The nation’s capital not only has one of the highest unemployment rates, but is also the only big U.S. city without a stand-alone community college. Is there a connection?

 By David Pluviose

Every major city in every state in the country has a public community college, as do U.S. territories such as Guam and Puerto Rico. President Bush, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and civic and business leaders of all stripes are increasingly talking up community colleges as critical to training U.S. workers for ever-changing job needs in the global marketplace.

However, despite near-universal agreement that community colleges are instrumental to the prosperity of communities everywhere, one major city is lacking one —  the nation’s capital.

In 1977, Washington’s only two-year institution, Washington Technical Institute — which had opened in 1968 — was merged with the district’s Federal City College and Washington Teachers College to form the open-access University of the District of Columbia. The merger was part of a push for statehood and for equal access to higher education in the district, movements that had picked up steam in the 1960s.

The Sum of Its Parts
The unprecedented consolidation led to a decline in total students, from 14,000 in 1977 to less than 5,000 today, as well as to a decline in two-year offerings.

“We had a [vocational-technical school] with WTI, and we had a separate Federal City College, and what we argued — those of us who were on the other side from what the [UDC trustee] board did — was that the two-year programs were going to get lost, and that is indeed what has happened,” says Dr. Meredith E. Rode, a UDC professor of art who was a charter faculty member of Federal City College when it opened in 1968.

Dr. Rafael L. Cortada, a former president of UDC, says WTI’s two-year offerings were neglected by a UDC board of trustees that saw a community college as less glamorous than a university. Ironically, UDC’s campus was originally built for an expanding WTI in the early 1970s.
“UDC started with all of the two-year programs you had from WTI. But because of the board’s biases, they were starved to death, because the students were in effect told, ‘Oh, don’t go there, it’s not a real degree,’” he says.