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"Democracy's College." In 1901, when University of Chicago President William Rainey Harper helped found Joliet Junior College, the nation's first public two-year college, he thought of it as a mere extension of high school: "Students should complete their basic education before coming to college." Now Edmund J. Gleazer Jr., executive director of the American Association of Junior Colleges, envisions "a new kind of college standing between the high school and the university—democracy's college of this century."
Part of the democratizing influence resides in the fact that most community colleges accept any resident high school graduate. The proximity of such a college can raise the percentage of a particular high school's graduates who enter college from 20% to 70%. A big attraction is low tuition (sometimes free, as in all of California's and some of New York's public junior colleges) and the relative cheapness of living at home. Particularly in an urban setting, these colleges are what Leland L. Medsker, vice chairman of the University of California's Center for the Study of Higher Education, calls the "opportunity college" for impoverished, ill-prepared youths and minority groups.
The community colleges are also attracting more affluent youths who want to avoid the huge, impersonal, lower-division classes on the big campuses, and many who may be able enough, but not mature enough, to compete at the university level. "On a university campus, a student sinks or swims," explains Dr. William G. Dwyer, president of the Massachusetts Board of Regional Community Colleges, "but on a community college campus, we try to teach him how to swim."
Funnel Function. This places unusual demands on the junior college, which often runs honors courses for gifted students at the same time that it offers remedial courses in English grammar and mathematics to salvage the lower-ranking high school graduate. And in its unique function as an educational funnel, it must counsel its students on which of the three broad paths each is best able to follow.
While the performance of specific junior colleges varies from dismal to superb, they are doing best in preparing their students for senior colleges. Medsker and California's Dr. Dorothy M. Knoell recently found that 75% to 80% of the junior college students who transfer succeed in earning their bachelor degrees, and that as a group, their senior college grades average only a shade lower than those of the students who spend all four years on the bigger campus.
Technical graduates perform well in their jobs, particularly when their training coincides with the needs of industries in the locality of the college. But Medsker contends that too many junior colleges tend to belittle their middle-track duty of providing a general education for the nontransfer, nontechnical student. Counseling is also often inept. The failure to give this type of student a meaningful broad education is a serious fault, since two-thirds of all students entering junior college profess an intention to continue to a senior college—but only one-third actually do.