The Contradictory College: Importance of Equity and Diversity

• In Event: 63.087 - Sheraton Roundtable Session 11 - Grand Centre
  In Roundtable Session: 63.087-4 - Revisiting the Contradictory College: 25 Years Later

Abstract

Contemporary literature on community colleges consistently acknowledges a few important demographic facts: that student populations in community colleges are overwhelmingly diverse as compared to their four-year counterparts. Students from historically underrepresented racial or ethnic groups, older adult students, and those from lower socioeconomic status are more likely to enroll in open access and more affordable community colleges. The Contradictory College acknowledges vast demographic differences and succinctly reviews the impact of community college attendance on student outcomes including economic indicators. The result is a contradictory picture of access, long-term economic success, and bachelor’s degree attainment that places community colleges as in facilitating and hindering student success.

Community colleges open educational opportunity for students via pathways to four-year degrees through the transfer function and vocational certificates to increase economic viability but they also suffer from low transfer rates and long-term economic advancement. Vocational certificates, for example, offer little opportunity for career advancement. Community college students also receive far fewer bachelor’s degree suggesting that students would have greater outcomes if they started at a four-year institution. Clark (1960) suggested that community colleges cool out students by promising higher education success but instead have structured alternative curricula and opportunities that redirect away from transfer to a four-year institution. These arguments, while important, do not directly examine the relationship between the student demographic composition of community college, which has increased in diversity over the last 25 years, and the contradictory nature of outcomes.

In this paper, I offer an expansion of the original arguments noted in Dougherty’s text using a critical feminist lens to review the literature on educational outcomes and institutional characteristics in community colleges. Using critical discourse analysis of the literature on community college and equity (i.e., race/ethnicity and gender) for the last 25 years, I will reframe the arguments on the impact of student outcomes to focus on differences within demographic groups (not just across) and the sociological dynamics that shape equity. Importantly, I will also integrate the literature on college student choice and identity to reveal the complex nature of race and gender in US society and the role that community colleges play in support individual success and economic viability.

Author

• Jaime R. Lester, George Mason University