Learning, Diversity and the Road Ahead

By Mark David Milliron & Gerardo de los Santos

Community college leaders anticipate wrestling with the increasing challenges of students enrolling at their institutions at different ages, with different backgrounds and beliefs and with vastly different levels of preparation. But there are many other issues of concern as well, such as keeping up with technology and recruiting and retaining diverse faculty.

We recently completed the fourth in a series of road-ahead surveys to find out what community college leaders think will be their biggest long-term challenges. Here’s a quick overview of some of our key findings, which will be published by the League for Innovation in the Community College in July: 

Patterns of Enrollment: Even more students will hold jobs, most will be first-generation college students and a growing cohort will be immigrants. Neat, linear pipeline models and traditional two-year programs will be hard pressed to meet the needs of these students — as they have been for some time. Leaders saw the need to expand outreach services to reach and truly engage these diverse students on their lifelong learning journeys. Everything from accelerated programs to five-year models will be tried, along with strategies to better bond with students as they enroll, leave and re-enroll in the community college. In addition, a growing number of recent high-school graduates will be driven our way because of the increasing costs of higher education. This cohort may lull us into thinking the traditional model is back in force. Demographic data, and our participants, warn against this assumption.

Diversity of Learning Needs:  Meeting the learning needs of local communities will continue to be a challenge. Biotechnology, teacher education, law enforcement, homeland security, health programs (especially nursing) and a general emphasis on science, technology, engineering and math will dominate the programmatic planning to meet the most pressing learning needs.