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Book Review: Globalizing the Community College: Strategies for Change in the Twenty-First Century

Globalizing the Community College: Strategies for Change in the Twenty-First Century by John S. Levin. Palgrave, New York, NY. 2001, 248 pages. $35, hardcover, ISBN 0-312-23906-8. Reviewed by Paula Zeszotarski. In his comparison of seven case studies from two nations, John S. Levin provides a revealing portrait of the community college as a late twentieth-century organization. Levin accurately depicts some of the key influences on contemporary higher education institutions through the lens of globalization theory. By focusing on the descriptive rather than the predictive, Levin improves on many theoretical discussions of globalization. However, the author could have made a further contribution to globalization theory by demonstrating how his evidence challenges certain central beliefs about globalization. The purpose of Levin's study is to demonstrate the effect of certain external forces on internal changes in community colleges. Levin asserts that globalization is chief among these forces in the late 1990s. For Levin, globalization is multidimensional. "While the global economy played a dominant role in institutional behaviors and actions, other global flows such as culture and information technology affected institutions" (p.xviii). To this end, Levin studied a total of seven colleges in the United States and Canada. Beginning in April 1996, Levin conducted formal and informal interviews with students, faculty, and staff; observed institutional activities; and analyzed governmental and institutional documents. Levin devotes one chapter of analysis to each of the four, interrelated domains: economic, cultural, information, and political. Drawing on the literature of the effect of globalization on higher education, Levin identifies behaviors associated with the impact of globalization on higher education and examines them within the context of the four domains. These behaviors were not present in all organizations studied, nor were they unilaterally observable in any one organization. The result of this study is an accurate and insightful portrait of contemporary community colleges. The changing role of the state was the primary influence on community college behavior in the economic domain. Most colleges experienced a decrease in state funding and the loss of their primary economic support sent colleges scrambling to do more with less and to seek other (private) sources of revenue. At the same time, states actively promoted productivity, often through establishing performance measures. College responses were characterized by internationalization, marketization, productivity and efficiency, restructuring, and commodification. Marketization and internationalization (see below) occurred partially as a result of decreased state support. Colleges sought new sources of revenue from contract training partnerships with local and foreign businesses and governments, increasing tuition fees for local students and admitting more international students, and donations from the private sector. Marketization meant curricular changes in the form of a new focus on vocational programs. Productivity and efficiency became the buzz words of education in the last decades of the twentieth century. Individual colleges responded to this external pressure differently. Some expanded course offerings in high demand areas and other systematized program reviews that resulted in program revision or reduction. Most colleges became more reliant on part-time faculty, a trend that was widespread throughout American community colleges at the time. A related behavior, organizational restructuring, was motivated by financial, personnel, and cultural considerations. Financially, colleges responded to revenue shortfalls by laying off workers and downsizing operations. Personnel changes came as a result of reclassification of employees and the use of team instead of autonomous structures for faculty. In response to this new economic environment, commodification of programs was demonstrated by the marketing of special programs such as distance and international education and the infusion of marketable skills into traditional education. …