The future of the community junior college

Although there have been community colleges around since the early 1900's, only a few people have any clear notion of the full potential this kind of an institution can make available for education. At first these institutions were expected to provide a substitute education for freshman and sophomore programs at the university. Success was judged upon the basis of whether students who completed such courses were able to do equally well in completing more advanced courses at a four-year college or university. Falling into the comfortable logic which has most often guided the four-year institutions, educators pridefully pointed to the number of failures as indicators of high standards and defensible quality. Community colleges were good if they duplicated with few modifications (the fewer, the better) the standard freshman and sophomore programs. Then during the 1930's someone noticed that many community college students (about three fourths of them) didn't continue this education at four-year colleges and universities. They terminated, it was assumed, their studies in the community college. Of course, some of them were forced to terminate by failing grades-but there were others over whom the faculty fussed and commiserated because their education appeared to be lost, wasted, useless. Whereupon a mass of literature and program planning developed which conceptualized-rationalized-described-and defended a new concept of terminal education. Terminal education meant to most people that education which is organized and pointed toward preparation for a specific job. Such jobs were to be skill oriented-deadend in terms of educational progress-and of a lower level (and lower salary) than those jobs which required baccalaureate and/or

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