\n<\/p>\n
I have to hand it to CC Daily<\/em>; its article on the recent round of FIPSE grants had a killer closing sentence. <\/p>\n The recent round of grants from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education had focus areas in AI, accreditation and civil discourse. As CC Daily<\/em> succinctly noted, \u201cNo community colleges received awards in the civil discourse category.\u201d<\/p>\n None. Not one, out of over 1,000 institutions across the country. Zero.<\/p>\n I know it\u2019s not for lack of applications. <\/p>\n They were well represented among the awards focused on workforce training but were shut out when it came to addressing larger social issues.<\/p>\n To be fair, FIPSE wasn\u2019t alone in ignoring community colleges. As Karen Stout pointed out this weekend, The Chronicle<\/em>\u2019s quarter-century forecast drew on 50 experts from across higher education to talk about emerging trends; only one was from a community college. We have over 40\u00a0percent of the students in the country, but received 2\u00a0percent of the attention. Two is greater than zero, granted, but come on.<\/p>\n Who is at the table will affect what gets considered important. From the Chronicle<\/em> group, for instance, you wouldn\u2019t know that dual enrollment has quietly but steadily redefined the barriers between secondary and postsecondary education around the country and that the funding structures and academic policies in many states (cough Pennsylvania cough<\/em>) haven\u2019t kept up. That has consequences in myriad ways, ranging from faculty credential requirements to residency-based tuition to the impact on grad school applications for students who got B\u2019s at age 14. Business models based on a previous reality struggle under the emerging one. That\u2019s invisible to people at think tanks who focus on disciplining \u201cthe woke left,\u201d but it\u2019s real and it matters.<\/p>\n The civil discourse piece was just the latest in a long line of reminders that many policymakers see community colleges as workforce training centers and nothing else. Higher education, in their view, belongs to those who can afford it; our job is to produce skilled proles who will produce profit, do what they\u2019re told and stay quiet.<\/p>\n Well, no. Community colleges are, among other things, colleges; they embody the belief that nothing is too aspirational for anybody, including people from lower-income backgrounds. Workforce training is a key component of the mission, but it isn\u2019t the entire mission\u2014and it shouldn\u2019t be. Our students have just as much dignity, humanity and perspective as anyone else\u2019s.<\/p>\n Last week I had the opportunity to see a new slate of officers of student government get sworn in. It\u2019s always a happy occasion. Over the course of my career, though, I\u2019ve seen the tone of those events shift. Twenty years ago, I heard students talk about making a difference. Ten years ago, I heard them talk about building their r\u00e9sum\u00e9s. Now I hear them talk about making friends. That very human need for connection isn\u2019t unique to four-year schools. Community colleges are, among other things, places where people from different backgrounds interact on equal footing, often for the first time. It\u2019s where students learn to practice civil discourse on the ground. Interactions like those are crucial parts of educating a citizenry. That\u2019s part of our mission, and I offer it without apology.<\/p>\n An old saying suggests that if you aren\u2019t at the table, you\u2019re on the menu. Community colleges deserve to be at the table. When we aren\u2019t, the entire conversation is distorted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have to hand it to CC Daily; its article on the recent round of FIPSE grants had a killer closing sentence. The recent round of grants from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education had focus areas in AI, accreditation and civil discourse. As CC Daily succinctly noted, \u201cNo community colleges received awards<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41460,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[10288,22081,2346,16374,6689,176],"class_list":{"0":"post-41459","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-apparently","9":"tag-bachelors","10":"tag-civil","11":"tag-degree","12":"tag-discourse","13":"tag-requires"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41459\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/41460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}