Community Colleges May Be America's Secriet Weapon in the Knowledge Wars

The New York Times, covering Jill Biden's trip to Europe (where she led the U.S. delegation to the World Conference on Higher Education, reported her saying that

Community colleges could become a tool to help economic recovery in the United States and a model for developing countries debating how to improve their education systems

The article also states:

There are almost 1,200 community colleges among the 4,100 public and private higher-education institutions in the United States, serving almost 12 million students.......

That message resonated in a report released Tuesday by the World Bank, which said countries that aspire to build “world-class universities” to drive development and compete in global rankings of the best international universities may be “chasing a myth.”

Comment: Community colleges are a great resource to students and their families, communities and the nation, providing affordable and accessible opportunities and graduates to fill many key roles in the society. There have been efforts for many years to spread the community college model to developing nations, and I think those efforts should continue. They are not a complete solution to educational needs, but they can form an important, cost effective component of national and regional systems of higher educaiton.

Of course I am a product of the Californian higher education system of the 1950s and 60s in which junior colleges, state colleges, the University of California system and a variety of private institutions were combined successfully. JAD