A College For All Californians

This is the first comprehensive and contemporary history of the largest and most diverse public system of higher education in the United States. Serving over 2 million students annually—approximately one-quarter of the nation's community college undergraduates—California’s 116 community colleges play an indispensable role in career and transfer education in North America and have maintained an outsized influence on the evolution of postsecondary education nationally. A College for All Californians chronicles the sector's emergence from K–12 institutions, its evolving mission and growth following World War II and the G.I. Bill For Education, the expansion of its ever-broadening mission, and its essential role in the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education. Chapters cover California’s junior and community colleges’ development, mission, governance, faculty, finances, athletics, student support services, and more. It also examines the successes and ongoing political, financial, and educational challenges confronting this uniquely American educational experiment. Book Features: Encapsulates the evolution and contemporary status of our nation’s largest and most diverse undergraduate education system.Examines how the colleges were influenced by the political, economic, and social issues of the day.Includes new historical information affecting postsecondary education in California.Analyzes some of the most important current and emerging issues that will continue to influence California’s community colleges. Contributors: Carlos O. Turner Cortez, Michelle Fischthal, Jonathan Lightman, Jessica Luedtke, David W. Morse, Joe Newmyer, Mark Robinson, Leslie M. Salas.

This is the first comprehensive and contemporary history of the largest and most diverse public system of higher education in the United States. Serving over 2 million students annually--approximately one-quarter of the nation's community college undergraduates--California's 116 community colleges play an indispensable role in career and transfer education in North America and have maintained an outsized influence on the evolution of postsecondary education nationally. A College for All Californians chronicles the sector's emergence from K-12 institutions, its evolving mission and growth following World War II and the G.I. Bill For Education, the expansion of its ever-broadening mission, and its essential role in the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education. Chapters cover California's junior and community colleges' development, mission, governance, faculty, finances, athletics, student support services, and more. It also examines the successes and ongoing political, financial, and educational challenges confronting this uniquely American educational experiment. Book Features: Encapsulates the evolution and contemporary status of our nation's largest and most diverse undergraduate education system. Examines how the colleges were influenced by the political, economic, and social issues of the day. Includes new historical information affecting postsecondary education in California. Analyzes some of the most important current and emerging issues that will continue to influence California's community colleges.

Can the U.S. keep its dominant economic position in the world economy with only 30% of its population holding bachelor’s degrees? If the majority of U.S. citizens lack a higher education, can the U.S. live up to its democratic principles and preserve its political institutions? These questions raise the critical issue of access to higher education, central to which are America’s open-access, low-cost community colleges that enroll around half of all first-time freshmen in the U.S. Can these institutions bridge the gap, and how might they do so? The answer is complicated by multiple missions—gateways to 4-year colleges, providers of occupational education, community services, and workforce development, as well as of basic skills instruction and remediation.To enable today’s administrators and policy makers to understand and contextualize the complexity of the present, this history describes and analyzes the ideological, social, and political motives that led to the creation of community colleges, and that have shaped their subsequent development. In doing so, it fills a large void in our knowledge of these institutions.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. Subsequently leaders and communities tried to refashion this institution into a tool for increased social mobility, community organization, and regional economic development. Thus, community colleges were born of contradictions, and continue to be an enigma. This history examines the institutionalization process of the community college in the United States, casting light on how this educational institution was formed, for what purposes, and how has it evolved. It uncovers the historically conditioned rules, procedures, rituals, and ideas that ordered and defined the particular educational structure of these colleges; and focuses on the individuals, organizations, ideas, and the larger political economy that contributed to defining the community college’s educational missions, and have enabled or constrained this institution from enacting those missions. He also sets the history in the context of the contemporary debates about access and effectiveness, and traces how these colleges have responded to calls for accountability from the 1970s to the present.Community colleges hold immense promise if they can overcome their historical legacy and be re-institutionalized with unified missions, clear goals of educational success, and adequate financial resources. This book presents the history in all its complexity so that policy makers and practitioners might better understand the constraints of the past in an effort to realize the possibilities of the future.