The Community College and the Good Society

The Community College and the Good Society PDF

Author: Chad Hanson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-08

Total Pages: 110

ISBN-13: 1351484710

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The community college is the largest single sector of the U.S. higher education network. As of 2005, 40 percent of newly enrolled undergraduate students attended community colleges. The American two-year school is a vast, rapidly changing, and under-studied institution. The aim of The Community College and the Good Society is tocritically analyze the internal changes and external forces that shifted the focus of the two-year college-from the liberal arts to job training. Chad Hanson raises a series of questions about what is lost or forsaken when public institutions become preoccupied with economic goals. When educational institutions turn their attention toward training workers to private-sector specifications, Hanson argues, our social and cultural lives suffer. He describes the "the learning college movement," an ideological framework that justifies the current emphasis on vocational training. In addition, he explores the implications of competency-based education, a philosophy and method for creating curriculum with strong support among administrators and boards of trustees. For more than four decades, a steady stream of commentary aimed at understanding the two-year school made its way into the literature on higher education. In this work, Hanson provides an alternative view of the community college. He offers suggestions for new teaching strategies, curriculum, and organizational structure. These changes will encourage the potential for the two-year college to flourish as an institution that provides a permanent place for the arts and sciences.

For the Common Good

For the Common Good PDF

Author: Charles Dorn

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2017-06-06

Total Pages: 478

ISBN-13: 1501712608

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Are colleges and universities in a period of unprecedented disruption? Is a bachelor's degree still worth the investment? Are the humanities coming to an end? What, exactly, is higher education good for? In For the Common Good, Charles Dorn challenges the rhetoric of America's so-called crisis in higher education by investigating two centuries of college and university history. From the community college to the elite research university—in states from California to Maine—Dorn engages a fundamental question confronted by higher education institutions ever since the nation's founding: Do colleges and universities contribute to the common good? Tracking changes in the prevailing social ethos between the late eighteenth and early twenty-first centuries, Dorn illustrates the ways in which civic-mindedness, practicality, commercialism, and affluence influenced higher education's dedication to the public good. Each ethos, long a part of American history and tradition, came to predominate over the others during one of the four chronological periods examined in the book, informing the character of institutional debates and telling the definitive story of its time. For the Common Good demonstrates how two hundred years of political, economic, and social change prompted transformation among colleges and universities—including the establishment of entirely new kinds of institutions—and refashioned higher education in the United States over time in essential and often vibrant ways.

Social Democratic Capitalism

Social Democratic Capitalism PDF

Author: Lane Kenworthy

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0190064110

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What is the configuration of institutions and policies most conducive to human flourishing? The historical and comparative evidence from the world's rich democratic countries suggests that the answer is capitalism, a democratic political system, good elementary and secondary schooling, a big welfare state, employment-conducive public services, and moderate regulation of product and labor markets. This set of policies and institutions, which sociologist Lane Kenworthy calls social democratic capitalism, improves living standards for the least well-off, enhances economic security, and very likely boosts equality of opportunity. And it does so without sacrificing the many other things we want in a good society, from liberty to economic growth and much more. While the Nordic nations have been social democratic capitalism's chief practitioners, there is good reason to think other affluent countries, including the United States, will move in this direction in coming decades.

Do Community Colleges Respond to Local Needs?

Do Community Colleges Respond to Local Needs? PDF

Author: Duane E. Leigh

Publisher: W.E. Upjohn Institute

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0880993286

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Describes community colleges as institutions with several missions: supplying courses to students interested in transferring to a university college, providing occupational training adapted to local labour market needs as well as adult basic education and workforce development. Using the 1996 cohort of first-time freshmen, discusses results of educational research into the questions to which extent the colleges meet the education and training needs of immigrants and whether the attainment responds to changing skill demands of the local economy.

Fostering the Liberal Arts in the 21st-Century Community College

Fostering the Liberal Arts in the 21st-Century Community College PDF

Author: Keith Kroll

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-01-11

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13: 1118834534

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Liberal arts education is one of the founding missions of community colleges. However, it has drifted toward vocational training to such an extent that the dominant narrative of the 21st-century community college portrays a job (re)training center more than an educational institution. This volume offers a timely, much-needed, and persuasive argument for the importance of a liberal arts education, particularly in the humanities, for all students attending a public, comprehensive community college. The Landscape of the Liberal Arts What Happened to the Liberal Arts? Two-Year Humanities A President’s View on the Importance of the Liberal Arts in Community Colleges Why Community College Students Need Great Books Discovering History at the Community College Why Community Colleges Need the Academic Study of Religion How Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts Programs Prepare Students for Workforce and Life A 21st-Century Humanities for the Community College Sources on Liberal Arts in the Community College This is the 163rd volume of this Jossey-Bass higher education quarterly report series, an essential guide for presidents, vice presidents, deans, and other leaders in today's open-door institutions, this quarterly provides expert guidance in meeting the challenges of their distinctive and expanding educational mission.

Social Justice and Community College Education

Social Justice and Community College Education PDF

Author: Bryan Reece

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-07-05

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1000389634

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This book explores the central role community colleges play in American social justice. The United States has long-standing social and cultural structures that perpetuate inequality along race, ethnicity, and income lines. The primary role of American community colleges is to disrupt these structures on behalf of the students we serve. In this sense, community colleges are called to play a subversive role in contemporary society, but it is a good kind of subversion. Social Justice and Community College Education makes four very important contributions to this conversation: First, the book helps us quantify and understand the size and dimension of the equity gaps in higher education by tracking ten specific student groups from historically underserved communities. Second, the book summarizes best practices research and literature with regard to pedagogy, services, programs, and leadership in community colleges, presenting practical strategies for implementation. Third, through a national survey of community college personnel, the book covers significant new territory in the discussion of work we need to do collaboratively as community colleges. Fourth, this book captures the unique and special mission of American community colleges. Our work is the work of social justice, and we carry this work out in society at a greater volume, with greater intentionality, and through greater expertise than any other sector of higher education. In this arena, community colleges should lead.

Poor Queer Studies

Poor Queer Studies PDF

Author: Matt Brim

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2020-03-06

Total Pages: 143

ISBN-13: 1478009144

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In Poor Queer Studies Matt Brim shifts queer studies away from its familiar sites of elite education toward poor and working-class people, places, and pedagogies. Brim shows how queer studies also takes place beyond the halls of flagship institutions: in night school; after a three-hour commute; in overflowing classrooms at no-name colleges; with no research budget; without access to decent food; with kids in tow; in a state of homelessness. Drawing on the everyday experiences of teaching and learning queer studies at the College of Staten Island, Brim outlines the ways the field has been driven by the material and intellectual resources of those institutions that neglect and rarely serve poor and minority students. By exploring poor and working-class queer ideas and laying bare the structural and disciplinary mechanisms of inequality that suppress them, Brim jumpstarts a queer-class knowledge project committed to anti-elitist and anti-racist education. Poor Queer Studies is essential for all of those who care about the state of higher education and building a more equitable academy.

Generally Speaking

Generally Speaking PDF

Author: Madeline J. Smith

Publisher: Myers Education Press

Published: 2019-07-29

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 197550125X

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This extensive overview first surveys the history of general education in the United States. It discusses how the recommendations of stakeholder groups have shaped general education in recent decades. Subsequent chapters detail best practices and findings in the assessment of student learning as it relates to the general education curriculum across institutional types. The discussion then turns to the larger impact of general education on culture and society as students navigate life beyond the undergraduate experience. The final chapters will provide insight into how various institutions are innovating through the general education curriculum, as well as a discussion on the keys to maintaining the relevancy of this curriculum throughout the 21st century and beyond. Perfect for courses such as: Assessment of Student Learning | Higher Education Administration Academic Issues in Higher Education | Introduction to/Foundations of Higher Education

The Credential Society

The Credential Society PDF

Author: Randall Collins

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-05-28

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0231549784

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The Credential Society is a classic on the role of higher education in American society and an essential text for understanding the reproduction of inequality. Controversial at the time, Randall Collins’s claim that the expansion of American education has not increased social mobility, but rather created a cycle of credential inflation, has proven remarkably prescient. Collins shows how credential inflation stymies mass education’s promises of upward mobility. An unacknowledged spiral of the rising production of credentials and job requirements was brought about by the expansion of high school and then undergraduate education, with consequences including grade inflation, rising educational costs, and misleading job promises dangled by for-profit schools. Collins examines medicine, law, and engineering to show the ways in which credentialing closed these high-status professions to new arrivals. In an era marked by the devaluation of high school diplomas, outcry about the value of expensive undergraduate degrees, and the proliferation of new professional degrees like the MBA, The Credential Society has more than stood the test of time. In a new preface, Collins discusses recent developments, debunks claims that credentialization is driven by technological change, and points to alternative pathways for the future of education.

What We Owe Each Other

What We Owe Each Other PDF

Author: Minouche Shafik

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2022-08-23

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 069120764X

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From one of the leading policy experts of our time, an urgent rethinking of how we can better support each other to thrive Whether we realize it or not, all of us participate in the social contract every day through mutual obligations among our family, community, place of work, and fellow citizens. Caring for others, paying taxes, and benefiting from public services define the social contract that supports and binds us together as a society. Today, however, our social contract has been broken by changing gender roles, technology, new models of work, aging, and the perils of climate change. Minouche Shafik takes us through stages of life we all experience—raising children, getting educated, falling ill, working, growing old—and shows how a reordering of our societies is possible. Drawing on evidence and examples from around the world, she shows how every country can provide citizens with the basics to have a decent life and be able to contribute to society. But we owe each other more than this. A more generous and inclusive society would also share more risks collectively and ask everyone to contribute for as long as they can so that everyone can fulfill their potential. What We Owe Each Other identifies the key elements of a better social contract that recognizes our interdependencies, supports and invests more in each other, and expects more of individuals in return. Powerful, hopeful, and thought-provoking, What We Owe Each Other provides practical solutions to current challenges and demonstrates how we can build a better society—together.