Teaching in the Commercialized Community College

Leigh Cunningham

At the start of the winter semester in January 2007, during a college-wide faculty meeting, the president of Kalamazoo Valley Community College (KVCC) where I teach announced the establishment of an auto-tech academy and plans for additional academies (including welding, corrections, and hospitality). The president discussed the reasons for the academies, which would not require students to take general education courses. She saw no need for automotive or welding students to take an English course. As she stated, "some students [...] don't have the luxury of time and money for the traditional path" (Davis A2), and the academies would provide job (re)training, offer curricula based on local business requirements, and offer the fastest possible route to get students into the workforce. At the time (and to this day) the college offered the "traditional" A.A.S degree in Automotive Technology, which requires six credits in English and a minimum of six credits in general education.

A front-page headline in the local newspaper, "Academy speeds career training," and an accompanying article described the purpose of the academies:

Starting with an automotive technology class in September, students in KVCC Advanced Technology Career Academies won't have to take general-education courses such as English. They'll only have to take courses directly related to the skill they want to learn.

It doesn't result in a college degree, but it does provide whatever credential or certification may be needed to work in the trade or skill taught

(Davis A1).

Since the academies would be noncredit, students would pay a fee rather than tuition. For example, the forty-two week auto-tech academy fee was $7,000 for the first academy with a projected cost of $12,000 for future academies. This compares to the A.A.S. degree, which costs about $6,000 (including books and materials).

Although the college used the term "career"—the term "vocational" having acquired negative connotations—the academies seemed to me a return to the two-track system developed and promoted by Charles Prosser in the early decades of the twentieth century that separated vocational training and general education. In fact, the president's elitist statement that students without "the luxury of time and money for the traditional path" would be good candidates for the academies eerily echoes Prosser's own motives for vocational education. According to Evan Watkins, "Prosser was interested in building a working class to meet the needs of a burgeoning industrial economy, not in contributing to a middle-class mythology of individuals getting ahead" (3).

As an English teacher, and proponent of liberal arts education, I was stunned and dismayed by the president's claim that a student, any student, did not need to take an English course, or for that matter any general education courses. Community college students are entitled to an education that includes both general education and vocational training (skill training). By separating vocational training and general education, the academies seemed closer to a for-profit college model of job (re) training than to the mission of the public, comprehensive community college. In fact, descriptions of the career academies seemed like for-profit advertisements, matching curriculum to the demands of local employees.

I am not against vocational education or "career education." While I love the idea of learning for learning's sake, it is naïve to argue that vocational education has no role in the community college (or in the four-year college or university). I may be unhappy with the degree to which getting a better job—most of my students already work—motivates my students' reasons for attending school, but it is the reality. And it is not hard to understand why they feel this way: beginning in childhood they are bombarded with cultural messages that define schooling as primarily a means to material success. For them, schooling has been identified solely with economics and work. The belief that schooling serves any other purpose is lost.

Historically the mission of the public, comprehensive two-year college was to offer...