutional researchers address issues of power and allow for competing or conflicting institutional structures within a single society, but more could be done to address issues of power, conflict, and political struggle within the conceptual field of “culture.”[xvii] Neo-institutional theory needs to revise current anthropological conceptions of ideology to incorporate more of the neo-Marxist focus on politics because many institutions are mythologized in order to “justify the exercise of power” and to “sustain relations of domination.” The neo-Marxist focus on individual agency, praxis, and “liberation” from oppressive social structures should also be incorporated into the study of institutions and institutional change.[xviii] Institutions can embody contradictions or conflicts. Ideologies can be contested. Power can reside not only in the actions of individuals, but within the very structure of institutions. And actors can use the presence of multiple institutions, multiple ideologies, or institutional contradictions and conflict to exploit competing “institutional logics” as a “basis for resistance.” John L. Campbell offers a compelling “typology of ideas” for understanding not only how ideas embody institutional structure, but also how institutionalized ideas can be used by actors in political debates over public policy.[xix]
Recent scholarship has also approached organizations and institutions as social structures “embedded” within an “organizational ecology,” whereby a series of “mutual interactions” between interdependent social groups shape the evolution and survival of organizations, organizational forms, and institutionalized practices and norms.[xx] Organizations are connected to and influenced by a host of social sectors, including federal nations, geographical regions, states, sub-states, local governments, organizations, and social groups, like the family.[xxi] Within each sector there are diverse “clusters of norms” and organizational typologies that institutionally define and constrain individual and organizational actors, and thereby, a host of institutional norms and forms are continually reified and perpetuated across a diversely populated social and organizational landscape, which slowly changes through time. Because societies are characterized by such diversity of social sectors, each with their own institutions and norms, different institutions can be “potentially contradictory,” which can allow for social conflict and social change through time as institutions develop in relation with the institutional and physical environment.[xxii] However, it is still unclear how institutions “change” and what change actually means. Theorizing the nature and extent of institutional change is an unresolved issue. Institutions are seen as stable social structures outside the control of rational agents which seem to slowly adapt to internal and environmental conditions through an incremental process, although there is some evidence to suggest that rapid changes can occur in short periods due to environmental shocks.[xxiii]
The Institutionalization of Junior Colleges and Community Colleges
Little attention has been paid to the process and degree of institutionalization within complex ecological and temporal social networks. How are particular institutions socially constructed and reproduced in specific historical and geographical contexts? Does the power and stability of particular institutions fluctuate in relation to specific historical and geographical contexts? Powell has argued that “institutionalization is always a matter of degree, in part because it is a history-dependent process.”[xxiv] It has become clear that institutions do change in relation to their environments and, thus, scholars who study institutions must be aware of the changing dynamics of historical circumstances and how socio-political and economic environments affect the structure, purpose, and power of existing institutions.
There have been only four historical-sociological case studies focused on the institutionalization of community colleges in the United States,[xxv] although most of these studies have not directly used the theory of institutions as an analytical framework. These studies have mostly investigated the early formative stages of junior/community colleges in the early 20th century. Conceptually, these studies trace “communities of practice” or “social movements” that have become ritualized, institutionalized, reproduced, and contested through time, but most of these studies do not follow the junior/community college from its origins to the 21st century, nor have many of these studies focused on how this institution has changed in relation to external socio-political environments.[xxvi] Only Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel have attempted to trace the institutionalization of the community college into the later half of the 20th century; however, their study only went so far as the 1970s and 80s, and their focus on vocationalism precluded a larger analysis of the contested institutionalization of the community college in relation to other historical trends in the U.S., like racial segregation and the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights movement, or the late twentieth century movement for educational standards and institutional evaluation. There is also a deeper methodological issue that has not been fully explored: the extent to which university scholars have exercised (and continue to exercise) a primary power over defining, legitimizing, and reforming both institutional discourse and practice. Thus, the scholarly literature surrounding the junior/community college (and the actual impact this literature has had on practice) is perhaps the most revealing aspect of the public phenomenon of this institution, and thereby, the most important source for a history of the institutionalization process.
The American junior college turned community college will be used in this book as a case study for understanding the formation and historical evolution of a particular institution of higher education. This case study draws upon the seminal work of Brint and Karabel, and it seeks to extend their basic thesis, with modifications, into the 21st century. This study will seek to address the larger issues of increased access to higher education and social mobility, while also addressing the more particular issue of the institutional purposes and social role of the junior/community college. As already mentioned, this study will focus on the political assumptions about who has the right or power to define this institution’s mission, who is responsible for enacting its roles, and how this institution is supposed to be valued and judged. And this study will also leave open the much larger and more theoretical issue of whether or not particular human actors or groups have been able to control the contours of this institution.
The basic narrative of the institutionalization of the junior college qua community college is one of social control and organizational anarchy. While this institution was formed with clear purposes in mind, it became apparent early on that this institution was not operating as planned, nor was it efficient at achieving its stated missions. Between 1920 and 1940 junior college leaders went through an intense identity crisis as they debated both the purpose of junior colleges and the placement of these institutions between secondary and postsecondary education systems. Where junior colleges extended secondary schools or separate “junior” colleges? Were junior colleges primarily supposed to prepare academically talented students for entry into a 4-year university or were they also supposed to train less talented vocationally-oriented students for local labor markets? And were junior colleges only responsive to universities and labor markets by training and credentialing post-secondary students, or was there also supposed to be responsiveness to local community needs, which might include non-credentialing purposes, like literacy classes, citizenship classes, and general community education classes? Arguably a measure of consensus over these questions among junior college leaders, federal and state educational authorities, and the general public did not congeal until the publication of the President’s Commission on Higher Education report in 1947.
In 1947 Higher Education for American Democracy seemed to not only legitimate junior colleges by arguing that half of the American population could benefit from two years of postsecondary schooling, but the report also seemed to sanction a broad comprehensive mission for these institutions by suggesting a new name, and thereby, a new institutional identity: the Community College. Up until the publication of this report, junior college leaders had debated whether the primary function of the institution was to keep its traditional mission as a conduit for student transfers to 4-year universities, or whether it should adopt new missions like offering terminal occupational and semiprofessional programs. Most junior college leaders lent towards the latter of these two options because it would increase the legitimacy of the institution within already established systems of secondary and postsecondary education. There were also calls for expanding the institutional mission to incorporate adult education, like literacy and citizenship classes, and also programs that would meet diverse local needs.
However, not everyone at the time saw the community college in such lofty, democratic, and egalitarian terms. From the start, university officials promoted junior colleges because of their value as a “screening service” to divert many postsecondary students away from the selective and resource limited universities. State legislators also promoted junior colleges as a less expensive form of higher education for the masses that would allow for cost-effective means to democratize access to higher education, while also creating an institution that would filter out the unprepared or disadvantaged majority from actually earning a college degree. The University of California, Berkeley sociologist Burton R. Clark famously called this the “cooling out” process.[xxvii]
Clark’s thesis was famously extended into an internationally acclaimed book published in 1989, Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel’s The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 1900 – 1985. Brint and Karabel argued that the educational system in the U.S. has always been a “hierarchically differentiated” system that has been structurally connected to the labor market and class structure. But the American educational system has also been relatively “open” and democratic, especially in the 20th century, and most Americans have seen it as a “ladder of opportunity” and “upward mobility.” The institution of community colleges offered an “egalitarian promise,” but at the same time it also reflected the “constraints” of the capitalist economic system in which it was embedded. Part of the reality of that system is an optimistic society that generates more “ambition” than its can structurally satisfy, which creates a need for an elaborate and often “hidden” tracking system to channel students into occupationally appropriate avenues largely based on their socio-economic origins.[xxviii]
From its beginnings the community college has had the “contradictory” function of opening higher education to larger numbers of students from all socio-economic backgrounds while at the same time operating within a “highly stratified” economic and educational system, which created a need to “select and sort students.” This “cooling-out function” (or “the diversion effect”) caused ever increasing numbers of lower SES students in higher education to be diverted into more “modest positions” at the lower end of the labor market. As Burton Clark once admitted, “for large numbers failure is inevitable and structured.” Brint and Karabel argued that not only do community colleges help “transmit inequalities” through their sorting function, but they also “contribute to the legitimization of these inequalities” by upholding meritocratic rhetoric that often blames the victim for failing to succeed in an structurally rigged class-system: “The very real contribution that the community college has made to the expansion of opportunities for some individuals does not, however, mean that its aggregate effect has been a democratizing one. On the contrary, the two-year institution has accentuated rather than reduced existing patterns of social inequality.”[xxix]
The majority of students who enrolled in junior colleges during the first half of the 20th century were middle class high school graduates looking to earn their bachelor’s degree and enter a white collar profession. Working class high school students either dropped out of high school early to get a job, or they waited until earning their high school diploma to enter the work force. Very few working class students entered junior colleges. However, the point of Brint and Karabel remains substantial: junior college leaders in conjunction with community business leaders actively tried to manipulate junior college student aspirations by engineering more and more occupationally oriented terminal programs. They also encouraged this route more passively by neglecting a pedagogically appropriate curriculum and adequate student support services geared toward less academically prepared students. Many junior college students tended to either drop out or settle for a terminal occupational certificate. By 1970s, around 75 percent of low achieving students would drop out during their first year in urban community colleges. Critics also pointed out that it was not an accident that the lowest achieving students in both secondary and postsecondary schools have historically been, and continue to be, the economically disadvantaged, ethnic/racialized minorities, immigrants, the disabled, and dislocated low-skilled workers.
Despite the transfer mission remaining a primary emphasis for most community colleges throughout the 20th century, the apparent manipulation of institutional purposes by community college leaders, state governments, and the business community has remained constant, if not intensified. Recent scholarship on the community college has demonstrated that community college administrators have increasingly adopted an ideological stance of neo-liberal corporatism over the last couple of decades, which has directed them to focus on efficiency, productivity, and marketplace needs. This has lead to a much larger array of occupationally oriented terminal programs. Some have claimed that these occupational offerings may be crowding out academic transfer-oriented programs, and leading away from an institutional climate focused on higher education.
A look at the history of higher education in the U.S. and the changing dynamics of student access does reveal some expansion of access and equity in terms of increasing amounts of post-secondary education for a broader swath of Americans. However, traditionally underserved populations like the economically disadvantaged and many ethnic/racial minorities still struggle to achieve equality of opportunity in American society and its systems of higher education. As the U.S. moves into a post-industrial “knowledge economy” in a highly globalized world, the issue of unequal student access to higher education remains a prominent and pressing political problem, and it has recently become intertwined with the issue of outcomes in terms of the educational and economic success of the student and the economic development of the nation.
The open access mission of the community college was forged in an environment of socio-political inequality, educational elitism, and restricted educational and financial resources. Community colleges were designed to be under-funded and marginalized institutions in hierarchical state systems of education. While access in community colleges was open to all, no provisions were made to ensure the success of students in community colleges, nor access to the more advanced and economically rewarding levels of the higher education system. In fact, it was assumed that a great many students enrolled in community colleges would be drawn away from higher education and redirected to terminal, lower-status and lower-paid vocational careers. Now that more and more students are clamoring for a university education because of economic conditions that heavily reward university credentials, the notion of community colleges as holding pens for the underprivileged has been questioned, and new policies are being promoted in order to make state systems of higher education more equitable and just. Community colleges hold immense promise if they can overcome their historical legacy and be re-institutionalized with the proper staffing and financial resources. However, the path dependent nature of institutions and the limited rationality and power of institutional actors make these social structures incredibly resistant to change. Can an institution which was “born subordinate” as the lower-level holding pen for the university overcome its own legacy and develop into a truly meritocratic and democratizing institution? This study will not provide any easy answers. Instead, this book will try to illuminate the parameters of this question by unfolding the historical trajectory of this institution in all its complexity, and along the way suggest possibilities for future change.[xxx]
Endnotes
[i] Brint & Karabel, The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 1900-1985 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Christopher J. Lucas, American Higher Education: A History (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994); W. Norton Grubb and Martin Lazerson, The Education Gospel: The Economic Power of Schooling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 158; Kent A. Phillippe and Leila Gonzalez Sullivan, National Profile of Community Colleges: Trends & Statistics, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: The American Association of Community Colleges, 2005), 70-73.
[ii] Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol, eds., Inequality and American Democracy: What We Know and What We Need to Learn (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005).
[iii] Peter F. Drucker, “The Age of Social Transformation,” The Atlantic, 274, no. 5 (Nov 1994), 7, 10.
[iv] Robert Reich, “The Lost Art of Democratic Narrative,” The New Republic, 21 March 2005; Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making, revised ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002): 1-54.
[v] Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), 23; Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields.” In Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (1983; reprint, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 41-62; Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writing of Marx, Durkheim, and Max Weber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Ronald L. Jepperson, “Institutions, Institutional Effects, and Institutionalism,” In Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 143; Douglas C. North, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1981); John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995). I think the most profound discussion of these problematical questions can be found in the work of Michel Foucault.
[vi] DiMaggio and Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited,” 8; Roger Friedland and Robert R. Alford, “Bringing Society Back In: Symbols, Practices, and Institutional Contradictions.” In Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 232-263; James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 150; Searle, The Construction of Social Reality.
[vii] Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, 15; DiMaggio and Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited,” 20, 23, 26, 28; Andre Lecours, “New Institutionalism: Issues and Questions,” In Andre Lecours, ed., New Institutionalism: Theory and Analysis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 3-25; John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” In Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (1977; reprint, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 41, 44; Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 20-21, 43, 51; Lynne G. Zucker, “The Role of Institutionalization in Cultural Persistence,” In Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 85; Searle, The Construction of Social Reality.
[viii] Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory; James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, 15, 150, 336.
[ix] James A. Berlin, “Postmodernism in the Academy,” In Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies (West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2003): 60-82; Friedland and Alford, “Bringing Society Back In,” 232, 254; Jepperson, “Institutions, Institutional Effects, and Institutionalism,” 145, 149, 151-52, 158; Walter W. Powell, “Expanding the Scope of Institutional Analysis,” In Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 188, 194-195; Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel, “Institutional Origins and Transformations: The Case of American Community Colleges,” In Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 337-360. Paul Pierson argues that the term institutional “change” is misleading because it is almost impossible to change institutions fundamentally. Instead, Pierson recommends the term “institutional development” as a more accurate description of how institutions change through time. Pierson, Politics in Time, 133, 137.
[x] Sherry B. Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 7, 18, 127, 130, 133, 139, 147, 152. See also: Pierson, Politics in Time, 137. On the relationship between institutions and agency see: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (1953; reprint, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), part I, 23. Michele Foucault is perhaps the most profound philosophical exploration of the very limits of human agency. He reformulated Kant’s “critique” as the only way human beings can get outside the totalizing power of institutions and refuse to be “subjected.” James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, 302.
[xi] Ronald L. Jepperson and John W. Meyer, “The Public Order and the Construction of Formal Organizations,” In Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 204-231; James March and Herbert Simon, Organizations, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 130; Meyer and Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations;” Pierson, Politics in Time; W. Richard Scott, Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1992).
[xii] Karl E. Weick, “Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 21, no. 1 (March 1976): 1-19; March and Simon, Organizations,157, 159; Michael D. Cohen and James G. March, “Leadership in an Organized Anarchy,” In M. C. Brown II, ed., Organization and Governance in Higher Education, 5th ed. (1974; reprint, Boston: Pearson, 2000), 16-35.
[xiii] Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, “Introduction,” In Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1-38; Meyer and Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations,” North, Structure and Change in Economic History; Scott, Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems; W. Richard Scott and John M. Meyer, “The Organization of Societal Sectors: Propositions and Early Evidence,” In Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 108-140; Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” In Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3-37.
[xiv] DiMaggio and Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited,” 66, 68; Meyer and Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations,” 41, 44-46, 48-50, 58, 60; Scott, Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems,176; Scott and Meyer, “The Organization of Societal Sectors,” 123-24; Powell, “Expanding the Scope of Institutional Analysis,” 184.
[xv] Friedland and Alford, “Bringing Society Back In,” 243; Zucker, “The Role of Institutionalization in Cultural Persistence,” 83.
[xvi] Daniel Beland, “Ideas, Interests, and Institutions: Historical Institutionalism Revisited,” In Andre Lecours, ed., New Institutionalism: Theory and Analysis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 29-50; Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture: An Analysis of Our Social Structure as Related to Primitive Civilization (New York: Penguin Books, 1934), 2; Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, 23, 33; Clifford Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” In The Interpretation of Cultures (1964; reprint, New York: Basic Books, 1973), 193-233. Clifford Geertz, “Common Sense as a Cultural System,” In Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (1975; reprint, New York: Basic Books, 2000), 73-93; Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, Louis Wirth & Edward A. Shils, trans. (New York: Harvest Book, 1936); North, Structure and Change in Economic History; Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory.
[xvii] Friedland and Alford, “Bringing Society Back In,” 253; Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory; Powell, “Expanding the Scope of Institutional Analysis.”
[xviii] Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), 224; John B. Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 11, 131. Eagleton makes several arguments about how the studies of ideology can be used towards an applied political science. He argued, “If a theory of ideology has value at all, it is in helping to illuminate the processes by which such liberation from death-dealing beliefs may be practically effected” (p. 224). Friedland & Alford also seem incorporate such a possibility by highlighting the importance of subjectivity and actors in understanding institutional change (p. 254). They also seem to agree with Eagleton that social scientists can knowingly or unwittingly get caught up in the reproduction of the status quo through uncritical study of “dominant institutional logics” (p. 260). Friedland and Alford, “Bringing Society Back In.”
[xix] John L. Campbell, “Institutional Analysis and the Role of Ideas in Political Economy,” In John L. Campbell and Ove K. Pedersen, eds., The Rise of Neoliberalism and Institutional Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 160; Friedland and Alford, “Bringing Society Back In,” 254-55.
[xx] Joel A. C. Baum and Jitendra V. Singh, “Organizational Hierarchies and Evolutionary Processes: Some Reflections on a Theory of Organizational Evolution,” In Joel A. C. Baum and Jitendra V. Singh, eds., Evolutionary Dynamics of Organizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 5; DiMaggio and Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited;” Friedland and Alford, “Bringing Society Back In;” Scott and Meyer, “The Organization of Societal Sectors,” 137; Powell, “Expanding the Scope of Institutional Analysis.”
[xxi] Jepperson, “Institutions, Institutional Effects, and Institutionalism;” Doug McAdam and W. Richard Scott, “Organizations and Movements,” In Gerald F. Davis, Doug McAdam, W. Richard Scott, and Mayer N. Zald, eds., Social Movements and Organizational Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 4-40; Scott and Meyer, “The Organization of Societal Sectors,” 117; Powell, “Expanding the Scope of Institutional Analysis;” Zucker, “The Role of Institutionalization in Cultural Persistence.”
[xxii] Friedland and Alford, “Bringing Society Back In,” 232; McAdam and Scott, “Organizations and Movements;” Pierson, Politics in Time; Zucker, “The Role of Institutionalization in Cultural Persistence,” 84.
[xxiii] Siobhan Harty, “Theorizing Institutional Change,” In Andre Lecours, ed., New Institutionalism: Theory and Analysis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 51-79.
[xxiv] Jepperson, “Institutions, Institutional Effects, and Institutionalism,” 151-52; Pierson, Politics in Time; Powell, “Expanding the Scope of Institutional Analysis,” 195; Zucker, “The Role of Institutionalization in Cultural Persistence,” 104.
[xxv] Brint & Karabel, The Diverted Dream; Brint and Karabel, “Institutional Origins and Transformations: The Case of American Community Colleges;” John H. Frye, The Vision of the Public Junior College, 1900 – 1940 (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1992); Kenneth Meier, The Community College Mission: History and Theory, 1930 – 2000 (Chico, CA: Unpublished manuscript, 2008); David F. Labaree, “From Comprehensive High School to Community College: Politics, Markets, and the Evolution of Educational Opportunity,” Research in Sociology of Education and Socialization: A Research Annual, 9 (Greenwich, CN: JAI Press, 1990): 203-240.
[xxvi] On practice theory see: Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory; Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). On social movement theory see: Gerald F. Davis, Doug McAdam, W. Richard Scott, and Mayer N. Zald, eds., Social Movements and Organizational Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
[xxvii] Burton R. Clark, The Open Door College: A Case Study (New York: McGraw Hill, 1960).
[xxviii] Brint & Karabel, The Diverted Dream, 5-19, 56, 59, 91, 205-32.
[xxix] Ibid.
[xxx] Brint and Karabel, “Institutional Origins and Transformations: The Case of American Community Colleges,” 349.