Community Colleges and the Future

As I've noted before, the current emphasis on four-year colleges and bachelor's degrees is hugely inefficient, ignoring a myriad of realities in the US economy and education system. The focus is myopic at best, and it does an incredible disservice to many skilled students and workers who could be educated and trained in far less time for far less money with much greater success.

Clearly, many students do not need seventeen years of education - as most professions don't require it - and students should be empowered to get training and get on with their lives whenever they are ready. With many people never finishing bachelor degrees, the education system needs to re-evaluate associate degree programs. For, a student who quits a four-year college after two years has nothing, while a two-year program offers a degree and the option of applying the credit to a four-year degree.

Time Magazine is taking a look at this issue in this article, "Can Community Colleges Save the US economy?" My answer is yes.

Support for Community Colleges

According to vice-presidential wife, Jill Biden, "Community colleges are the way of the future." Biden, a former teacher at Delaware Technical and Community College and current teacher at Northern Virginia Community College, was in Denver on a visit with her husband, and she offered this insight during an interview with the Denver Post. It's nice to see someone near the Obama administration talking more specifically about this post-secondary option, especially as more high schools push the four-year college track on everyone. While President Obama has said it is his goal that all students seek some secondary education or training, his Education Secretary has been more assertive in focusing on four year colleges. And anyone with any true knowledge of the education system or our economy knows that is naive and myopic. Biden has the experience to speak credibly on this issue, noting the increased enrollment in tough economic times.

Biden said Delaware Technical & Community College, where she used to teach, logged a 30 percent increase in enrollment this year. Enrollment is up about the same amount at Northern Virginia Community College, where she now teaches English as a second language and developmental English for foreign professionals. After watching EMS faculty and students respond to a simulated heart attack in the school's mock street scene, Biden told the group, "I've taught many EMTs, firemen, police cadets and nurses. You all play such a vital role in our communities.

"In fact, we had a fire in our house four years ago. As we were running around in a panic, one of the firefighters waved and yelled at me, 'Mrs. Biden, I'm Harry, remember me from your class?' "

Biden is on the mark. Perhaps, the administration will start letting her give more interviews.