Community college

“ Because no hardworking student should be stuck in the red. We’ve already reduced student loan payments to ten percent of a borrower’s income. Now, we’ve actually got to cut the cost of college. Providing two years of community college at no cost for every responsible student is one of the best ways to do that, and I’m going to keep fighting to get that started this year. ”

“ It’s a simple fact that community colleges are the most flexible educational institutions we have. I’ve traveled all over this country, from New York to Iowa to California, to see how community colleges create partnerships with Fortune 500 companies and local businesses to generate jobs; support apprenticeships with organized labor, and prepare hardworking students for good-paying jobs in the areas in which they live.
Making community colleges free is good for workers, it’s good for companies, and it’s good for our economy. ”

“ They are the backbone of retraining, but also the only access point available to many of our people. So if you are out there trying to work to support your family—let’s say you are a single parent trying to raise three kids and you have to work during the day—community college is also one of the few places where you can get an advanced degree and the skills you need for a better job. ”

“ The college is a homogeneous community of a distinct and peculiar type. It is a little world by itself. The professors and students are separated from the common activities of life, and a common feeling unites all in a common bond. There are poured into this community the hopes, aspirations, habits, and tastes of the different students, which are soon molded into a common life, and become, in turn, an important factor in forming the character and directing the life of the student. ”

“ Students must keep up their grades and stay on track to graduate. States must contribute funding and hold community colleges accountable for the results. And community colleges must maintain high graduation and job placement rates. And here’s a key point — community colleges will have to offer courses that are directly transferrable to a four-year degree. ”

“ All educators should be aware of and support efforts that recognize and offer educational opportunities to underprivileged students.
The City University of New York has implemented two programs-College Discovery for community college students and SEEK (Search for Elevation, Education, and Knowledge) for senior college students-that provide specialized counseling, remedial instruction, and tutorial services enabling nearly 14,000 disadvantaged students a year to receive the benefits of a college education. ”

“ I fully believe that a high school should be to-day just what it was originally planned to be back there in the first half of the nineteenth century—a school higher than the elementary, controlled by the community, in co-operation with the educational leaders of the State, serving the needs of the community, fitting its boys and girls for service in the community and discriminating, if at all, in the favor of the group of boys and girls who are not going to college, since that group is much the larger. ”

“ If a student works as a reading tutor, colleges will no longer be required to pay one-quarter of that student's work-study costs. With today's actions by these college presidents, and with the steps we are taking to help them, college students can now work their way through school by teaching our children to read. That is how we will take more responsibility, create, more opportunity, and build a stronger, more united community for all Americans. ”

“ The presence of a college, with its educated faculty, in any community, modifies the tone of its intellectual and social life. The colleges have been centers of leavening influence in the new States. While recognizing this with gratitude, one can also see that the conditions which justified and demanded the multiplication of these small colleges have ceased to exist, and that the different conditions which now prevail counsel denominations to consolidate their weak institutions, and to concentrate their dissipated forces upon a few strong ones. ”

“ As a community of consumers merely, a student body is no more homogeneous than a community of producers. Within the frame of similarity generated by the condition of dependence there exist both the formal academic gradations dividing year and year as rank and rank, and the non-academic but “collegiate” gradations of caste and class, interest and attitude. Every college, for example, has its tiny liberal group, its sparse collection of students [24] who trouble themselves with social problems, international relations, disarmament, and the like. ”

“ All this and much more was tolerated for years on the assumption that students, imbued with college spirit, should not be subjected to the laws of decent living that govern those members of civilized communities who have not had the advantages of a higher education. The most serious difficulties between faculties and students and between students and the police, the country over, for the past twenty years, have arisen in connection with displays of 'college spirit' after the 'big game.' Any college and any community might cheerfully sacrifice this kind of college spirit. ”

“ What the College should aim at is to increase the science and intelligence of the community, and not to teach industries which they know a great deal better than the professors. The new College is only the local expression of a general movement for higher education. That movement has no doubt received its primary impulse from the conviction that our industrial population ought to be educated in the principles which underlie their occupations. ”

“ Now you need to give more community colleges the resources they need to become community career centers: places that teach people skills that local businesses are looking for right now, from data management to high-tech manufacturing. ”

“ The ways of an undergraduate community are determined by standards which do not apply to men and women of the same age who must work for their livings. For example, there survives from the Middle Ages an antagonism between gown and town. When this began it involved all the members of the academic community—faculty even more than students. ”

“ The Harvard life and spirit and teaching are all adapted to lead young men to the love and service of truth and to send them out to a ministry as wide and varied as the needs of humanity. The influence of the scholars and teachers and administrators that have been drawn into the service of the college is paramount, even if it is unconsciously{227} exercised and felt, in the community about the college. Here have always been—inevitable in a town which is the resort of the chosen youth of the country—a healthy, wholesome independence of spirit and a high-minded earnestness. ”

“ Exactly the same experience results from school and college organization of education work. The student in the common schools does not choose his course; it is prescribed for him by his family and by society. He does not go to school because he is mentally ambitious, but because the standards of universal education require it of him. Especially in the colleges which inherit a great name and attract young men and women for social advantage, the students are characterized by an involuntary subjection to the routine of modern pedagogy. ”

“ College government is an important question. The college, as a distinct and separate community, has rules and regulations based on well-established principles, which aim to conserve the general good of the whole body of students. The college honor can not be sustained unless there is a recognition of authority and responsibility.
The college legislation and government rests principally with the faculty, overseers and trustees, who aim to be liberal, yet firm. College sentiment among students is often capricious and subject to sudden revolutions. ”

“ The first step should be elimination of mimic universities and restoration of the college with a fixed curriculum, intended to develop the man and to lay foundation for a broad education. By thus removing odds and ends of elective courses and attempts at types of work belonging altogether to graduate study, relief will be given from much which is of doubtful utility to the undergraduate, and the professors will regain that leisure, which for so many years was utilized to the advantage of the whole community. ”

“ We also recognize that many workers change jobs in the middle of their careers, and they often get the training they need at community colleges. I have asked Congress to provide $250 million to community colleges to help Americans get the skills they need for high-growth fields. ”

“ The associations, friendships, and experiences in the college community are also important factors. It has been well said that a college is a miniature world, with its successes, failures, and temptations as real as those of the world without.
It is impossible, in an article like the present, to do more than give a few of the peculiarities of Yale. The writer disclaims any attempt to analyze critically the influences and tendencies of the college, but aims merely to present a few facts concerning its students, buildings, class spirit, and every-day life. ”

“ The consensus of opinion among college authorities is that the morals of students are better than those of the same number of youth outside the college. "Our opinion is," says Noah Porter, "and we believe it will be confirmed by the most extended observation and the most accurate statistics, that there is no community in which the pre-eminently critical period of life can be spent with greater safety than it can in the college." ”

“ Trustees and teachers are unwilling to acknowledge that their college has no good reason for separate existence, though they know and the community knows that they know the fact. Alumni, whose only manifestation of interest in the college has been an occasional visit to a summer re-union, are apt to display a sudden and emphatic love for Alma Mater when consolidation is suggested, putting forth energy enough against consolidation to place the college on a good footing, if properly directed. ”

“ Mabie saw the need of a greater degree of organization among the students, in order that the college might thereby become more of a community. How directly opposed the present-day cry is! Student organization has to-day so spread and so wound itself about the very life of the college, that it threatens to hide the intellectual aims for which the college exists. The editors venture to express the opinion that, had Mr. ”

“ These colleges provide for their students both housing and social life. The latter is somewhat cloistral, to be sure, but it is open to all. By the very conditions of their life, they do not need the help of the fraternities for disciplinary or legislative measures. Does this mean that the colleges are without cliques, that every student is a sister to every other? Who that has lived in a woman’s college does not know that every class is run usually by one group of friends, with occasional more or less successful attempts by other rival groups to grasp the power? ”

“ It is impossible to estimate the indebtedness of popular to collegiate education. There is an intimate and vital relation between the college and the public schools, which differ not in kind, but only in the degree of instruction. "The success and usefulness of common schools," says Professor W. S. Tyler, "is exactly proportioned to the popularity and prosperity of the colleges, and whatever is done for or against the one is sure to react, with equal force and similar results, upon the other." ”

“ This University, gentlemen, has not, under existing circumstances, the means of exercising any of that domestic discipline which is a valuable feature of the Collegiate System in some other Universities, nor can she give to her students that kind of moral training which results from the free social intercourse of a large body of educated youths, living together as one community, and not only prosecuting common studies and striving after common objects of ambition, but sharing also in common recreations and amusements. ”

“ In that state at the present moment privately endowed institutions are caring for more than twenty thousand students, and are making an annual gift to the state of more than three million dollars. These institutions are well scattered, and reach localities untouched by the university. Higher education must be carried to the various communities. The number of young people that can be sent to college is increased fivefold, if those young people can be housed and boarded at home, and if there is no railroad fare to pay. ”

“ But we need more concentration of effort, money and good men, both as instructors and students, in colleges where the highest education may be obtained. The great number of our colleges is a source of weakness—not of strength. A great number of these institutions are mere academies, and seem to have been founded principally to keep students within the denominational fences of their parents; the college is charged with what should be the special work of parent and pastor. ”

“ Then, supported and fed by, and inspiring all below, should be the college, the school of higher education. Justice to a race long oppressed, obligation to meet more than half way those states that make generous appropriations to this end, and safety to the nation, demand that these should be liberally furnished with such buildings and grounds as health and comfort require, with libraries and apparatus equal to the best, and an efficient corps of teachers, so paid that their best energies may be given to instruction. ”