At Issue: Online Education and the New Community College Student.

Abstract

Community colleges are facing a demographic shift in their student bodies with significant consequences for how they can utilize instructional innovations such as online education. On the one hand, community colleges are educating an increasing number of adult learners, with a set of psychological, academic, and personal characteristics that make this population likely to benefit from the flexibilities provided in the online environment. At the same time, community colleges are also now educating a growing number of younger and academically at-risk students in need of remediation and greater academic structure than today's online classes may be able to deliver. Community colleges utilizing online education will need to take into account the distinct needs of these two growing populations in order to maximize student learning in the online environment. ********** Since their origins in the late 19th century, community colleges have pursued the mission of finding a way to deliver a quality education and its concomitant social and economic benefits to a diverse population. Community colleges are accustomed to adaptation and change, as they have continuously struggled to find ways to deliver an education to a diverse student population while facing the constraints of limited resources (Cohen, 2003; Kevin J. Dougherty & Townsend, 2006; Vaughan, 2006). Community colleges are now facing a new wave of change in the form of demographic evolution and technological innovation that demand new adaptations. An increasingly diverse student body is entering the community college system, bringing new challenges for community colleges with respect to their ability to serve this population. On the one hand, community colleges are increasingly serving an older nontraditional student population, adults with considerable work experience who are returning to college to advance their education and develop their sells set to help them succeed in the new economy. At the same time, community colleges are also serving a younger, academically at-risk student population with very different academic and psychological characteristics than their older counterparts and with a distinct need for developmental education. This demographic shift has the potential to present community colleges with serious challenges as they seek to utilize instructional innovations such as online education to expand their capacity to serve a growing and changing community college student body. Diversity and the mission of community colleges Community colleges have long pursued the mission of making higher education available to the poor and working class of America. Since their inception during the late 19th and early 20th century, community colleges have been charged with the mission of delivering an education, and its associated social, political, and economic benefits, to a broad array of the population (Cohen, 2003; Kevin J. Dougherty & Townsend, 2006; Vaughan, 2006). Community colleges have historically functioned as pathways by which Americans could pursue economic opportunity and social mobility through acquiring a higher education (Bailey, 2006; Franco, 2002). While higher education traditionally functioned as a luxury product focused on providing the higher class with a traditional liberal education, community colleges helped transform both the availability and purpose of higher education, moving higher education toward more practical programs of instruction that could be applied immediately in the job market to help individuals attain higher-paying jobs that could help them rise up the socioeconomic ladder (Dougherty, 1994). While community colleges have always been involved in the task of making higher education available to the poor and working class, the specific characteristics of these populations have changed over the years. During their earliest years in the post-Civil War era, the community colleges (then termed junior colleges) focused their efforts on educating America's working class to fill the nation's need for a more technically educated workforce necessary to perform the jobs of an increasingly industrialized economy (Brint & Karabel, 1989). …