March 9, 2000 | Read Time: 5 minutes
In this new century, the missions and programs of community colleges are overlapping more and more with the fundamental concerns of grant makers. From educating former welfare recipients so that they can make the transition to paying jobs to forging partnerships with the public schools so that students will be prepared to handle the demands of college, community colleges are playing a significant role in helping to create a fair and just American society.
What’s more, such institutions — which collectively account for 46 percent of America’s undergraduates — enroll a disproportionately high percentage of students from groups that grant makers traditionally have been interested in helping: women, minorities, and people from families with low incomes.
Yet according to the Foundation Center’s 1998-1999 report on Grants for Higher Education, less than 2 percent of all foundation grants given in higher education were received by community colleges. Indeed, foundations grant more dollars to colleges and universities in other nations than they do to community colleges in the United States.
Part of that discrepancy is understandable, particularly since much foundation support is for research. Foundations that specialize in medical research, for example, will always lean toward the major research universities — and indeed they should.
The discrepancy may also be due to the educational backgrounds of foundation officers and foundation trustees. I have yet to encounter a foundation program officer or trustee dealing with higher-education grants who graduated from a community college or who had served as a faculty member or administrator at a community college.
But it is nonetheless unfortunate, because community colleges are among the nation’s leaders in several program areas that are of interest to many foundations and are deserving of more funds:
* Community colleges are leading the way in providing Internet-based education, videoconferencing, and the incorporation of multimedia technologies into instruction. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 55 percent of the college students who take courses via the Internet are enrolled at two-year colleges. My own institution, Columbus State Community College, offers more Internet-based courses than do most of the large public universities in Ohio.
* Community colleges are forming partnerships with public-school systems to promote and foster educational-reform efforts. They are reaching out to assist school systems that are struggling to balance increased demands for educational accountability from lawmakers and the public with tighter and tighter budgets. More than 150 community colleges, for example, operate Upward Bound or Talent Search programs that identify disadvantaged middle-school and high-school students and provide them with tutors, mentors, and cultural-enrichment programs to encourage success in high school and effective preparation for college.
* Community colleges also work with high-school teachers and administrators to make sure that public-school curricula are relevant both to college-preparation requirements and to the world of work. Maricopa Community College, in Arizona, leads a National Science Foundation project to assist teachers in the Phoenix public schools to institute improvements in math and science instruction. More than 100 community colleges nationwide are part of the Tech Prep movement, which has developed a new educational track in the high-school curriculum that blends the traditional academic subjects with career preparation, connecting the final two years of high school with the first two years of college.
* Community colleges are among the key providers of education and other social services to the unemployed and to people on welfare. Several community colleges lead multiple-institution collaboratives sponsored by U.S. Department of Labor as model welfare-to-work programs. Portland Community College, in Oregon, which is regarded as a national leader in welfare-to-work services, operates a comprehensive resource center through which clients can receive job-hunting assistance, job-skills training, and follow-up services to increase the likelihood of success as a new job holder.
What’s more, community colleges are increasingly playing a leadership role in working with a variety of social-service organizations and government agencies to meet human needs in literacy development, job-skills training, and community economic development. And because of their diverse makeup, community and junior colleges are an excellent investment for grant makers who are concerned with education, economic opportunity, and race relations.
Unfortunately, several major national foundations impose restrictions on making grants to community and junior colleges — although they have no such restrictions on providing funds to public four-year institutions. The Kresge Foundation, for example, specifically excludes community and junior colleges from receiving funds. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute provides major support for undergraduate science education and for pre-college science education, but community colleges are not eligible to receive those grants.
To correct that situation, grant makers must move to eliminate those restrictions, and to actively incorporate community colleges into their grant-making strategies. For example, grant makers could respond positively to requests from representatives of community colleges and their associations to visit foundation offices to discuss areas of common interest. Or, foundation officials could invite representatives of community colleges to speak at regional or thematic meetings of grant makers, where they would find out more about the ways in which their missions are overlapping. The Ford Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, or one of the other grant makers that currently invest in community colleges could sponsor that type of event.
The community-college movement in America is a young and vigorous enterprise that has generated many innovative projects. Private foundations can be key players in helping to maximize the impact of those projects.
Hal Merz is director of the grants office at Columbus State Community College, in Columbus, Ohio.
