All things to all people and none to any

Yesterday I spoke at a conference of educators about a long range plan developed by the California Community Colleges. I was troubled when I thought about what to say because a) I am skeptical of any long range plan - educators are prone to make these things up, spending a lot of energy in developing them, only to let them have a shelf life of about 30 minutes. and b) because as they developed the plan they almost consistently ignored the contributions of the independent colleges. So as I said to my colleague with the community colleges - "do you want me to be naughty or nice?" I ended up being mostly right. I spoke about a couple of areas - finances (the long term prospects for more money in massive amounts is small), the role of the California Master Plan (the long term statutory demarcation of power in the public segments has served the state well for more than 40 years), and what is lovingly called intersegmentality - that is the mentality to think about how to work together with your other colleagues in education. Clearly the challenges facing the state are huge and no single group of higher education is going to be able to solve the range of issues that need to be dealt with. But in the last several years - the groups(segments) in higher education (UC, CSU, the Community Colleges, and the independents) have shown less of a propensity to work together.

This is especially critical for the community colleges. There are some internal problems - for example the sector has only about 40% of its students pursuing a degree nationally - that leads to a lot of cross purposes which ultimately dissipate resources. But the community colleges presumably need to think more carefully about how they relate to the four year segments. Precious few students in the sector (fewer than 100,000 of 2 million students) transfer to one of the four year segments. There are lots of explanations about why that happens and none of them are especially satisfying. Indeed, a good number of matriculants in the community colleges may not be thinking about getting a BA - but there should be some lines of demarcation that make sense.

A couple of places are thinking creatively about the lines between the community colleges and the four year institutions. For example, Alliant International University has made a determined effort in the last year or more to define programs which would articulate student desires coherently from the two year to the four year program. This would accelerate study from the AA to the BA to the MA. It would make all of the parts of higher education a lot more efficient - and that might actually free up some additional money.

Likewise National University has done some careful thinking about how to assure that students get to the next level - but a lot more among the four year institutions needs to be done. Without it this four year plan will look like all the other shelf place holders and this generations will not be well served. We cannot afford that.