June 24, 2008

Illinoisans Value Local Community Colleges Over 4-Year Institutions, Survey Finds

A recent survey of 1,143 Illinois residents found mixed attitudes about higher education in the state. Results of the survey, conducted by a University of Illinois research center, will be released today at the Illinois Higher Education Summit, where academic, business, civic, and political leaders are meeting to discuss the future of higher education in the state.

In the survey, the Institute of Government and Public Affairs found that respondents were more likely to have positive perceptions of their local community colleges than of four-year institutions statewide. Eighteen percent of those surveyed said their local community college was doing an “excellent” job, whereas just 11 percent said the same of four-year colleges and universities.

The survey found that while 72 percent of Illinoisans strongly believe that any qualified student in the state should be able to go to college, only one-third strongly believe that every student who is motivated actually has the opportunity. Only 8 percent of residents said they strongly believe that “college students are getting their money’s worth.”

The survey also found that about one-third of residents said colleges in Illinois were about the same as those elsewhere in the country. As a researcher at the institute put it, the public thinks colleges in Illinois are “good but not great.”

Citing the finding that 73 percent of residents think college is very important, Stanley O. Ikenberry, a professor at the institute, said by e-mail that people clearly see higher education as central, “but they may not appreciate the depth and breadth of higher-education resources available.” —Ingrid Norton

Comments

1. As local schools, community colleges generally enjoy good relations along with public schools, churches and local politicians. The public tends to see issues with other people’s schools, colleges and politicians—not theirs.

   Surveys like this have little real value. Still, the cc’s should feel good about it. And it is important to feel good.

   — Bill S.    Jun 24, 11:47 AM    #

2. Bill, I gotta disagree. I think this is about more than community solidarity. I think it is a reflection of our large state schools abandoning undergraduate education for research while our community colleges step in to fill the void. I live in a city with a “top 50” research university and a sizable community college. The vibe at the university I work at among the undergrads that have experience with both is that you are better off at the CC because the teachers are there to teach and have more education than most the TAs that lead the majority of undergrad classes at the university.

   I think this reflects a need for our state universities to push for a greater balance between research and education.

   — anon    Jun 24, 11:58 AM    #

3. As one who has taught at a community college for over twenty years, I was pleased with this story. I think community colleges are one of this country’s most valuable, democratic institutions.

   — Savage Detective    Jun 24, 12:11 PM    #

4. Most four-year universities have rendered themselves largely obsolete even as we demand more and more tuition to pay for our pensions and health insurance, not to mention the perks and salaries many (though not all) of us enjoy. The recent article on excessive inauguration celebrations provides an interesting case in point.

   Sadly, we do very little to train most kids to succeed in the 21st century, although we do not hesitate to saddle them with astounding student loans. That fact alone explains the poll results. In any event, we are smart people and I think we know that most four-year universities are not providing a product or service that is nearly as valuable as the cost would suggest. We lecture and we research and then kids graduate after they’ve heard enough and repeated what we said back to us. CC’s, on the other hand, are actually preparing kids to survive in a much more demanding world. How many of us could survive in this new world? Thank goodness for tenure!

   Rather than focusing on the kids who will be saddled with indentured servitude for the next forty years to pay off their loans, we comfort ourselves by condescending community colleges, telling each other how valuable we are, and prattling on about the “value of an education” — although the loudest talkers never seem to be the one paying for it. It’s really sad.

   I wish I had enough guts to say these things publicly, but talking to captive audiences is so much easier. In any event, I’m not angry but just reflective at this point.

   — DOS    Jun 24, 03:49 PM    #

5. There are major advantages and disadvantages to community colleges vs. 4-year state universities, and community colleges serve a real need to bring high school students up to a certain level with excellent instruction. However, state universities are not now funded at the levels they were a decade or two ago, and the need to garner federal funding to support the university is real. 4-year institutions bring a real depth to education of the individual, and only through those research programs can a student get into graduate or professional schools, or find a position in industry.

   — Bernie    Jun 24, 04:10 PM    #

6. “DOS” your candid and insightful examination of the challenges facing our four-year sector of higher education is most appreciated and hopefully will reach a more public audiance that is increasingly skeptical regarding the real impact of these institutions on the quality of undergraduate education across the country. The Illinois study could indeed be replicated in most states without much of a change in the outcome. Unfortunately, funding continues to lag for the community college sector where the vast majority of quality teaching occurs. Finally, Bernie (#5), I would challenge you with regard to the impact that the vast majority of research conducted by our 4-year colleges have upon the typical student. Rather, the real result accrues to the funding agency/company that increasingly pays the bill OR the “distinguished” projessor that faces the publish or perish challenges of maintaining their position and title.

   Thankfully, we do have the community college which quietly and expertly continues to do its job of educating the majority of lower division, undergraduates to enter the job market or compete quite favorably with “the competition” upon transfer to the four-year institution.

   — D. New    Jun 24, 05:01 PM    #

7. My first experience with TA’s came after 9 years of collegiate and graduate education (the latter at a professional graduate school.) I enrolled as a general student just to pick up various elements in my study of media. The law school course I took dealt with media law and was well taught by a professor who formerly had been an FCC commissioner. Some of the other courses were excellent, carefully guided by the faculty (it helped that they were in the Instructional Design field.) The larger lecture courses were not so good. So I suppose it depends on the faculty, the area of learning, and the TA’s.

   It is true, however, that the primary focus of community college faculty is on teaching, rather than research. A few have doctorates or their equivalent, almost all, except in business and technical fields, have at least a master’s.

   Since community colleges generally have an open registration they focus on providing resources for students who need additional help with learning resource specialists. Publish or perish is also not a concern.

   While I have in hand no more than anecdotal information it is said that cc students who transfer to four year institutions do as well or better than those enrolled all four years there. If accurate I would suggest it is because their foundational two years were strong due to the concentration on teaching rather than maintaining or gaining tenure through publishing or advancing onward and upward (which is not to say that many do not become administrators nor that many do not work for advance degrees in order to teach elsewhere.) The ethos is critical.

   Since I teach at a community college I do have a bias, of course. I do have one specific example of a student who benefited from attendance at our college. She was bright, gifted, and hindered however by the fact that she had ADD of which she was unaware. Seeing the uneven quality of her work I asked her about some of her working style and suggested that she speak to a counselor and explore whether she had ADD. She followed through, received help, and upon graduation attended her last two years at one of the premier women’s colleges where her work merited continuing on to graduate studies. This is not to say it might not have happened elsewhere, of course.

   Community colleges share the underfunding of all public educational institutions. This leads to a greater dependence, for good and for ill, upon underpaid adjunct faculty. (Many rely on having only a very few full time faculty in each field.) For good because many who teach at salaries half that of full time faculty (and with no benefits) do so because they love to teach. For ill, because collegiality is difficult to sustain and the community college becomes more a collection of teachers than a collegium of teacher/learners. This minimizes interest in collegial discussions in academic fields and faculty workshop days are often generalized (even if helpful) on teaching skills and sometimes, alas, inspirational plenary speakers. Underfunded faculty development committees do provide some support for attendance at professional guild gatherings but hardly enough. In the face of these particular challenges community colleges still provide solid education for both those who seek AA degrees and those who choose to transfer in order to study for BA degrees and beyond.

   — be!    Jun 24, 05:20 PM    #

8. Involvement in research programs at the four-year university certainly may help get students into graduate or professional schools, but it is not required to get the average student a position in industry. Our local industries are clamoring to get our two-year engineering technology graduates – we can’t produce enough for the demand. The reason? Our engineering technology program curricula are largely determined by DACUM panels that are made up of local inductry representatives. Consequently, industries know that the curricula are exactly what they need them to be, and if a student becomes proficient in the core competencies of a particular curriculum, that student knows exactly what they need to know to contribute to the industry, and to be successful. The placement rate for our 2-yr graduates into jobs related to their degree is nearly 100%. Those who don’t work are the ones who choose not to.

   Our two-year engineering technology grads get paid pretty well too. Many start in the $40K/yr range and move up from there.

   — FB    Jun 24, 05:20 PM    #

9. I teach and am a department head at the flagship state research institution in Illinois and I have long noticed that many of the students and my surrounding community seem to have much better feelings about our local community college than about this university. As an institution of higher learning, it is impersonal, decentralized, and myopically focused on multi-million dollar science and engineering faculty research grants and patent revenue-generating applied research. Undergraduate education and student services are a pale second. It is interesting and i must say reassuring to see that the community ‘out there’ so clearly grasps the actual priorities circulating inside the institution.

   — Karen    Jun 25, 12:12 AM    #

10. The problems with four year schools are as diverse as the populations that make up the campuses. From personal experience we can see that two years plus training programs prepare a student for the real world whilst top tier and flagship Universities are really more about marketing and self promotion geared towards growing their nest eggs. The public should pay attention to where many of our scandal ridden headline grabbers graduated from. For instance Alberto Gonzales, the fake Attorney General graduated from Harvard I believe? This just goes to show a degree from Harvard or Yale will get you lots of access but lots of criminal activity. This is not something to brag about, is it? In many respects I would hire an ethical two year graduate over a Princeton, Yale or Harvard graduate any day of the week. This guarantees less babysitting, oversight and pampering, which seems to be a necessary condition for top tier school graduates.

    http://www.bccmeteorites.com/misconduct-planetary.html

    SRD-BCCM

    — SRD-BCCM    Jun 25, 07:40 AM    #

11. “Eighteen percent of those surveyed said their local community college was doing an “excellent” job, whereas just 11 percent said the same of four-year colleges and universities.”

    I don’t see how this equates to Illinoisans valuing CCs over 4 year institutions as the headline states. The questions asked were “Overall, how well do you think the public four‐year colleges and universities in Illinois are doing?” and “Overall, how well do you think your local community college is doing?”

    If I were answering those questions I would be comparing my local CC to other CCs and Illinois’s public 4 year institutions to other states’ public 4 year institutions. Not comparing my local CC to Illinois public 4 year schools.

    I could easily honestly say that my CC was excellent and the 4 years were only good and still think the 4 year was a better choice than the CC.

    Btw, I’m not making any judgments here about either type of institution; I just wanted to point out that the data doesn’t support the headline. shrug

    — INTPLibrarian    Jun 25, 09:50 AM    #

12. Being a former resident of Illinois and currently living in a neighboring state, I wonder how much of this is geography related. Most of the large state universities in Illinois are located hours away from the population centers so folks naturally look at their local institutions in a different light. I would guess that most of those surveyed have never even seen the 4-year campuses. At the same time, they are the taxpayers and their perceptions count, right or wrong.

    — mjmc    Jun 25, 10:41 AM    #

13. John Ciardi, the Dante translator, said something like this: “A university is what happens to a college when it stops caring about students.”

    Bernie, the universities have had declining state support to force them into grant-seeking mode and the instruction of undergrad classes by TAs and other quality declines that are the result of financial decisions that support graduate schools and research agendas rather than undergrad education, but the decline is relative to the starting point. CCs’ funding has declined just as much or more in many states but after having started out significantly lower per FTE. The decline at CCs is therefore worse in many ways.

    I think the judgment comes down to a question of mission and commitment to that mission. The CC mission is about access and good teaching, while many universities have a mission focused on research and knowledge creation. I don’t go into a department store expecting to buy groceries. The two missions have become remarkably different in the last decade or so, and the public seems to understand this.

    — Rich    Jun 25, 01:49 PM    #

14. I WISH TO THANK BE! (#7) FOR THE ASTUTE OBSERVATIONS ABOUT THE DOWNSIDE OF ADJUNCTING THE PROFESSORIATE, PARTICULARLY THE COMMENT ABOUT THE ABSENCE OF COLLEGIALITY SO IMPORTANT TO THE PROFESSION. How ironic that the community college is all too often not a place where teaching communities are formed and sustained. I say all this as one who’s taught at various college levels, including cc, and I fully appreciate the good work that happens at community colleges.

    — George T. Karnezis    Jun 25, 02:50 PM    #

15. The question about students “getting their money’s worth” needs to be looked at in the light of the fact that the “flagship state research institution in Illinois” is also the second most expensive (for in-state students) state university in the country, according to an article this spring in the Chicago Tribune. It is rather offensive that the university is so outrageously expensive for in-state students, making it most unlikely that one does get one’s money’s worth. As a graduate of said institution, I looked on it as a good solid, affordable place for my own kids, but find that affordability is in question. Perhaps we should look at a CC.

    — Rachel    Jun 25, 03:52 PM    #

16. What’s the best, simpliest strategy for encouraging inner city kids to choose community college? —R

    — Rena Marzen    Jun 25, 04:41 PM    #

17. I feel certain that the Illinois study, if replicated in the other 49 states, would produce similar results. The study targeted John and Judy Q. residents – most of whom either attended their local community college, or have family members who did. A good number of four year college students leave the state after graduation, ergo they would not be participating in a study of this type.

    — Bill    Jun 25, 08:21 PM    #

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