Community colleges in all areas of the country offer students opportunities for postsecondary education that they might not otherwise have. But the nearly 600 community colleges that serve rural communities play a special role in providing access, one that deserves greater understanding and recognition.
As Arthur M. Cohen, who was then a professor of higher education at the University of California at Los Angeles, and Florence B. Brawer, who was then research director of the Center for the Study of Community Colleges, noted in The American Community College (Jossey-Bass, 1982), for millions of students, the choice is not between a community college and another institution, “it’s between a community college and nothing.” That is particularly true in rural America.
I first became aware of rural community colleges in 1986, when I was hired to direct the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Alabama. My charge was to develop programs and services for the state’s technical, junior, and community colleges. When someone suggested that the best way to learn about the colleges was to get out into the field and visit them, I did. It took nearly six months of travel to visit all 41 institutions.
I was not pleased with what I found.
While every college had pockets of excellence, nearly all 20 technical colleges, most of which were located in rural areas, had “textile programs” — a fancy term for rooms full of sewing machines. I saw only women, and almost always African-American women, training to become seamstresses on those sewing machines. But the textile jobs did not exist; that industry had shipped its jobs overseas. Often, such students had to take out loans to attend college, which meant that they were, in effect, sentenced to long-term indebtedness because no jobs would be available when they completed their programs.
It was not a good situation. Something got into my craw and has fired me ever since. I began to collect good examples of community-college involvement in economic development to try to improve the situation. Besides my fieldwork in Alabama, I also participated in the Community Colleges of Appalachia’s study of rural community colleges, organized by Eldon Miller, who was president of West Virginia University at Parkersburg, and Robert Pedersen, his special assistant — national research that preceded the Ford Foundation’s Rural Community College Initiative.
In the course of my career, I left the University of Alabama to work at other places but returned nearly 20 years later, in the fall of 2005, to serve as director of the Education Policy Center. It pleases me to report that Alabama’s community colleges have substantially improved.
The textile programs are gone, and mergers have resulted in a more comprehensive network of community colleges that provide much-improved service to the people of Alabama, especially rural people. Before the mergers, depending on where one was born, accessible transfer or vocational education may not have existed. Comprehensive community colleges have improved access to lower-division baccalaureate degrees as well as to challenging careers, while expanding short-term, noncredit work-force-training opportunities. And Alabama’s rural community colleges provide cultural and fine-arts programs to poor, geographically isolated regions of the state that otherwise would be devoid of them. They are better colleges today than before.
Through my studies as a higher-education professor and field visits to more than 350 community colleges in 35 states, here is some of what I’ve learned about rural community colleges:
Rural community colleges play a crucial role in the education of students in their regions. James C. Palmer, a professor of higher education at Illinois State University, calls community colleges the “neighborhood schools of higher education,” an especially apt description of rural community colleges and the access they provide to the American dream. Our nation’s rural populations are changing, increasingly diverse, and in need of higher education for work-force training. U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics show that 65 million people live in rural America, 63 million of whom do not farm. Indeed, 96 percent of total income in rural areas, along with virtually all of the new-job growth, is from nonfarm sources. In addition, rural America has seen a significant increase in its Hispanic population.
Increasingly, community colleges are meeting the needs of such rural residents. The center’s research shows that enrollment in rural community colleges increased 42 percent between 2000-1 and 2005-6. A third of all students at associate’s colleges were enrolled at rural community colleges, compared to 31 percent at urban and 29 percent at suburban institutions.
A commitment to access is reflected in the students that rural community colleges serve. A study that David Hardy, director of research at our center, and I conducted for the Rural Community College Alliance shows that rural community colleges serve 48 percent of all first-time, full-time students enrolled in all community colleges. In comparison, urban community colleges serve 24 percent, and suburban community colleges serve 27 percent.
Rural community colleges are also committed to building sustainable communities and regions. That commitment requires meeting the needs of local employers while working to expand the region’s high-wage job base. For example, in research for our center and the Rural Community College Alliance, Mary Beth Reid, area director of education for the Kindred Hospitals of Tarrant County, Tex., found that most of the nurses and allied-health professionals employed at hospitals and community-health clinics in remote areas of rural America are graduates of the local rural community colleges.
Rural community colleges also help build their communities by functioning as regional centers for drama, theater, and the visual and literary arts. For instance, Northeast Alabama Community College, with the largest Hispanic enrollment of any of Alabama’s community colleges, hosts over 7,000 people per year at plays and musicals at its Bevill Lyceum — an amazing attendance figure, given that the population of Northeast’s service area is only 45,000 people.
Rural community colleges play many other roles to support their communities. At Frank Phillips College, in Borger, Tex., students have cleaned the grounds of the local nursing center and conducted an annual canned-food drive to benefit women’s and children’s shelters, among many such activities. Similar examples abound in rural community colleges throughout the nation.
Rural community colleges build especially strong linkages with elementary and secondary education. Rural areas can’t afford to waste a single potential contributor to their local economies, so many rural community colleges offer dual-enrollment programs with high schools throughout their regions. For example, students often enroll at Frank Phillips with between 15 and 30 hours of completed college credits under their belts.
I have also found that people hold myths about rural community colleges. For example, most probably don’t realize that athletics and on-campus housing are very important to such institutions. In fact, in 2002 more than 70,000 full-time students participated in intercollegiate athletics at community colleges, making it one of the most popular student activities. Of the colleges that fielded athletic teams, roughly 61 percent were rural, less than 25 percent were suburban, and 14 percent were urban. In addition, of the 220 community colleges that reported to the Education Department that they offered on-campus housing in 2006, about 90 percent were in rural settings.
Despite the growing accomplishments and contributions of rural community colleges, state financial support in recent years has dwindled. In 1981, 16 states provided 60 percent or more of total funds to operate their community colleges. By 2001, none did. That was before the severe recession of 2001-3, when 34 states made deep midyear budget cuts in their community-college appropriations. In 1995, Texas supported 81 percent of its community colleges’ instructional formula. That support dropped from 65 percent to 52 percent in 2003 alone.
In Texas and the 25 other states across the country that rely on local support as a major revenue source for their community colleges, rural community colleges have been hurt the most by those state cutbacks, according to our center’s surveys of state directors of community colleges. A giant, urban Dallas County Community College District can raise local taxes slightly and generate most of what the state budget cuts took away. But it doesn’t work that way for many rural community colleges, because property values in rural areas are often significantly lower. Thus a larger percentage tax increase produces much less money. State dollars are powerful tools to ameliorate differences in assessed property values between low- and high-valuation districts, so the long-term decline in state support has hit rural community colleges particularly hard.
Moreover, that decline has occurred just as those institutions have had to expand their missions to provide noncredit work-force-training programs. For example, at Frank Phillips College, the percentage of support from work-force-training grants and contracts has grown from 2 percent to 19 percent between 2000 and 2007. To obtain such grants has required a tremendous investment on the part of faculty and staff members to write the grants, administer them, and to report about the grants when completed. Thirty years ago, that time might have been invested in classroom instruction or advising student organizations. Not today.
State cutbacks have also forced colleges to significantly raise tuition for students and their families. At Frank Phillips College, for example, tuition and fees in 1995 were $600 per year; by 2000 the figure had increased to $1,045 per year. This year tuition and fees for a full-time student enrolled over two semesters averaged more than $3,000 per year. The result at Frank Phillips and other rural community colleges is that many more students are in debt, with much higher levels of average indebtedness. Our research shows that 63 percent of all first-time, full-time students at rural community colleges incur debt, compared to rates for suburban and urban community colleges of 21 percent and 16 percent, respectively.
That is largely because people in rural areas generally make less money than their counterparts in urban and suburban areas. While noting that living costs are 15 percent lower, Charles W. Fluharty, the founding director of the Rural Policy Research Institute, has cited wage levels that are 25.5 percent lower for those who work outside metropolitan areas. At what point must graduates of rural institutions leave their regions even if they want to stay?
Given the financial challenges, new public policies for rural community colleges must be considered. First, enabling laws should be re-evaluated and revised. It took until 1995 for Texas to pass an enabling law allocating each of its 254 counties to one of its 50 community-college districts. But those counties’ taxing districts do not match the state-assigned service-delivery areas of the community colleges. Thus, the taxing district for North Central Texas College has fewer than 40,000 residents, while its state-assigned service-delivery area includes Denton County, with 600,000 residents. Because Denton County taxpayers pay nothing to support North Central, the only way the college can provide the necessary services is to force students from Denton County to pay much-higher tuitions. Similar examples can be found across the country.
The problem, which can be characterized as the failure of 1960s-era state enabling laws to work well in modern times, almost always has a strong rural dimension. Model state legislation is needed, and that might best be accomplished if a major national foundation got involved and motivated states to confront the issue.
Second, many presidents of rural community colleges tell me that their involvement in work-force-training activities represents an unfunded mandate, with no dedicated-revenue support from the federal government. In fact, the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Education, Health and Human Services, and Labor all provide different resources through government programs like the Carl Perkins Career and Technical Education Act, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, and the Workforce Investment Act. Most of the federal agencies that administer such programs have a state-level cabinet agency as well.
But community-college presidents often cite bureaucratic turf issues as barriers. In a state like Texas, there will always be regional offices of the Workforce Investment Act and other government programs located in Dallas, Houston, and other cities. But the service areas of those offices do not match the state-assigned service areas of the rural community colleges. States throughout the nation should align those service areas to ease the process by which rural community colleges can obtain the funds they need.
Third, we should evaluate government policies related to investment in arts and humanities. Preliminary research that our center has conducted in Alabama shows that the National Endowment for the Arts invested less than $10,000 in rural community colleges between 2000 and 2005. Does the same occur in other rural areas, and if so, what does that say about the endowment’s ability to stimulate the arts in those areas? We need more government-supported research that answers those questions and also assesses the National Endowment for the Humanities’ role.
Finally, a major national study that looks at the similarities and differences among urban and rural areas is needed. The federally supported longitudinal studies that Linda Serra Hagedorn, a professor of educational administration and policy at the University of Florida, and her colleagues have conducted on urban community colleges should be replicated in rural areas, and the lessons from both settings compared.
Community colleges are the land-grant colleges of the 21st century. They provide both practical and liberal education for the working classes of our nation. As we confront the challenges of providing access and building economically and culturally sustainable communities in the 21st century, it is time to recognize and support the special contributions that rural community colleges play in providing entry to the American dream.
Stephen G. Katsinas is a professor of higher education and director of the Education Policy Center at the University of Alabama. He is author, with Vincent A. Lacey, of Community Colleges and Economic Development (American Association of Community and Junior Colleges, 1989).
http://chronicle.com Section: Community Colleges Volume 54, Issue 9, Page B26