A. The Community (or Junior) College 1. The Need In an age of technology that constantly requires more specialized skills, our society is demanding, and will continue to demand, an increasing number of workers with skills beyond those obtainable in high school, although not necessarily those that can be obtained only through a 4-year college education. A recent study by the National Science Foundation, for example, forecasts that while the civilian economy will need many more engineers than were thought 5 years ago to be necessary, we also face an acute shortage in the ranks of the skilled craftsmen and technicians. Thus a high school diploma has now become less a terminal point and more a preparation and opportunity for further study and training. By the same token, the economy will provide fewer and fewer opportunities for young people who approach the world of work with limited educational achievements. We are building massive problems for the future in welfare, unemployment, poverty and crime-unless we provide a maximum of opportunity for the youth of today to achieve the highest level of education of which they are capable. The United States Commissioner of Education has recently remarked in an address to the American Association of School Administrators: "Unemployment grows whenever educational levels are low, .. income rises whenever educational achievement is high, poverty and lack of education are always linked." The District must offer educational opportunity where none now exists. Among those deprived of opportunity are young people whose academic aptitude cannot be demonstrated by conventional measures, largely because of their cultural, economic and educational handicaps. These persons seem, indeed, to be without hope of satisfactory employment because of the inadequacy of their educational attainments. For example, the young men and women who are in the two lower "tracks" in the public schools and who finish high school with academic deficiencies, even when these are remediable, are now inadmissible to any college or university in the District. Most of the children of the more than 30,000 families in the District with incomes of less than $3,000 are within this group. Also among this group, however, are many average and even above-average young people who lack any adequate opportunity to realize their potential. The need for maximum educational opportunity-and for the incentive which that opportunity will provide for those who now lack any hope of competing in the world of workis recognized as a national problem. The Committee agrees with the recent statement by Edwin P. Neilan, then President of the United States Chamber of Commerce, in the October 1963 Junior College Journal: In coming years, we must develop a much larger middle-class group of technical, supervisory, subprofessional people who do not need and perhaps would have difficulty acquiring a college degree . The major challenge that we face is the further evolution and improvement of a voluntary system of education, generated primarily by the efforts of the people themselves, working through their own leaders in communities and institutions. The community college provides a new dimension and is an essential instrument in the accomplishment of this purpose. The needs of the District of Columbia in this respect are in no sense unique. In a paper prepared for the U.S. Employment Service in October 1963, "Training for Occupational Skills in the Washington Metropolitan Area," Laure M. Sharp of the Bureau of Social Science Research, Inc., states: It is becoming increasingly clear that the preferred training for semiprofessional, technical, submanagerial and office occupations is a general high school education followed by 1 or 2 years of posthigh school training. Accumulating evidence suggests that this pattern has become widely accepted in urban areas. Employers prefer to have 19- or 20-year-old beginners, rather than younger workers. . . Thus, the junior college or community college is becoming increasingly popular as a "transitional" institution, both for transfer to a 4-year institution and for labor market entrance. There is a lack of such public institutions especially for D.C. Similarly, the Skill Survey of the Washington Metropolitan Area, prepared in 1963 by the U.S. Employment Service for the District of Columbia, states that "The labor market cannot absorb any increase in unskilled labor," and adds: The more education and training a young person has the better job he can expect to get. Some training past the high school level is desired by most employers. As these citations suggest, the institution in American higher education deemed best fitted to carry the burden of extending education beyond the high school is the comprehensive community or junior college (hereafter referred to as the community college). Many States and cities are making far-reaching plans for establishing or completing a network of such colleges, and are placing on them an increasing share of the task of extending and equalizing the opportunity of American youth. California, Florida, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, and Ohio are among the States that have either established many new 2-year community colleges or announced plans for great expansion of their community college systems. Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Miami, St. Louis, and Philadelphia, among the cities comparable to Washington, either have or are establishing junior colleges. The Committee believes it imperative that the District become a part of this widespread movement. 2. The nature and purposes of the community college The nature of the community college recommended for the District can best be summarized in terms of what it should undertake to do. In addition to stimulating and assisting every student to discover his highest potentialities, its purposes should be: (a) To provide through education and community life the knowledge and the ideals on which active, informed and responsible citizenship is necessarily based; (b) To enrich the personal lives of students through both formal and informal contacts with art and literature, with artists and writers-indeed, with all those humane sources of a vision of human greatness; (c) To train the large number and the great variety of technicians and other skilled persons on whom a highly industrialized and rapidly changing society depends; (d) To offer opportunities for adults to repair their cultural and educational deficiencies, to redirect their abilities and to improve their knowledge and competence; and (e) To prepare students for further formal education in 4-year colleges and universities. The unique function of the comprehensive community college is to offer varied opportunities for occupational education reaching from the least complex all the way to those requiring a fairly extensive background in science and mathematics. Technical training at the subprofessional level is a major employment need and will provide the base for the economic improvement of a large number of youth now unserved and untrained for productive careers. The Committee does not believe it either necessary or appropriate to prescribe the specific offerings of the District's community college which, in fact, ought to remain responsive to changing needs. The present employment needs of the District, as analyzed by the recent Area Skills Survey, would strongly suggest, however, that the curriculum be planned to prepare such semiprofessional employees as technicians in the engineering sciences and in medicine, dentistry and public health, specialized salesmen, business machine repairmen, designers and draftsmen, and nurses (registered and practical). The college should also prepare such skilled clerical employees as secretaries (general and specialized), bookkeepers and office machine operators, and such trades and crafts as mechanics (aircraft, automobile, air-conditioning, refrigeration and others), construction and repair men, and metal workers. The programs of the college in these areas will need to strike a balance between mastery of those skills and techniques that facilitate entry into employment, and comprehension of the basic principles underlying a whole category of occupations. Only such a balance can give craftsmen the capability of acquiring other skills with a minimum of reeducation as machines and processes become obsolete. It will be important to relate the offerings of the community college to the program of study in the high schools in such a way as to give maximum encouragement to high school students to look forward-and to plan forward-to its vocational programs. This will not involve intensive vocational education in the high school. It will entail anticipatory learning. High school students will acquire the necessary scientific, mathematical or other background for vocational community college curricula more meaningfully if they see its relation to the practice of an occupation or to later educational preparation for an occupation. High school students should visit classes in the college as well as places where they may ultimately work; they should see demonstrated the use of mathematical skills in technical processes; and they should have the opportunity, in classroom or laboratory, of using background knowledge and skill in some of the more elementary of these processes. Teachers and administrators at both the high school and the community college levels must understand and appreciate the importance of motivation, and particularly the relevance of one kind of learning to another, of one level of education to the next. The Committee believes that in the community college the concept of "continuing education" should take precedence over that of "terminal education." Vocational and technical courses of study in the college should afford ready and effective points of entry into employment, but the doors should always be open to adults who want to improve their skills or retrain themselves for changing job specifications or new job opportunities. Similarly, others who want to remedy their educational deficiencies or enrich their lives culturally should be made welcome by the college. Among these, it seems probable, will be young people who failed to finish high school. Remedying their scholastic weaknesses through special courses offered by the college will qualify many of these persons for registration in one of the institution's formal courses of study. There will also be older persons who may not want to register in the community college for academic credit. For such persons, an adult education program will constitute a vital function of the college. The Committee is aware that both the public schools of the District and its local univer |