Harvard or the Community College

It’s pretty self-evident to anyone at Harvard that the world revolves around the Ivy League. Students at the best universities go on to cure cancer, dominate Wall Street, and occupy the White House (or, lately, to Occupy Wall Street). That’s why Harvard and other universities lobby for higher education—with which we mean more money for colleges like ours.

In the fiscal year of 2010, the federal government awarded Harvard $600 million for research, the kind of funding that strengthens our science departments and promotes America’s long-term competitiveness on the global stage. Yet there’s a kind of higher education that may be more important to America’s future than anything in the Ivy League. It’s the community college.

Student attendance at community colleges has surged during the last decade. Enrollment now stands at 8.2 million, a 2.2 million hike in the last two years. In Texas, 79 percent of students who enroll in a public university begin at a community college. Even during the recession, the national rate of enrollment at community colleges leapt forward at a pace three or four times greater than that of four year institutions.

For all our Nobel Prizes, it’s increasingly clear that investment in higher education gets the most bang for the buck when it’s put into community colleges, not Ivies. There are two reasons why community colleges should be a top priority for anyone who cares about higher education.

First, they draw in people who otherwise would never see a blackboard again. Given that those who receive a community college certificate go on to earn 15 percent more than those with no college education, the benefits that young people would gain from the expansion of community colleges are enormous. (We need not mention benefits, like crime reduction, that society would gain.) Four-year institutions, on the other hand, use an admissions process that mostly shifts around otherwise college-bound students among various slots. America needs to net fresh pupils into the educational loop—we’ve gone from the world’s first to 16th in the proportion of young people earning a higher education—and community colleges offer a bridge to university.

Second, improved community colleges will create a more diverse workforce and help close the achievement gap between the races. Currently, 32 percent of Asians and whites hold four-year degrees, while only 15 percent of blacks and Hispanics do. One way to narrow this divide is to bolster the institutions that have the best track record in reaching blacks and Hispanics, and those are community colleges. More than half of all Hispanics choose them over four-year colleges, and almost half of all blacks do. Investing heavily in these two-year colleges will arm members of minority groups, who tend to be poorer, with greater skills—thereby chipping away at both the achievement and income gaps.

Yet funding for community colleges is seriously absent. The Brookings Institution estimated that the federal government traditionally spends on community colleges one tenth—or $2 billion—of the amount it provides four-year colleges. Presumably, this lag in funding is due in part to the fact that U.S. presidents and senators neither send their kids to community colleges nor pick advisors from their faculty, something that reflects a daunting myopia in the political consciousness.

President Obama, to be sure, recognizes the importance of two-year programs. In 2009, he set forth a $12 billion initiative to boost graduation rates in community colleges. That federal funding will dampen tuition costs and attract students. Still, 64 percent of college presidents don’t foresee Obama realizing his goal to produce 5 million more community college grads by 2020. For that aspiration ever to come to fruition, government and donors will have to rethink the way in which they provide money.

Granted, community colleges often don’t provide a great education. Their graduates are less likely to occupy top spots in the nation or world. But one lesson of American history is that sometimes mass education is more important than elite education. In the 19th century, European countries offered first-rate schools for the upper class but scrimped on education for all. In contrast, the United States promoted mass education—first, widespread literacy and primary education, and then in the 20th century high school education for the great majority of children, and finally higher education for a large share of the public. America’s best schools were often inferior to Europe’s best schools, but what turned out to matter most was that mass education was better in America than in Europe—and that gave us the jump on economic productivity and technological innovation.

So, members of Congress and Harvard donors, I have a suggestion: We all want Harvard to get its fair share of funding, but your wealth may do as much at our nation’s least prestigious institutions, the humble community colleges we’re all glad we’re not attending. You might not get a marble library named after you, but you might give a kid who worked odd-jobs throughout high-school a coveted shot at becoming a mechanic, or an orphaned teen with a knotty childhood a fresh start.

And trust me, Harvard will survive.

Gregory D. Kristof ’15, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Hurlbut Hall.