Opportunity Stymied in Community Colleges by Extreme Partisanship and Money in Politics
In a new and very thoughtful blog post, Mike Rose, well known education writer and professor at UCLA, explores a subject on which he is an expert: the meaning of community colleges in the lives of their students. In Rose’s 2012 book, Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education, he declares: “One of the great achievements of American higher education, an achievement uniquely ours, is its continued drive—not without conflict and contradiction—toward wider and wider inclusion. The community college has been especially valuable here…. What has become increasingly clear over the past few decades, however, is that access is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for achieving a robust and democratic system of higher education. It is not enough to let people in the door; we have to create the conditions for them to thrive once inside.”
In his current blog post, Rose considers a book I haven’t read, but plan to find very soon:Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream by Suzanne Mettler. How does public policy address—or for a number of intersecting reasons miss—the needs of the students it is intended to help? Rose is a skilled story teller who depicts the lives of particular students to show how, “The elements of inequality…inadequate aid, diminished student services—interact with the broader dynamics of social and economic inequality in our time: income disparities, unstable housing, food insecurity, cutbacks in social services. There’s an awful synergy here as each sphere of inequality intensifies the other making it increasingly difficult for low-income students to enter and succeed in college.”
Rose describes two years he spent observing a community college in a very poor neighborhood of a big city: “the overall picture (is) one of profound possibility and profound need.” Worries for the students include money, the timing of the arrival of their financial aid, transportation, housing, lack of access to a computer or on-line access. Then there are family and overwhelming work responsibilities with many students patching together several jobs to make ends meet at the same time they are attending school. Personal and family crises for Opportunity Stymied in Community Colleges by Extreme Partisanship and Money in Politics | janresseger: