Globalizing the Community College: Strategies for Change in the Twenty-First Century (review)

Along with an open access philosophy, community colleges are designed to respond to the needs of their individual community's economy. They are focused, flexible, and designed to change as rapidly as their community's needs change. Business and industry increasingly are looking to community colleges to provide education and training and community colleges are responding to meet these needs. This rapid economic response approach, as well as a mission to offer an affordable, quality education, is unique to community colleges. With this backdrop, Levin's book makes the reader face the question: What effect will globalization have on community colleges' current and future operations?

College presidents, chief academic officers, student services officers, and finance officers, along with their respective governing boards at both 2-year and 4-year institutions, should read John Levin's book, Globalizing the Community College: Strategies for Change in the Twenty-First Century. Professor of Higher Education at the University of Arizona and a former community college administrator and instructor, Levin brings an important work to bear on the issue. The book contains eight chapters and an appendix that describes the research supporting this discussion. It is one of the few books that compares community colleges in two nations in order to demonstrate that the impact and response to globalization are not specific to one geographic location. In light of the significant impact community colleges have on the educational system, it is critical that educators, administrators, and the millions who have a personal stake in the path of education today and in the future keep acutely informed on the external forces that impact community colleges.

In a useful presentation, Levin discusses the effects of globalization and the community colleges' responses to the phenomenon in four important domains: economic, cultural, informational, and political. Gathering data from institutional documents, interviews, and observations, he examines the effects of the global economy upon the mission, policy, and practices of seven community colleges in three Western U.S. states and two Canadian provinces. Through his efforts, he provides a comprehensive array of information to support his thesis that the community college has become a global center for education.

Levin is supportive as well as critical of community colleges. He recognizes that they are comprehensive institutions that serve not only local labor market needs, but also are vehicles for social mobility and change. In an historical approach, he demonstrates how the 1990s changed the role of community colleges, forcing them to focus on workforce training, the market, and economic outcomes.

And it was during the mid-to-late-1900s that community colleges not only maintained their commitment to open access, but also responded to community and training needs, thus losing the emphasis on their social role. The author does not dispute that community colleges should mirror their respective communities and respond to external variables which impact them, such as the process of globalization; however, he pushes the point that these patterns of behavior have transformed the community college into a different institution. The seven institutional studies illustrate this impact and change as well as highlight the similarities and differences among institutions.

The author stresses that today's role for community colleges is to produce skilled workers, respond to work force needs, and to serve as a training and development partner with businesses. He states that the educational shift is from traditional-aged students to the workers who need additional skill sets. He also places the responsibility for this shift firmly on community college administrators. In this, he echoes Dougherty (1994), who argued that community college's operations have moved toward vocationalism and away from a traditional liberal education, creating a contradictory college, in which operations are contradictory to its mission. Whether this is an issue of blame and abandonment or of responding to [End Page...