As a minority, I’m more sensitive to it because we have a lot of minority kids who can’t go through the traditional four-year institutions. Junior colleges are a great option,” Crespo adds.
Breuder says that community colleges have evolved far beyond the original mission of Joliet Junior College in Joliet, Ill., the nation’s first two-year college. According to Breuder, “The mission of community colleges over the last hundred years has broadened away from just being what Joliet was created to do, feed universities, to today where we do more than just feed universities; we got into developmental, technical, compensatory, prebaccalaureate.
“Everybody undergoes what some want to use in a bad way, ‘mission creep,’ because we’re changing to reflect the needs of the interests of the people, whether they’re local, statewide or national,” Breuder says.
Breuder says that a community dictates the mission of its community college, and if the consensus is that their community college should offer baccalaureate degrees or even become a four-year institution, so be it.
“Let’s just fast-forward this 50 years, and we’re predominately baccalaureate. The only way we could get that way, frankly, is if it reflected the needs of the community,” Breuder says. “So if Harper was created by the community, for the community and that’s what they dictated as the taxpayers, we have to reflect the disposition of the people who created us and paid for this.”
PHOTOS COURTESY OF HARPER COLLEGE
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