This suggests that if we are waiting around for four-year higher education institutions to solve the problem of stalled economic and social mobility for young people born into families with low levels of wealth, it’s going to be a very long wait.
What Community Colleges Can Do
What must community colleges do to address these twin crises? In 2019 and early 2020, I participated in a working group convened by Opportunity America that produced The Indispensable Institution: Reimagining Community Colleges. This report contains specific recommendation designed to enable community colleges to achieve their mission “as the nation’s primary provider of job-focused education and training.”
The report advocates for extending community colleges’ workforce development mission and allowing academic credit for all learning that takes place in both the academic and continuing education divisions. This means that short-term certificates attained through continuing education should be “stackable” toward degrees. It argues that all degree programs should include a mix of academic and career-focused courses, that all should include some form of work-based learning, and that all degrees and credentials should have value in the workplace.
To support this approach, the report argues that state funding and accountability systems should be based not on enrollment but on degree or certificate completion and labor market outcomes after graduation. For students who transfer to four-year institutions, the key accountability metric should be four-year completion rates.
At one level, these and other recommendations in the report might seem like common sense, and the report is studded with examples drawn from institutions that are already implementing many of these recommendations. The problem, however, is that such reforms are far from the norm. Assessing transfer programs by four-year degree completion rates, for example, would require a sea-change in current practice. While nearly 80 percent of first-time community college students say their goal is to attain a four-year degree, only 13 percent succeed in doing so within six years.
Currently only 12 percent of U.S. workers have an associate’s degree as their highest postsecondary credential. The working group believes that if all associate’s degrees were redesigned to have immediate value in the labor market, this number could rise dramatically and open new doors to opportunity for many.
Equity and Urgency
One final comment on equity and urgency: it should come as no surprise that Black and Latinx adults and youth are disproportionately represented among both displaced workers and 25-year-olds who do not have four-year degrees. Education and training interventions like those recommended in the report are necessary but insufficient without governmental responses to the underlying causes of the problem.
Low rates of college attainment among young people born into low-wealth families is at least as much a function of huge wealth disparities along racial lines—white families with school-age children have, on average, 100 times the wealth of Black families with children—as of educational factors. If community colleges are given the support they need, they can equip both young people and adults with the skills and credentials to start on a path to economic prosperity. But unless we as a society are willing to tackle the grotesque racial disparities in family wealth, solving these workforce crises will take us only so far.