A good friend in my department recently completed her Ph.D. at a nearby mid-level research university—something not unusual among community-college faculty members. Unfortunately, what’s also not unusual is the flak she got from her professors:
“Why on earth are you teaching at a community college?”
“You’re planning on leaving there after you finish, right?”
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“No sense casting your pearls before swine.”
If I understand that last metaphor correctly, that would make her other colleagues and me, not to mention our students, swine.
I frequently encounter the same attitude as I travel around the country speaking to graduate students about academic careers at two-year colleges—or perhaps I should say don’t travel and don’t speak. Because the truth is, I’ve been invited to speak at only a handful of research universities, despite literally putting myself out there. Whenever I plan a trip, either for vacation or to attend a conference, I’ll contact two or three institutions in the area, usually through their career centers, to offer my services as a guest speaker, gratis. Only a handful have ever taken me up on my offer. A couple expressed interest and suggested that I get back to them later. A few others replied to say thanks, but their calendars were already full.
The rest simply didn’t respond at all.
Let’s put aside for a moment the stunning lack of professionalism, not to mention the mild blows to my ego. What’s really apparent is that those institutions—that is to say, the overwhelming majority of the dozens I’ve contacted over the past five or six years—have absolutely no interest in exposing their graduate students to information about two-year-college teaching careers or the community-college job market.
Clearly, it isn’t the students themselves making that decision. When I am invited to speak, my presentations are always well attended and well received. The students who show up seem legitimately interested in at least considering two-year colleges as a possible career choice, as their formal questions during the presentation and informal questions afterward attest.
To be fair, it’s also not the academic departments who keep turning me down (or ignoring me). It’s the career centers. But given my friend’s experience, which is hardly unique, I find it hard to believe that the attitude of the career-center directors at those institutions is not a reflection of the attitude they perceive within the academic departments—namely, that working at a two-year college is somehow beneath their graduates.
I understand that this mind-set among faculty members and administrators at many mid-level graduate programs stems from their desire to gain prestige for themselves and their institutions. It also suggests a great deal of insecurity on their part. But it is extremely shortsighted and decidedly not in the best interests of their students.
Bear in mind, after all, that my friend already has a good job, with tenure and a decent salary. I wonder how many of that department’s graduates in the last 10 years can say the same. She wanted to finish her Ph.D. in order to fulfill a personal goal, and because she would get a nice raise when she added those three letters after her name. And it didn’t hurt that the state was paying for it.
But let’s say that, spurred on by her professors, she did decide to leave her current job. Coming from a mid-level graduate program, where could she go? Harvard? Stanford? North Carolina at Chapel Hill? I think not. Most likely she would end up at a small liberal-arts college or perhaps a regional master’s-level university. Or maybe the best she could do would be to get a job at a community college—like the one where she already teaches.
Not that I’m casting any aspersions. As an undergraduate, I attended and had good experiences at both a liberal-arts college and a regional university, and I’ve taught at community colleges for 23 years. My only point is that, if she followed her professors’ advice, my colleague would leave her tenure-track job at a large and thriving two-year college for, at best, a job that might or might not be much better than the one she already has—assuming she were fortunate enough to land such a job to begin with.
Honestly, is teaching a 4/4 load with publishing expectations really better than teaching a 5/5 load with no publishing expected? For some people, perhaps, but not for everyone. And that’s what her professors, and thousands of others like them around the country, don’t seem to understand.
Nor, it seems to me, are they giving much thought to the greater good—even though President Obama (for whom, I’m willing to bet, nearly all of them voted) has not only called upon Americans to perform selfless service but has also extolled the virtues of community colleges. If the best and brightest are not to teach on our nation’s two-year campuses, lest they cast their pearls before swine, then who is to teach there? And what does that say about our society’s commitment to those institutions and the students who attend them?
But the most alarming point, I’m afraid, is that faculty advisers and career counselors who disparage community colleges are simply giving bad advice, based on an obvious failure to grasp the realities of the job market.
Casual perusal of The Chronicle’s Careers section will show that, in a typical issue, about 40 to 45 percent of the teaching positions advertised are at community colleges. And that seems about right, because according to the American Association of Community Colleges, two-year institutions enroll nearly half of all college students in the United States and substantially more than half of freshmen and sophomores. That means that graduate students who refuse even to consider community colleges are essentially ignoring about half of the available jobs. For many of those students, it also means that once reality sets in, and they find themselves applying to two-year colleges anyway, they’re likely to approach the process with a sense of failure and accompanying resentment. My colleagues and I see that all the time when we interview young people fresh out of graduate programs. It’s one reason some of them don’t get jobs. Who wants to work with someone who obviously doesn’t want to be there?
Please listen, graduate-program directors, faculty advisers, career counselors, and anyone else who has any influence over graduate students: If you’re going to keep admitting people to your programs, knowing many of them won’t be able to get jobs in their fields, at least be honest with them about their prospects. Tell them the whole truth, including the fact that teaching at a community college is an academic career, too, and a viable alternative to the traditional university track—and that they’re not failures if they choose to go that route. Who knows, they might even like teaching at a community college. Some of us do, you know.
That sort of candor on your part will have at least two happy results: increasing your students’ job prospects and improving our applicant pool. Best of all, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that some of your graduates are teaching the very people in this country who need top-notch teachers the most: community-college swine—er, students.
