At community colleges, great expectations don’t come with dollars

When President Obama visited Michigan’s Macomb Community College last summer to announce his American Graduation Initiative, he raised hopes on the campuses of community colleges around the country. Community colleges, he said, would be the key to both increasing college graduation rates and training workers for occupations that would help bring the economy back to its feet. Obama pledged $12 billion over the next decade to improve job training programs, upgrade community college facilities and develop online courses.

Those ambitions have been significantly scaled back. In Congress, the graduation initiative fell out of a bill to remake the student loan industry. What ultimately passed for community colleges — $2 billion in federal funds to go out in the form of competitive grants between 2011 and 2014 — was seen by many as something of a consolation prize.

For community colleges, it was only the latest bit of bad fiscal news. The lousy economy has wedged community colleges between two sides of a vise: On one side, financial support from state and local governments is declining, and on the other side, enrollments are soaring as more middle-class families find they can’t afford four-year tuition and laid-off workers go back to school to retrain. Jim Jacobs, the president of Macomb Community College who hosted Obama last summer, now says that the community college financial model is broken.

By Ali Eaves, Special to Stateline

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