The US community college after globalization

Abstract

This chapter focuses upon both education and training policy and practice in US community colleges following the period of the 1980s and 1990s where the globalization process shaped and influenced these institutions. On the one hand, institutional policy and behaviors pertain to program completion (including credentialing) and student learning outcomes. On the other hand, national policy for a globally competitive workforce points to the ways in which ideology, particularly neoliberal or liberal market ideology, used the globalization process and globalizing tendencies (e.g., international labor forces, immigration, and information technology). This ideology, or at least its tenets, has insinuated itself into public education. We draw upon a longitudinal investigation of US community colleges that highlights three community colleges, examined initially in the period of 1989–1999 and subsequently in the period of 2000–2013. During the former period, these colleges emphasized international education, cultural diversity, and access to further education as well as job preparation as key features of curriculum. Their operations featured efforts of greater efficiency, the use of information and educational technology, international partnerships and projects, and shifts in organizational structures and management. During the latter period, institutional behaviors and actions took on a decidedly more neoliberal tendency, with greater direction by the state as financial concerns, particularly after 2008 (i.e., the Great Recession), student outcome measures, and efforts for greater accountability and legitimacy were evident. As a result, community colleges in the USA reflect both national policy for a globally competitive workforce, so that the US economy can prosper, and states’ policies for financial constraints on public expenditures through both the rationing of higher education and the generation of revenues (e.g., international education). Thus, community colleges are both vehicles and models of state policy.