Abstract
Historians of higher education have long acknowledged a blind spot when it comes to the history of less selective institutions, including community colleges, which today educate nearly half of all undergraduates in the United States. Even as scholars debate the merits of these institutions—at once celebrated as levers of social mobility and criticized for diverting students’ ambitions—few have examined the experiences of students on these campuses, past or present. This chapter surveys the literature on the history of community colleges to identify challenges and opportunities for scholars seeking to study their campus life. The chapter considers how a better understanding of campus life at community colleges may change understanding of what it means—and has meant—to be a college student.
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Notes
- 1.
Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President in State of the Union Address,” The White House, January 20, 2015, accessed April 9, 2017, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/01/20/remarks-president-state-union-address-january-20-2015.
- 2.
The White House, “Higher Education,” accessed September 17, 2013, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/issues/education/higher-education.
- 3.
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), xii.
- 4.
“2016 Fact Sheet,” American Association of Community Colleges, February 2016, http://www.aacc.nche.edu/AboutCC/Documents/AACCFactSheetsR2.pdf. Recent research suggests that homelessness and food insecurity among community college students is much more widespread than previously thought. See, for instance, Sara Goldrick-Rab, Jed Richardson, and Anthony Hernandez, Hungry and Homeless in College: Results from a National Study of Basic Needs Insecurity in Higher Education (Madison, WI: Wisconsin Hope Lab, March 2017).
- 5.
Philo A. Hutcheson, “Reconsidering the Community College,” History of Education Quarterly 39, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 309.
- 6.
See, for instance, Thomas Diener, ed., Growth of an American Invention: A Documentary History of the Junior and Community College Movement (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986).
- 7.
Hutcheson, “Reconsidering the Community College,” 309; Laurence R. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, [1962] 1990).
- 8.
Hutcheson notes two works on the history of American higher education which devote some attention to junior and community colleges: John S. Brubacher and Willis Rudy, Higher Education in Transition, 1636–1956 (New York: Harper and Bros., 1958) and David O. Levine, The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, 1915–1940 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); see “Reconsidering the Community College,” 309n6. Other examples of work on the history of junior and community colleges are discussed below.
- 9.
Allen Witt, James L. Wattenberger, James F. Gollatscheck, and Joseph E. Suppiger, America’s Community Colleges: The First Century (Washington, DC: Community College Press, 1994), 1.
- 10.
See L. Steven Zwerling, Second Best: The Crisis of the Junior College (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976) and Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel, The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Equal Educational Opportunity in America, 1900–1985 (New York: Oxford, 1989).
- 11.
For an overview of such criticism, see Fred L. Pincus, “How Critics View the Community College’s Role in the Twenty-First Century,” in A Handbook on the Community College in America: Its History, Mission, and Management, ed. George A. Baker III (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 624–36.
- 12.
See, for instance, Richard M. Freeland, Academia’s Golden Age: Universities in Massachusetts, 1945–1970 (New York: Oxford, 1992).
- 13.
President’s Commission on Higher Education, Higher Education for American Democracy, (New York: Harper and Bros., 1947–1948) (hereafter HEFAD).
- 14.
See HEFAD, vol. 3, 5–14.
- 15.
Phebe Ward, Terminal Education in the Junior College (New York: Harper and Bros., 1947), 103–04.
- 16.
Pincus, “How Critics View the Community College’s Role,” 624–25.
- 17.
Levine, The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, 164–65.
- 18.
Levine, The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, 181.
- 19.
See Brint and Karabel, The Diverted Dream, 23–66.
- 20.
Kevin J. Dougherty, The Contradictory College: The Conflicting Origins, Impacts, and Futures of the Community College (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994).
- 21.
J.M. Beach, Gateway to Opportunity? A History of the Community College in the United States (Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2011), xxxv.
- 22.
John H. Frye, The Vision of the Public Junior College, 1900–1940: Professional Goals and Popular Aspirations (New York and Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 29, 115–16.
- 23.
See, for instance, Frederick Lamson Whitney, The Junior College in America (Greeley, CO: Colorado State Teachers College, 1929); James A. Starrak and Raymond M. Hughes, The New Junior College: The Next Step in Free Public Education (Ames, IA: The Iowa State College Press, 1948); Nelson B. Henry, ed., The Public Junior College: The Fifty-fifth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1956); K. Patricia Cross, the Junior College Student: A Research Description (Berkeley, CA: Center for Research on Higher Education and American Association of Junior Colleges, 1968); James W. Thornton, Jr., The Community Junior College, 3rd ed. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1972); and other titles discussed below.
- 24.
P. P. Claxton, “The Better Organization of Higher Education in the United States,” United States Department of Education Bulletin, 17–26 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1922): 21–27.
- 25.
Leonard V. Koos, The Junior College Movement (New York: Ginn and Co., 1925), iii.
- 26.
Levine, The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, 162.
- 27.
Carl E. Seashore, The Junior College Movement (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1940), iii.
- 28.
Koos, The Junior College Movement, 19.
- 29.
Koos, The Junior College Movement, 17–22.
- 30.
Koos, The Junior College Movement, 388–90.
- 31.
John W. Harbeson, Classifying Junior College Students (Pasadena City Schools: Pasadena, CA, 1932), 20.
- 32.
Harbeson, Classifying Junior College Students, 20.
- 33.
Harbeson, Classifying Junior College Students, 33.
- 34.
Harbeson, Classifying Junior College Students, 230.
- 35.
Leonard V. Koos, The Community College Student (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1970), xiii.
- 36.
Arthur M. Cohen, Florence B. Brawer, and Carrie B. Kisker, The American Community College, 6th ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2014), 47–53.
- 37.
Cohen, Brawer, and Kisker, The American Community College, 54.
- 38.
Cohen, Brawer, and Kisker, The American Community College, 65.
- 39.
Hutcheson, “Reconsidering the Community College,” 318.
- 40.
Frye, The Vision of the Public Junior College, 73–96.
- 41.
Frye, The Vision of the Public Junior College, 87–88.
- 42.
Marvin Ray Aaron, “The Higher Education of African Americans in Kansas City, Missouri: A History of Lincoln Junior College, 1936–1954” (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri-Kansas City, 1999).
- 43.
Aaron, “The Higher Education of African Americans,” 267.
- 44.
Aaron, “The Higher Education of African Americans,” 273–78.
- 45.
Nan Elizabeth Haugen, “A History of Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics in San Diego community colleges from 1955 to 1972” (Ed.D. diss., University of San Diego, 1990).
- 46.
Robert Patrick Pedersen, “The Origins and Development of the Early Public Junior College: 1900–1940” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2000).
- 47.
Pedersen, “The Origins and Development of the Early Public Junior College,” 32.
- 48.
Pedersen, “The Origins and Development of the Early Public Junior College,” 49.
- 49.
The Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education, The Feasibility of a National Policy for the First Two Years of College (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1975), 2, quoted in Pedersen, “The Origins and Development of the Early Public Junior College,” 49.
- 50.
Pedersen, “The Origins and Development of the Early Public Junior College,” 49–50.
- 51.
Pedersen, “The Origins and Development of the Early Public Junior College,” 49–50.
- 52.
Pedersen, “The Origins and Development of the Early Public Junior College,” 52–53.
- 53.
Pedersen, “The Origins and Development of the Early Public Junior College,” 54.
- 54.
Pedersen, “The Origins and Development of the Early Public Junior College,” 54–58.
- 55.
Pedersen, “The Origins and Development of the Early Public Junior College,” 53–54.
- 56.
Cohen, Brawer, and Kisker, The American Community College, 63.
- 57.
Cohen, Brawer, and Kisker, The American Community College, 65.
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Strohl, N.M. (2018). New Voices, New Perspectives: Studying the History of Student Life at Community Colleges. In: Ogren, C., VanOverbeke, M. (eds) Rethinking Campus Life. Historical Studies in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75614-1_9
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