Community colleges are crucial to improving the economic prospects of people from low- and moderate-income families, with many students long past their teen years, yet education budget cuts threaten their prospects at better jobs and incomes.
The majority of the more than ten million students in community colleges, and especially in adult-school academic and occupational programs, are from low- to modest-income backgrounds. And some live in poverty. For the most part, they have not benefited from high-performing schools or quality educational resources. They typically must work—some full-time or close to it—have family obligations, and have limited transportation. The schools and programs they attend provide the primary, if not only, avenue for them to further their education. This is particularly true in rural America. As a steady stream of reports on the American economy from federal, state, and private agencies have claimed, both workforce development as well as attainment of bachelor’s and graduate degrees will stagnate without the achievement of this large and varied population.
It is in these institutions that we can get a measure of how we’re doing as a society on a number of questions that are fundamental to our best sense of who we are. How well are we preparing students from a broad sweep of backgrounds for life after high school, and how adequate are the programs we have in place to remedy the failures of K–12 education? How robust is our belief in the ability of the common person, and what opportunities do we provide to realize that ability? Given the nature of Western capitalism, what mechanisms are there to compensate for boom-and-bust economic cycles, for “creative destruction,” for globalization? Do we have an adequate social safety net, and how effective are we at providing people a second chance? How open and welcoming are our core institutions—such as postsecondary education—and how adaptable?
The problem is that these second-chance institutions are not living up to their promise, and the current political climate poses threats to their improvement and, in some cases, to their continued existence. Community college graduation rates offer one indicator of the limited effectiveness of our second-chance institutions. The majority of students entering community college say they want to graduate, but only about 30 percent complete a degree or credential or transfer within four years. There are a number of reasons offered for these disappointing results.
For all the diverse talents and strengths those entering the community college system bring to it, many students have a lot to overcome, ranging from poor educations and family disruptions to unstable employment, housing, and health care. They have not been on the educational fast track and don’t come from families with much experience in higher education, so they aren’t that familiar with institutional policies and norms. For older students, there’s the additional burden of not having been in a classroom in decades. “I hated school,” one woman told me, “and to be back in it is really strange.” Some students, younger ones particularly, come because they know it will help them get a better job or because parents urge it or friends are going, but they don’t have a particular goal in mind, which, combined with a lack of institutional savvy, leads to low levels of engagement, unfocused course selection, and sporadic attendance.
What is significant, though, is that some community colleges get better results than others with students who share similar background characteristics. Demography affects but does not determine achievement; what the college does matters. Let me here sketch the institutional barriers to student success. We find some of these barriers in the full range of postsecondary institutions, community college to Ivy League university, but they are especially vexing for the typical community college student who has fewer resources to overcome them.
At the policy and administrative level, many colleges—especially those in large higher ed systems—are hard to navigate: guidelines and requirements for matriculation, financial aid, or transfer are complicated by decades of independently made policy decisions that lack coherence. Counseling staff are overloaded (on some campuses a single counselor can be responsible for two thousand students). And different levels and kinds of advising (from an academic department, from the financial aid office, from the transfer center) can be fragmented, leading to contradictory advice. Even after spending a year or two at some colleges, I have a hard time wrapping my head around the many options and requirements involved in remedial courses in math, writing, and reading.
When it comes to curriculum and teaching, course sequences and requirements can be confusing. Here’s a small but telling example: it’s not uncommon that the three sequenced remedial writing courses leading to transfer-level English will have nonsequential, seemingly random numbers such as English 68, 25, and 30. The same holds true for reading and for math. Of more concern, little coordinated thought is typically given to how to address the limited skills and background knowledge of many of the students wanting to take academic or occupational courses. As for faculty, one finds—as in any profession—a wide range of competence and commitment, from people going through the motions to exceptionally gifted teachers deeply committed to their students. But community college teaching loads are daunting, and, increasingly, courses are taught by adjunct faculty holding down jobs on two or three campuses. So mounting a coordinated response to student need is difficult at best. As one instructor at a midwestern college put it, “It’s hard to get the conversation going when we’re all teaching five sections of writing.”
Then there is the complex web of traditions, turf and status dynamics, and beliefs about institutional mission, the purpose of education, and the abilities of the student population. These symbolic and ideological issues emerge when you probe administrative structures or curriculum or staff and faculty behavior, and, to my mind, they represent the most formidable barriers to change. Some examples: the long-standing tension between the academic and the vocational mission of the community college; the deep-rooted erroneous beliefs about learning that shape most remedial programs; and the very different, frequently not articulated, philosophies of education held by staff and faculty.
On the campuses that are more successful, various combinations of enterprising faculty, department chairs and program directors, midlevel managers and top brass—though not always all these actors—are able to coordinate services and provide more structure and guidance for entering students, revise or create curricula that more directly address student needs, and develop ways to work through administrative and ideological tangles.
I want to return to those dreary statistics about student success. Though there is wide agreement that our second-chance institutions (and postsecondary institutions in general) have to do better, some of us are also concerned that these aggregated rates of completion of degrees and rates of transfer don’t reflect the multiple reasons why people go to a community college—and why they leave. Even though the majority of students upon entry do say they want to complete a certificate or degree, many, in fact, shift to shorter-term goals, in some instances because of inadequacies in a college’s services and curriculum, but also in response to personal needs, family demands, or opportunities in the job market.
One young man, a high school dropout with past addiction problems, entered an electrical construction program and over his first year got absorbed in school, developed some literacy and numeracy and trade skills, and began to see himself in a different light. He quit before completing the occupational certificate to join the navy where he could continue his education, clear his debts, and have a potential career before him. A woman with two kids already had a low-level job in the fashion industry, and she entered a fashion program to take four or five courses that built sufficient skills to get a better job in her company. Both of these people would be recorded as dropouts, a failure both for them and their college. It is also the case that approximately 60 percent of community college students attend more than one community college, so we won’t get a complete picture of their postsecondary experience by focusing on their exit from the initial college.
There are efforts, therefore, to develop more discrete indicators of student progress and college effectiveness. How many students complete their remedial requirements within a certain time frame, or transfer-level English or math, or thirty units—a number associated with labor-market payoffs? These and other benchmarks correlate with student success, and they give a better indication of how well a college is doing its job. And, significantly, these more discrete measures can be used by an institution to create strategic counseling and instructional interventions, such as zeroing in on transfer-level math.
It is characteristic of our time to rely heavily on statistical measures in forming public policy; we count, and calculate averages and ratios, seeking clarity in numbers. I appreciate the value of statistical analysis and use it in my own work. But such analysis, especially the fairly broad kind used in policy making—tallies, percentages, trends—fills in only part of the picture of complex human reality. Some studies do combine interviews and other on-the-ground information with analysis of numerical data, but such studies are rare. The typical study would not capture the motives and decisions of that woman in the fashion program and the guy who joined the navy. Furthermore, no matter how refined the collection and analysis of statistical data, without knowledge of the history and culture and daily reality of the place from which the data were collected, policy makers can make huge blunders, as the history of failures in urban renewal and agricultural development illustrate. In general, the makers of education policy have not learned this lesson.
The heightened attention these studies of student success have brought to the community college (and likewise to adult school) has definitely put reform of two-year colleges on the map—a welcome development, for that segment of postsecondary education typically gets little attention. Federal and state governments and private foundations have sponsored initiatives aimed at increasing student success, and the many people within colleges who for some time have been pushing for improvements have received a welcome boost.
The issue I just mentioned about the need for intimate knowledge of institutions comes into play here. These initiatives naturally are geared toward results, more students hitting those aforementioned benchmarks and end goals. The ensuing pressure and accountability might jolt those campuses paralyzed by ossified traditions, infighting, and inertia. That would be a blessing. But we have to be careful about the mechanisms we put in place, for—as recent No Child Left Behind–driven K–12 reform has demonstrated—the fix can lead to unintended negative consequences. For example, there are proposals—and some attempts—to tie funding to these benchmarks: budgets will be affected by the percentage of students that exit remediation or gain those thirty units or complete a certificate or degree. This has a commonsense appeal, but one predictable result will be for formerly open-access colleges to put a floor on whom they admit, accepting only those who have a better chance of succeeding, limiting opportunity for the most vulnerable. Or small programs that are successful will be pressured to expand, to be brought to scale before they’re ready or in a way that replicates the superficial features of the program but loses its heart, the qualities that make it work.
There is one other thing that worries me about the current reform environment. The continual broadcasting of high failure rates—statistics that, as I’ve been suggesting, might not tell the full story—can, over time, breed a sense of hopelessness in the public and lead policy makers to cut funds or redirect them. I’ve been watching, and have written about, this kind of thing happening in K–12 education. The headlines on the newspaper articles reporting on these studies of failure crystallize my concern: “Billions Spent in U.S. on Community College Students Who Drop Out” or “Failing Students Get Federal Aid.” That sort of message can spark action, but it also leads to backlash and withdrawal of support.
The challenge as I see it is to be clear eyed and vigilant about the performance of our second-chance institutions but to use methods of investigation that capture a fuller story of the institutions and the people in them. As well, we need to find, study, and broadcast the many examples of successful work being done daily in these places and build our analysis and our solutions on illustrations of the possible.
America loves the underdog, the come-from-behind winner, the tale of personal redemption, the rags-to-riches story. In Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger’s novel about an enterprising bootblack, one of the author’s fictitious benefactors offers the following rosy observation about upward mobility in the United States: “In this free country poverty is no bar to a man’s advancement.” The belief that individual effort can override social circumstances runs deep in the national psyche. It’s in Ben Franklin’s writing, it’s in Alger’s immensely popular nineteenth-century novels, and it is a central tenet in conservative social policy today.
How noteworthy it is then that a recent issue of the influential conservative magazine National Review posed this question in bold print on its cover: “What’s Wrong with Horatio Alger?” Above the question, the young Alger protagonist sits forlorn on a park bench, his shoeshine kit unused, an untied bundle of newspapers next to him, unsold. The standard political discourse from the Right contains no such question. The party line is that the market, if left alone, will produce the opportunity for people to advance, that the current sour economy—though worrisome and painful—will correct itself if commerce and innovation are allowed to thrive, and that the gap between rich and poor is, in itself, not a sign of any basic malfunction or injustice, for there are always income disparities in capitalism. For government to draw on the money some citizens have earned to assist those who are less fortunate is to interfere with market principles, dampen the raw energy of capitalism, and foster dependency. The opportunity to advance up the ladder of mobility is always there for those who work hard. This is a seamless story, made plausible by our deep belief in upward mobility.
But the author of the lead article in National Review cites statistics that pretty much all economists across the ideological spectrum confirm: upward mobility for people at the bottom rungs of the income ladder, limited during the best of times, is significantly diminished. Breaking the numbers out by race the author writes of “a national tragedy,” that “Black and White children grow up in entirely different economic worlds.” “Living up to our values,” the writer suggests, “requires policymakers . . . to focus on increasing upward relative mobility from the bottom.”
The Economist, not as fiscally conservative as National Review but in the same free-market ballpark, put it even more strongly in another recent cover story. The writers say that the real danger to the American economy is chronic, ingrained joblessness that is related to our social and economic structure: tens of millions of young, marginally educated people who drift in and out of low-paying, dead-end jobs and older low-skilled displaced workers, unable to find employment as industries transform and jobs disappear. This situation places a huge and, if left alone, intractable drag on the economy. Therefore, the editors recommend comprehensive occupational, educational, and social services, for America spends “much less as a share of GDP than almost any other rich country” on policies to get the hard-to-employ into the labor market.
This is the context in which we are considering our second-chance institutions. Many of the people we’re discussing are facing hardships beyond what education alone can remedy, including inadequate housing, health care, child care, and, ultimately, employment—just a decent wage and a few benefits. But for some, improving English or math or gaining a GED certificate or an occupational skill or a postsecondary degree would contribute to their economic stability.
Yet, right at the point when they are most needed, our second-chance institutions are being threatened with severe budget cuts. Across the country, community colleges, adult schools, and literacy programs are reporting record enrollments at the same time they have to trim staff, classes, and services. A number of colleges can offer only a smattering of courses in the summer. Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of people are on waiting lists or simply denied admission. On the other side of this coin are rural and semirural institutions that have lost enrollment over the years because of changing demographic patterns. They are facing closure, even though for those still in the community, they are the only resource of their kind available. One more thing: the public library—an iconic American institution—is reducing hours and staff and closing local branches. And this is at a time when two-thirds of the nation’s libraries provide the only free Internet access in their communities—and when government and employment information and forms are increasingly going online.
The immediate cause of these cuts is the terrible recession beginning in 2008. Policy makers face “unprecedented challenges” and “have no other choice” but to make cuts in education. Doing more with less has become, in the words of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, “the new normal.” The word austerity has entered our national conversation with a vengeance. As I write this, the Los Angeles Unified School District is considering eliminating its entire adult education program, twenty-four community schools, serving over 250,000 people.
I don’t dispute the immense difficulty of budgeting in a recession nor the fact that education spending includes waste that should be eliminated. But when our situation is represented as inevitable and normal, the recession becomes a catastrophe without culpability. The civic and moral dimensions of both the causes of the recession and the way policy makers respond to it are neutralized.
What is especially worthy of scrutiny is the role right-wing economic ideology is playing in these policy deliberations—and as the economy improves, the Right’s beliefs will still be a potent force in public policy. Antigovernment, anti–welfare state, antitax, this ideology forcefully undercuts broadscale public responses to hardship. Such responses are tarred as a “redistribution of wealth,” moving money, as Rep. Paul Ryan puts it, from the “makers” to the “takers.” Decisions are made on a ledger sheet profoundly bounded by simplistic assumptions about economics and opportunity and naive, often bigoted, beliefs about people who need help.
For the most part, conservatives support the idea of second-chance educational and training programs, but many would insist that the programs trim their costs and slash the financial aid that enables students to attend them. These policy makers also resist the kinds of services that many students need to continue their education: health and child care, rehabilitation programs, housing. So they support the idea of a second chance while undercutting most of what makes a second chance possible.
Equal opportunity is something every conservative affirms as a core American value. Yet in no realistic sense of the word does anything like equal opportunity exist toward the bottom of the income ladder. And some argue that opportunity is eroding toward the middle as well. Recent studies show that parental income has a greater effect on children’s success in America than in other developed countries. A report from the Pell Institute, for example, shows an astonishing 47 percent gap in the attainment of bachelor’s degrees between young people at the top half versus bottom half of our country’s income distribution. As that writer in National Review noted, low-income children live in a different economic world.
Many of the students I’ve taught at UCLA who come from well-to-do families grew up in a world of museums, music lessons, tutoring, sports programs, travel, up-to-date educational technologies, after-school and summer programs geared toward the arts or sciences. All this is a supplement to attending good to exceptional public or private schools. Because their parents are educated, they can provide all kinds of assistance with homework, with navigating school, with advocacy. These parents are doing everything possible to create maximum opportunity for their kids, often with considerable anxiety and expense. There’s no faulting them; poor parents would do the same if they could. But it would require quite a distortion to see young people from affluent and poor backgrounds as having an equal opportunity at academic and career success. To legitimize their view of the economy and society, then, conservatives have to justify advantage.
One way to account for unequal opportunity is to claim that intelligence is a factor and that the families and their children at the lower end of things are there because they’re not that bright—so various compensatory programs, in fact, won’t help that much. You’ll certainly hear this kind of talk in private, and a few bold pundits like Charles Murray, of The Bell Curve fame, say it in public. But scientifically it doesn’t hold water, and it is so politically unpalatable that few politicians would risk uttering it.
Another way to explain away inequality—one that has a long history in the United States and is still very much with us—is the moral argument. People are at the lower end of the economy because of a failure of character; they engage in counterproductive behavior, lack a work ethic, don’t complete things, and so on. They are a drain on the system, gaming it, on the dole. Since Ronald Reagan’s infamous “welfare queen” invocation, conservative political discourse has been brimming with such imagery, as the 2012 GOP primaries demonstrated. There is both a theory of the social order and good, old-fashioned prejudice at play here—and both are enhanced by the social isolation of the rich from the poor.
I don’t want to minimize the deep philosophical differences between the conservative and liberal perspectives on social issues, but I do think that some conservatives would be surprised to see firsthand the work ethic, the lack of excuses for previous bad behavior and blunders, the self-reliance, multiple responsibilities, and schedules of the people who populate poor communities.
I’ve been working with one group of students who begin classes at 7:00 A.M., then work, participate in student government, go to the library to study, and leave in the evening—usually by public transportation—to homes that are anything but stable (thus the refuge of the library). One young man is currently homeless, sleeping in his inoperable car parked at a friend’s family’s house. He’s at school every day by 6:00 A.M. to clean up and get his day in order.
Of course there are people at their school who are drifting, drawing what resources they can, sometimes deluding themselves, sometimes consciously gaming the system. Allow me to note that the students I’m mentoring can point them out in a heartbeat—because they are not the norm. Furthermore, and it’s a sign of the times that I even have to write this, such behaviors appear across the socioeconomic landscape. The deplorable thing is the degree to which moral and character flaws are disproportionately attributed to poor people. But if you are able to penetrate the ideological fog and actually enter other people’s lives, you’ll witness a quite different and much more complex human reality.
Finally, the Right justifies advantage by defining opportunity as an individual phenomenon and representing obstacles to mobility as clear and local and within one’s personal power to overcome. This definition yields a particular version of the rags-to-riches story, which takes us back to the young Horatio Alger character sitting on that park bench. Conservatives use rise-from-hardship narratives to great effect, for the narratives confirm their claims about the ever presence of opportunity, regardless of background. But one of the most striking things about conservative celebrations of social mobility is that they are accounts of hardship with almost no feel of hardship to them. They reflect a kind of opportunity that exists only in fiction. Obstacles receive brief mention—if they’re mentioned at all—and anger, doubt, or despair are virtually absent. You won’t see the home health care worker whose back is a wreck or the guys at bitter loose ends when the factory closes. You won’t see people, exhausted, shuttling between two or more jobs to make a living or the anxious scramble for minimal health care for their kids.
The Right’s stories present a world stripped of the physical and moral insult of poverty. Characters move upward, driven by self-reliance, optimism, faith, responsibility. Though there might be an occasional reference to teachers or employers who were impressed with the candidate’s qualities, the explanations for the candidate’s achievements rest pretty much within his or her individual spirit. The one exception is parents: they are usually mentioned as the source of virtue. Family values as the core of economic mobility.
In the Alger originals, the lucky break, the fortuitous encounter is key to the enterprising hero’s ascent. Alger’s narrator states: “Not many boys can expect an uninterrupted course of prosperity when thrown upon their own exertions.” It’s worth dwelling on this sentence, for there’s little play of chance and good fortune in the contemporary conservative version. Luck’s got nothing to do with it. And you surely will not hear a whisper about legislation or social movements that may have enhanced opportunity, opened a door, or removed an obstacle. It would be hard to find a more radically individual portrait of achievement.
The stories of mobility that I know differ greatly from the conservative script. To be sure, there is hard work and perseverance and faith—sometimes deeply religious faith. But many people with these same characteristics don’t make it out of poverty. Discrimination is intractable, or the local economy is devastated to the core, or the consequences of poor education cannot be overcome, or one’s health gives out, or family ties (and, often, tragedy) overwhelm.
The people who do succeed—and their gains are typically modest—often tell stories of success mixed with setbacks, of two steps forward and one back. Such stories reveal anger and nagging worry or compromise and ambivalence or a bruising confrontation with one’s real or imagined inadequacies—“falling down within me,” as one woman in an adult literacy program put it. This is the lived experience of social class. No wonder that these truer stories typically give great significance to help of some kind, both private and public. A relative, a friend, or a minister lends a hand. Family and community social networks open up an opportunity. A local occupational center provides training. The government’s safety net—food stamps and welfare, Medicaid, and public housing—protects one from devastation.
It is, then, a tight bundle of reductive economic and social theory, a fanciful definition of opportunity, and negative beliefs about the poor that have become such a force in truly difficult budget negotiations, and there does not seem to be an equally powerful economic and moral countervoice in those deliberations to check it.
As the editors of the Economist pointed out, the United States does not currently have robust policies to help low-income people enter and thrive in the labor market. Among the few policy initiatives in place are ones aimed at increasing enrollments in postsecondary education, and several private foundations, notably Gates and Lumina, have been sponsoring such initiatives as well. These efforts are laudable; however, they reach a fairly small percentage of poor and low-income Americans and on average are targeted toward the more academically skilled among them—though many still require remedial English and mathematics.
The economic rationale for increased postsecondary education rests on some widely held—and continually broadcasted—assumptions. Work in the “new economy” requires more literacy, numeracy, and computer skills as well as so-called soft skills like collaboration and communication. A further assumption is that there is a “skills mismatch” between many Americans and the labor market; that is, there are jobs out there that go unfilled because the local labor pool doesn’t possess the technological or behavioral skills to do the work. These beliefs have become gospel, repeated daily in policy speeches and documents and on opinion pages. And they do fuel enrollments in adult schools, colleges, and private occupational schools. There is some truth in them. A lot of the jobs that were available to someone with limited education in the mid-twentieth century have been automated and outsourced. And some specialized businesses across the country can’t readily get the kind of employee they need. But the overall economic picture is more complicated.
First of all, in many sectors of the labor market, there are simply fewer jobs to be had because of changes in technology and the way work is organized. And Americans are working longer and harder, creating increases in production but not in jobs or salaries. Many jobs, both blue-collar and white, are also being broken down into components and outsourced. Your service representative is speaking to you from India or the Philippines. The traditional correlation between increased education and income still holds, but a whole lot of people with bachelor’s degrees and beyond are out of work or working at a job that requires no college degree at all.
A particularly trenchant critique of the standard line on education and jobs is offered by political economist Gordon Lafer, who argues that the fundamental problem with the economy is the shortage of jobs and the absence of vigorous job-creation policies. It is a political “charade,” as he puts it, to push job training as the solution to unemployment, for this approach shifts the blame for unemployment and income inequality onto workers themselves, onto their lack of “higher-order thinking skills,” or “soft skills,” or the “mismatch” between their skills and the skills that industry demands. In fact, the jobs aren’t there, and short-term training in job-seeking strategies or basic skills does not make an appreciable difference in helping people get the limited number of jobs that do exist.
Lafer is targeting a particular set of policies and training programs primarily connected to the Workforce Investment Act, not necessarily the kinds of educational experiences I’m concerned with here, though there can be some overlap. But the larger point he makes is important here, for there is in the air the belief that education itself will lift people out of hard times. So let me be clear. I am not claiming that the education provided by second-chance institutions alone will guarantee mobility, be an economic magic bullet. I agree wholeheartedly with the call for better economic policy, for I see what happens when people work hard, build skills, gain a certificate or degree, and then go out into a world with no jobs or apprenticeships. It is indeed a cruel charade.
I am championing second-chance programs because I believe that when well executed they develop skills and build knowledge that can lead to employment but also provide a number of other personal, social, and civic benefits. There is an economic rationale for championing these programs—and these days the economic rationale is the only one that has a prayer of swaying policy makers—but school is about more than a paycheck.
To my mind, education and job creation are not an either-or proposition. There is a political battle over employment to be waged. And there is work to be done in the classroom. And at times the two come together. Students meet others in similar circumstances and broaden their understanding of their own hardships. They are exposed to economics, political science, history that, I’ll be the first to admit, can simply be another bunch of stuff to memorize and get out of the way but also can provide perspectives on society and one’s place in it. This is where good teaching is so important. Some students join clubs, trade organizations, or student government or get jobs on campus, all of which can provide the occasion to develop social networks and be exposed to new activities and bodies of knowledge. And as students become more literate and numerate, as they develop their interests or acquire new ones, as they learn trade skills, as they feel their minds working, this all affects the way they move through the world and act on it. One study suggests that nearly 20 percent of community college students decide to pursue further education after enrolling in their two-year institution. To the degree that educational programs and job creation are in conflict, it is solely because of political manipulation and not because the two are naturally antagonistic.
I believe deeply in what schooling can accomplish. And part of our problem—on the right and the left—has been that for decades we have reduced school, K–16, to an economic institution. But it is more than that, and throughout our history we have affirmed that education—for children and for adults, in the schoolhouse and in self-improvement associations—yields multiple benefits to self and society.
There are a number of means by which people can get a second chance in the United States: through education, through churches and faith-based institutions, through government programs and the military, through civic and community-based organizations, through labor unions, and through a wide range of private business and philanthropic initiatives. I’m focusing on education, and particularly on the community college and, to a lesser degree, the adult school. I refer to literacy programs, but did not have access to a substantial one during the writing of this essay, although I have in the past and will draw on that experience. In addition to libraries, community organizations, and churches, adult literacy instruction is also found in adult schools and some community colleges, so we will meet men and women along the way who are trying to learn to read and write.
Private occupational colleges—often called proprietary schools—have been in existence since the late nineteenth century (correspondence schools were one early example), and they have been undergoing a boom in the last few decades. They focus on specific job training, from fashion and culinary to engineering. As with any institution—particularly a rapidly growing one—there is a range of quality in proprietary schools, from ones that are well established and accredited to those that have been the subject of criminal investigation for fraud. Proprietary schools are not represented in this essay, for I want to focus on institutions that have a broader educational mission; even though community colleges and adult schools do offer occupational training (and we will witness a lot of it), that training, at least in theory, is embedded in a more educationally comprehensive institutional philosophy. I am also focusing on the public domain, on institutions that the society sees as worth supporting as part of the public good, as integral to the development of its citizens. This is an essay about the public, as well as personal, meaning of a second chance.
From Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education.