Word: two-year
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Community colleges are deeply unsexy. This fact tends to make even the biggest advocates of these two-year schools - which educate nearly half of U.S. undergraduates - sound defensive, almost a tad whiny. "We don't have the bands. We don't have the football teams that everybody wants to boost," says Stephen Kinslow, president of Texas' Austin Community College (ACC). "Most people don't understand community colleges very well at all." And by "most people," he means the graduates of fancy four-year schools who get elected and set budget priorities...
Those lost jobs are why Education Secretary Arne Duncan declared in March that two-year schools "will play a big role in getting America back on its feet again." Obama tapped two former community-college officials for top posts in the Education Department and in May announced a p.r. campaign - headed by Jill Biden, the Vice President's wife and a longtime community-college professor - to raise awareness about the power of these schools to train new and laid-off workers. (See pictures of the college dorm's evolution...
...community colleges. And if there aren't enough seats in classrooms, students can't get certificates or degrees, and skilled jobs remain unfilled. In short, as the Center for American Progress concluded in a February report, "America's future economic success may well depend on how we invest in two-year institutions...
That is, if they have enough resources to handle all the students. Chronically cash-starved, two-year schools pull in an average of just 30% of the federal funding per student allocated to state universities - though they educate nearly the same number of undergraduates. (Even after you account for the academic research that goes on at four-year schools, experts say community colleges still get shafted.) Two-year schools have been growing faster than four-year institutions, with the number of students they educate increasing more than sevenfold since 1963, compared with a near tripling at four-year schools...
...Saving Cash, Living at Home Community colleges are used to doing more with less. But this recession has led to record enrollment surges at many two-year schools, in part because of the influx of laid-off workers but also because more members of the middle class are looking to save money on the first couple of years of their children's higher education. Among them is Bruce Anderson, an Austin attorney who has lost nearly a third of his savings since the recession began and doesn't want to sideline his kid while waiting for the market to come...