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Why Honors Is a Hard Sell in the Community College.

The proposed honors program at our two-year community and technical college hangs in limbo. At the college president's request and after attending the 2013 NCHC conference in New Orleans, we developed a comprehensive honors program framework and spent the spring semester of 2014 sharing it with units across the college for discussion and feedback. The response was overwhelmingly positive. Our audiences suggested ways the program could leverage ongoing initiatives to meet strategic college goals and enrich current programming and opportunities for students, both in the technical and liberal arts areas. Moreover, the college saw the initiative as an opportunity to build a unique niche for itself since no other two-year colleges in the state of Minnesota offer a comprehensive honors program of this nature. Despite the many benefits of this proposed program, the administration hesitated to go forward The administrative indecision around our proposed program is but one manifestation of how honors education threatens to subvert larger narratives about the purpose of community colleges. Certainly many forces--structural, financial, and institutional--come together to impact the development of and investment in a new academic program. However, beyond the constraints all institutions face--financial pressures, enrollment issues, diminishing public support, and individual institutional characteristics--prominent contemporary discourse on community colleges seems to define their mission as incompatible with honors education Two-year colleges have been framed as the locus of remedial classes and "workforce skills training," not as sites of the academic and professional opportunity sought out by those in the more privileged social strata. Given this assumption about the role of community colleges, they have also been deemed the place of choice for a student population for whom academic and career expectations are low, students without the cultural capital of a middle-class upbringing. However, not only is honors education particularly suited to disrupt this narrative but, at its best, destabilizes it by recognizing all students' potential and--through mentoring, academic engagement, and high expectations--enabling them to realize their potential THE MISSION OF THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE The present status of community colleges developed concurrently with major shifts in the economy and education sectors. Prior to the end of World War II, four-year college completion rates in the United States were just 6% for men and 4% for women (National Center for Education Statistics). In the post-war period, good jobs that could support families in a middle-class lifestyle were available to those with at most a high school diploma. The ranks of the college-educated began to increase, however, as returning GIs used their benefits to further their educations. The Truman Commission Report of 1947 further spurred access to higher education by advocating the establishment of community colleges: locally based, open-access institutions of higher education that would democratize access and promote an educated citizenry Further, a college degree started to become more of a necessity as, beginning in the 1970s, the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy resulted in the loss of readily available, well-paying, union jobs that did not require post-secondary education. Today, however, an increasing number of jobs in all categories require degrees, and young people are told that they have essentially no future unless they obtain degrees and credentials. More and more, the focus on going to college is not to be well-educated but rather to be equipped to get any job at all. At the same time that these huge shifts in the economy have been occurring, college tuition has increased tremendously, even at state colleges and universities, making community colleges for many students the most affordable institutions of higher education. For this reason, community colleges can be, and for a small segment of their student bodies are, a place for students to start a college degree and from which to transfer to a four-year school, possibly then pursuing graduate study in their chosen field. …