Battlefield Promotions

The Hechinger Report had a good piece last week looking at the very real possibility that the strains on students, families and colleges may wipe away two decades’ worth of gains in racial and class equity in higher ed. It’s a real danger, and we need to make equity a cornerstone of any changes we make.

That said, I wonder if community colleges might actually receive a sort of battlefield promotion this fall that might be of long-term benefit for equity.

With most four-year colleges still charging full freight for what is increasingly going to be an all-online semester, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a fair number of students who would have gone there instead enroll at their local community college. The economic argument alone is powerful. If Intro to Economics is Intro to Economics wherever you go, why pay several times more? Admittedly, some institutions engage in a form of protectionism whereby they don’t accept transfer credits after students have initially enrolled -- cough UVA cough -- but over time, the sheer numbers may compel some rationality on that front.

Put differently, community colleges may suddenly seem much more relevant to some higher-income people than they have in the past. In the context of 2020, a community college may make a fantastic alternative for many who ordinarily wouldn’t have considered one.

If community colleges do a good job while receiving this newfound attention, not only could they make inroads with new families, some of whom have younger siblings who will attend college in the next few years, but they could also develop some new political allies.

Institutions that serve people with options tend to get more resources than institutions that mostly serve people without other options. In the U.S., that tends to break out along lines of race and class in predictable ways. Over time, economic polarization takes on a life of its own: as the institutions that serve the lower classes endure decades of austerity, people in the upper classes become more anxious about getting into the places where the lower classes are few and far between. The conflation of wealth with merit applies both to people and to places.

Normally, that’s a disaster for educational equity. Whatever equity gains colleges manage to engineer internally are often more than canceled out by inequity between institutions.

But in this case, we may have an opening to reverse some of that. Due to the external shock of COVID, suddenly the community college option carries new weight with the middle and upper middle classes. If they stick around for a while, we could very well start to see resources follow. And those resources could work to the benefit of everyone who’s already here.

Yes, there are echoes of gentrification in this scenario, but with a difference that matters. Residential real estate in any given area is finite, often brutally so. But community colleges are open admission. In most of the country, community colleges have capacity to spare, having endured enrollment declines for most of the last decade. That means that new seats for students who might otherwise have gone out of state won’t come at the expense of people who normally attend; we can accommodate both. Displacement will not be an issue. Nor would bidding wars or cost increases; if anything, an influx of people with influence could help on the subsidy side, thereby controlling prices. It could also help with transferability of credits, as four-year schools that have carefully hoarded prestige start to notice that the argument for continuing to do so is getting threadbare.

Admittedly, I would have preferred to avoid the pandemic entirely, for obvious reasons. But given that it’s here, for community colleges, this may be showtime. If we handle it well, we may stay relevant to a lot more people long after COVID is a distant memory. And the students we’ve always had might finally get a level of resources worthy of them.