Community college programs don’t adapt all that well to changes in the labor market, Michel Grosz argues.
Educators, policy makers and the business community are banking on community colleges to prepare the work force for jobs in rapidly growing fields and occupations. The ability of community colleges to perform such a role is increasingly vital, as the ongoing upheaval in labor markets due to trade and technological innovation has far-reaching consequences — affecting income inequality and political alignments, for example. The conventional wisdom for years, however, has been that the community college sector “dances to the rhythms of the labor market, but it rarely keeps very good time,” in the words of Kevin J. Dougherty, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, in The Contradictory College.
So far, research with strong empirical evidence on the topic has been scant. That’s why I embarked on a detailed analysis of California’s labor market and its 115 community college campuses, the nation’s largest public higher education system. My preliminary findings show that the criticism of community colleges regarding their ability to respond to changing markets is, to a certain extent, generally valid. Community colleges do increase certificates and degrees in growing occupations but only at half the pace that those occupations are growing. Equally important, I found that students, rather than college administrations, are responsible for most of that degree expansion.