Spotlight on Community Colleges

* Stephen Anderson was admitted to both the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of the nation's top engineering schools, and Lake Land College, his local community college. When he discovered that community college students who transferred to UIUC on average earned higher grade-point averages than students that started at the four-year school, he chose LLC. "I've traded off a $45,000 price tag for the first two years at UIUC for the cost of gas to get me to school each day," he said.

* Victor P. Zabielski, assistant professor of geology at Northern Virginia Community College, said he is finding many doctorates who want to teach rather than worry about publishing papers and are filling community college faculties. "Of the last three hires here in my department," he said, "all have Ph.D.s, myself from Brown University, another from Johns Hopkins, and the third from the University of California--Davis.

* Christopher McNally, a tenured associate professor of automotive technologies at a community college in New York, warned me not to overlook the two-year students who are getting vocational degrees and have no use for a four-year school. "I have many twenty-something former students with annual salaries far exceeding my own," he said.

* Teresa Monroe of Amsterdam, N.Y., said her son as a high school senior took all of his courses at a local community college and started Binghamton University the next year as a sophomore. The use of two-year schools to invigorate the high school years is growing, and some early college high school programs enroll high school juniors as college students.

As I said in my first column, it is hard to overlook the vibrancy of two-year schools, even if they are ignored by elitist columnists like me. I was happy see one emailer confess the same fault. This was Clifton Truman Daniel, the public relations director for a community college in Chicago named after his grandfather, President Harry S Truman.

Daniel said he used to be a reporter and also ignored community colleges as uninteresting. Now he wonders why he ever felt that way. At Truman College, he said, "I like walking down the hall and hearing every language but English (more than 56 are spoken here) and I like the fact that most people don't look or dress like me (students come from more than 144 countries). Most of all, I like the sense of optimism, of hope and possibilities. I know that exists at four-year schools, too, but here it's different, more deeply felt. The opportunity to obtain an education is viewed as a gift."

That is the way that single mother, Karen Davis, sees it, 19 years after she got her associate's degree at Southern State Community College. It was a hard time, particularly when she went to a four-year school, and beyond. "My father did not speak to me for several years during and after obtaining my master's degree," she said. He told her she was getting "above my raising" and becoming an "educated idiot."

But those attitudes will not survive into the next generation. The son she had to raise on her own also started college at Southern State, and he is now at Ohio University in Athens, seeking a degree in aviation management. He doesn't qualify for financial aid because his mother is making too much money---she is the dean of instruction at Southern State--but she doesn't mind paying those bills.

"I see it," she said, "as my way of repaying society for providing me with the financial aid and convenient, affordable, quality education provided to me through the humble beginnings of the community college."