Janet Wade of Buffalo Grove is working toward an associate’s degree in English at Harper College in Palatine, in the hope of transferring to a four-year college.
“I didn’t have the opportunity to go to college right out of high school, but I did go to college part time at Western Illinois University (in Macomb) and that was in the late ’70s,” said Wade, 40.
Wade chose Harper because “it’s nice, it’s convenient, and above and beyond all that, the price is right.”
Helen Mella, 20, of Berkeley and Stacy Wright, 19, of Westchester transferred recently to Triton College in River Grove from Northern Illinois University, De Kalb.
Mella, who had attended NIU for two years, and Wright, who had been there three semesters, preferred a smaller school where they would receive more attention from instructors for completing their general education requirements. Also, Mella’s mother was ill, and Mella wanted to be with her.
After completing their associate’s degrees, Mella plans to return to NIU and Wright plans to move to the East Coast and work a year before continuing her education.
Gad Ikeanumba, 39, now of Oak Park but originally from Nigeria, started at Triton in 1988. After 10 weeks, he completed a certified nurse-assistant program. He returned in 1990 and completed a yearlong program to become a licensed practical nurse. He returned in the fall of 1992 to work toward an associate’s degree in nursing to become a registered nurse.
“It’s a lot of perseverance and courage to continue” because he found school challenging academically and financially, Ikeanumba said. “When I started, I didn’t know anything; today, I’m very confident in what I am doing.”
Although the circumstances and educational goals of these students are different, the common denominator of their endeavors is their choice of school: the community college.
When community colleges were born in 1901, their purpose was to provide the first two years of a baccalaureate education. Since then, the schools have come of age, and their purposes have become as varied as the requirements of the modern work force and the educational needs of all ages.
“The community college is something that was born, bred and has been nurtured in the United States,” said Ronald Temple, the new chancellor of City Colleges of Chicago.
The movement began in Chicago at the turn of the century, when William Rainey Harper, then president of the University of Chicago, advanced the notion of a “junior” college to provide the first two years of a baccalaureate education. In 1901, he helped found Joliet Junior College, the first public junior college in the U.S.
Today, the popularity of this educational institution is well-established, with some 6.4 million students taking credit courses in the nation’s 1,200 community colleges, according to the American Association of Community Colleges, based in Washington.
That total includes more than half of all freshmen nationwide. Many more are taking non-credit courses, association officials said. They estimate that community college enrollments are growing at twice the rate of four-year colleges.
In Illinois, 49 community colleges serve more than 700,000 credit students and nearly 200,000 non-credit students annually, according to Illinois Community College Board figures.
By state law, community colleges must provide a “comprehensive curriculum”: a two-year baccalaureate program, occupational training and remedial and adult basic education.
Most maintain an open-admissions policy, requiring only basic placement tests for entrance. Some, however, place more stringent requirements on students entering two-year-college-credit programs.
Community colleges were “part of the whole movement that said that education was for everyone-that everyone should be given the opportunity for education, that higher education was not just for the elite,” said H.D. McAninch, president of the College of Du Page, Glen Ellyn, one of the nation’s largest community colleges.
“The big boom in community colleges started, of course, with the vets coming out of World War II. (Community colleges) began to really take off in the ’60s; we were forming about one a week in those years.”
The College of Du Page opened with 2,600 students in 1967 and has grown to more than 36,000. Much of that growth came during the 16-year tenure of McAninch, who is retiring in June.
“I think that the pattern has been set that we are really becoming a country of lifelong learning,” McAninch said. “It’s no longer true that you get a college education and then you don’t go back. I think everybody is going back.
“I think the nature of technology, the rapid change, the need for you to adapt on a job, require new skills, and there will be constant training all the way in the future. I think that’s going to bode well for community colleges.”
Temple, of the City Colleges of Chicago, also sees a primary role for the community college in “preparing a changing work force” and serving as a “major vehicle for economic development in this country.”
In addition to providing courses to meet vocational needs, City Colleges and other community colleges also address local economic issues.
“One of the things that has hurt big cities is the lack of a trained work force,” Temple said. “Most of our big cities-and Chicago is included-have had a relatively recent upsurge in the last 20 years of immigrants. Although some come with high skills, most come with low skills. So we have a work force that’s out of sync with the workplace.”
As a result, one of the growth areas for Chicago-area community colleges has been in the instruction of English as a Second Language, together with a greater emphasis on vocational-training programs.
But the capacity of community colleges to accommodate population growth and change may become increasingly strained, with a larger, more diverse and older student body, the increased need for remedial adult education, and state and local funding cuts, administrators said.
“There are a lot of things that, when I started, community colleges were not involved with,” noted Doug Tweetem, vice president of academic affairs for South Suburban College, South Holland, where he has spent 25 years as a chemistry teacher and administrator. “So this has also led to a much wider use of the community college by our residents.
“As students come back, they’re not necessarily interested in a degree of any type,” he added. “They want the classes that will make them employable.”
Like other community colleges, South Suburban provides a range of remedial education programs, including high-school-equivalency-exam preparation and basic reading and math classes.
“Here we get a wide variety of students, with reading levels all the way from 4th grade on up,” Tweetem said. “Roughly 10th grade is the minimum you need to succeed in college-credit courses. We’ve seen the number of (remedial) sections we offer go from one or two sections to 10 or 15, with 20 to 25 students per section.”
Community colleges are targeting that population of students who are not ready for four-year colleges, in addition to women and minorities and those at lower economic levels. Community colleges have the largest percentage of minority students, and the number of female students is well above 50 percent, said a spokesman for the American Association of Community Colleges.
Part of the appeal is the low cost. Tuition is about half that of four-year public colleges, according to association national averages.
Figures from the Illinois Community College Board said 1993 tuition fees in the state averaged $1,065 a year.
Administrators, however, fear the future effects of budget cuts. “I expect, for the next five to 10 years at least, some real stress when it comes to funding,” McAninch said. “Our state aid per student has gone down about 6 percent in the last two to three years, each year.”
Temple believes the budget squeeze will lead to further changes at City Colleges, which went through a budget slashing guided by the board of trustees in 1993, before Temple joined the administration.
“We have said that we have to focus on those things that are a part of our primary mission,” he said. “There are some things we’re looking at that we’re doing now that we really ought not be doing, (and) we’re going to phase those things out.”
He believes, however, that the original purpose of community colleges-two-year baccalaureate preparation-will see greater emphasis locally and nationally, in contrast to the broad shift to a more vocational focus in the ’60s and ’70s.
“We’re now talking about reinventing that vision of our serving as a primary entry point for individuals into the higher-education community,” Temple said.
Association figures reveal that one-third of all community college students transfer to four-year colleges. The association maintains that most community college students never intend to go on for a baccalaureate degree. Yet experts have questioned the overall effectiveness of community colleges in preparing students for bachelor’s degrees.
Faith Paul, president of the Public Policy Research Consortium, Northbrook, looked into the subject between 1988 and 1992 when she was a researcher at the University of Chicago and found evidence that community colleges nationally were failing in that regard.
“What I found, for all students and for low-income and minority students in particular, was that reliance on community colleges was less effective in terms of bachelor’s degree attainment than (in) the (state) systems that did not have heavy reliance on community colleges,” Paul said.
The issue “has to do with how many different functions any one campus can handle effectively,” she said. “On the community college campuses, there is every effort to meet the need of all students. It may be that some community colleges could better focus on the pre-baccalaureate, and others could better focus on vocational, and still others better focus on the adult and community work.”
McAninch recognizes the importance of a pre-baccalaureate emphasis. “We look at the general-education core to be the heart of our program. We think that you can’t just train people for a particular job because that particular job may not be there 10 years from now.
“You’ve got to provide people with an educational background where they can continue to learn all their lives. The best way to do that, in our opinion, is through that general-education, liberal-arts core.”
Nevertheless, community colleges are satisfactorily serving many students.
The classes at Triton are a lot smaller than at NIU, said Mella, for example. “The teachers actually know your name, not your Social Security number.”
“I think classes (at Triton) are easier because they’re more personalized,” Wright added. “But you’re still learning the same kind of information.”
“I think (Harper) is every bit as good or even better than the instruction I got at Western,” Wade said. Although there are some younger students in her classes, “they are very accepting of whomever is in the class.”
