September-October 2009

In May 2007, the U.S. State Department organized an international summit for college presidents from the U.S. and from countries in the developing world. There, the President of Rwanda, H. E. Paul Kagame, outlined the role of higher education in effecting the reconstruction of a country torn apart by war and genocide. According to President Kagame, “higher education plays an indisputable role in transforming a country,” especially one that aspires to create the innovations in agriculture, industry, and the economy that are prerequisites to internal stability and being part of the knowledge economy worldwide.

In the mid 1980s, Rwanda graduated only 2,000 students from its National University— by 2007, that number had risen to 3,000 a year. It did so while the country was engaged in an ideological battle with powerful development partners like the World Bank, which at that time asserted that higher education was a luxury Africa could not afford. But President Kagame told the assembled college presidents that despite this growth and the presence of a number of public and private universities established in the last several years, Rwanda still needed to address its skills shortages. “It is in this context,” he said, “that, together with our American partners and friends in the business and academic community, we are keenly interested in executing a strategy of utilizing institutional and human capacity from the United States.”

That was the good news. But then he went on to say, “We are establishing world-class science and IT training institutions in collaboration with leading American universities, and ... I commend this summit for encouraging the creation of a global university network for building capacity in science, technology, and engineering in developing countries.”

The aspiration to develop universities that engage in world-class science and collaborate with “leading” American universities (that is, those with internationally recognized “brand names”) is troubling because it is a strategy that will serve neither the ravaged country of Rwanda nor most of the developing world. In fact, a singular focus on the rarified world of high-end science and cutting-edge technology may sabotage the very social, political, and intellectual progress they both seek and need.

The aims of higher education throughout much of the 20th century have been premised on the notion that providing for the upward social and economic movement of the relative few will result in more stable and sustainable societies. While this model has had its undeniable benefits in countries like the U.S., where access to higher education had increased steadily throughout the 20th century, the same cannot be said about less developed countries, where social, economic, and gender stratification is more deeply woven into the fabric of the society.

Traditional models of higher education, even more in the developing than in the developed world, favor the “elite,” who generally have had a rigorous pre-college private education. Meanwhile, the general population’s inadequate secondary education not only blocks them from admission to “world-class” universities but ignores their daily struggle to survive. In doing this, the traditional model of the elite university, rather than assisting a country like Rwanda to emerge from its economic and political disorder, will retard the development of a new, vibrant, and economically sustainable society.

Higher Education in the Knowledge Economy

It is clear that in order to respond effectively to the burgeoning global knowledge economy, each nation must educate a greater number of people to higher levels than ever before. And particular attention must be given to expanding the ability of low-income individuals to access and succeed in college--especially in the developing world, where they make up such a huge proportion of the population.

So the challenge is how to exponentially increase the base of people who have postsecondary education. The form of higher education most frequently promoted by major philanthropic and government agencies, the traditional four-year college model, is not the answer. Reproducing or exporting highly competitive and expensive baccalaureate education will not create the critical mass of educated citizens and workers needed to promote the core transformations necessary to propel a developing country forward. The best way to address this new global challenge, we argue, is to adopt the framework embedded within the structure, mission, and ideals represented by the American community college model.

In the United States, almost five million students—nearly half of all undergraduates—are enrolled in community colleges. This number doubles when we include those adults who use community colleges for a variety of post-secondary educational purposes, usually aimed at improving employment and economic opportunities.

Over the past 35 years, America’s expansion of public higher education has resulted in enhanced opportunity in particular for low-income students. Community colleges have played a leadership role in that expansion, more than tripling the number of low-income students enrolled in college, while fouryear colleges have merely doubled their numbers.

And the American community college system serves not only individuals but the larger society. Precisely because by nature and design it aims to serve the needs of the local economy, it is the largest and most effective provider of customized training for entry-level employees and therefore a significant contributor to improved worker skills and enhanced business productivity. These are foundational skills that, as better jobs are gained and finances stabilized, individuals can build upon to further higher education attainment.

This worker-training model could work equally well for the developing world. Moreover, every emerging country needs to have a replenishable cadre of educated citizens to assume the complex responsibilities of developing, managing, and leading their social and political institutions. This too is a need that could be met by community colleges.

Highly developed countries such as the United States tend to promote and export the educational models of those institutions that are best equipped by tradition and finances to maintain strong relationships with international businesses, to retain influential lobbyists in government capitals, and to anticipate significant entrepreneurial gains from “selling” their brand in other countries. In the U.S., well-endowed institutions like Stanford University, Penn’s Wharton School of Business, Boston University, Notre Dame, and Georgetown University provide wealthy indigenous students access to their prestigious degrees. They have also established foreign-based centers to enable their American students to gain the international experience so sought after by major international corporations. These are important and necessary educational activities.

However, it is also true that elite universities may tend to perpetuate or even harden traditional class, gender, and ethnic divisions within a country. Perhaps at no time in modern history has it been so essential to the peaceful and progressive sustainability of the world to understand, define, and support higher education not as a differentiating but rather as a unifying force.

Colleges throughout the world are educating more students than ever before (over 6 million annually in India and China combined), responding to a demand that has yet to see its limits. In Europe and parts of South America, the Bologna initiative may profoundly alter the standard structure of higher education by making degrees more portable across national and international boundaries. Meanwhile, the mystique of American higher education has been diminished by the displacement of America from its position as a solitary world power and the policy decisions that abetted the waning of its ability to attract international students.

Yet in spite of diminishing of American higher education hegemony, much of the world still looks to America as a world leader in educational innovation. Thus, America can aspire to a moral high ground in the formulation of its national and international educational missions.

We argue here that the world requires a new and more vibrant vision of a higher education model that does more than simply provide training for future Wall Street hedge-fund traders or multinational CEOs. Our practice of establishing partnerships and sites overseas can no longer merely serve as a means of enticing international students to study at American universities or work for American companies, of improving university balance sheets, or of making American students more marketable to corporations. The strategy must be more accurately aimed at the development of educational systems that can progressively allocate education capital among a larger and more disparate group of people in every country, and in doing so establish the groundwork for broader and more participatory democracies.

Inverting the Pyramid

The challenge is to prompt a reevaluation of the policies, attitudes, and beliefs about higher education that have the potential to thwart and frustrate the very social and economic reforms that progressive leaders of so many developing countries say that they desire. The educational pyramid is currently standing on its head.

One of the basic assumptions of international development in higher education that must be challenged is the traditional practice of providing the most resources to the top of the pyramid. By establishing a more balanced distribution of resources and educational opportunities, countries can begin to increase the number of people with middle-level intellectual skill sets, increase the potential that a middle class will develop, and enable a greater number of individuals to move across income levels (see Figure 1). This process then broadens the path to leadership and economic prosperity so that it can be traversed by individuals who by class or heritage have been denied access to those goods.

While the idea is perhaps politically unpalatable, the fact is that replicating traditional models of higher education is not vital to very poor nations, because it is possible to educate a developing country’s top scholars in other countries and augment their employee base with international individuals who are needed to launch highly sophisticated business and social initiatives.

Increasing Access in the Knowledge Era

Historically, American colleges and universities were modeled, with some significant alterations, on the great European institutions. In the decades after the conclusion of World War II, the American system has been generally perceived as a superior brand both of general and professional education, as well as being a leader in the advancement of scholarship across multiple disciplines.

To accomplish a radical revision of educational philosophy and practice, governments and educators must arrive at a clearer understanding about how the basic requirements of society have changed in the post-industrial world (see Figure 2). The ideological constraints posed by long-standing beliefs about how, when, and to whom to deliver higher education must be fractured to allow for multiple processes. Breaking free of the old paradigm does not mean lowering standards but rather formulating multiple means for adult postsecondary education to flourish.

Community Colleges in the Developing World

Community colleges are premised on four major principles:

1) They are open-access institutions, providing educational opportunities for anyone with a high school diploma or GED.
2) They offer a wide range of career and technical degrees and certificates, calibrated to the local job market, that allow for employment at “middle-skill jobs” after only two years of full-time study.
3) They provide a pathway to the highest levels of university education through transfer.
4) Through continuing education, they are responsive to local community needs by offering a range of educational experiences to adults for the development and refinement of everything from basic literacy to advanced computer skills tied to a specific business or industry.

For a developing country, a community college system could offer a model of higher education that provides flexibility in terms of curriculum and training and is at the same time deeply tied to the specific character and needs of the local economy. The development of multiple sites within a country rather than the promotion of a single “great university” provides a nodal structure that is inherently more capable of innovation and rapid response to community need.

Our world is currently reeling from the undulations of an interlocking economy that no one fully understands. The biosphere is straining to maintain equilibrium in the face of unrelenting environmental assaults, while the social and political world is beset by violence, war, and poverty. These events are no longer contained within nation states or even within continents. A local, vibrant, organic system of higher education, spread throughout the world, would be a powerful counter to these forces.

And if countries are willing to adopt and adapt a community-collegelike system, there is the potential for greater positive outcomes than just a larger proportion of a country’s citizens educated to higher levels. One is the opportunity to reform existing power structures in such a way as to encourage a greater democratic impulse throughout the world.

Today, in almost every country in the world, the ruling class is comprised of those who are most likely to have been educated in elite universities and who, because they have the means to send their children to them as well, are perpetuating the status quo. A local community college is in many ways a subversive institution precisely because it will attract and serve those populations who are generally excluded from elite institutions and thereby from the highest levels of political and social power. And this is particularly true for women around the world.

In comparison to traditional fouryear colleges, whose focus on peerreviewed research and the lofty but higher-cost goal of discovering new knowledge through “world-class” science and technology research, community colleges tend to yield a much higher return on investment of public dollars. Additionally, because community college students often belong to marginalized classes, they can offer a very different world-view from that of the elite. And this ground-level view— properly educated, analyzed, nurtured, and applied—can result in the kind of innovative ideas, actions, and energy that comprise the fundamental building blocks of the new economy.

A Case in Point

The potential of the community college in the developing world is illustrated by the example of the Universidad Central, the only private non-profit university in Chile. Located in Santiago, the Universidad Central enrolls almost 30,000 students in a variety of disciplines. In a manner common in Europe, students enroll in a single major from the first semester. If they learn that they are strongly drawn to another discipline, they must begin their course of studies again. The rector (university president), Dr. Luis Alday, says that this results in a dramatic waste of student and faculty energy and is also part of the reason for the university’s low graduation rates.

The Universidad Central has close ties to business and industry, where there is growing concern about the lack of a flexible higher education system to produce “middle-skilled” technicians and employees who enter the workforce able not only to perform technical tasks but also possessing the intellectual capacity to solve problems and innovate in the workplace. The Chilean challenge of a social world emerging from years of authoritarian rule also cries for a more broadly educated citizenry.

LaGuardia Community College has developed a student exchange program with future English teachers from Universidad Central. The relationship was struck when Dr. Jorge Perez, a senior LaGuardia mathematics faculty member who was, as he says, “invited to leave Chile by General Pinochet” over twenty years ago, re-connected with Dr. Sergio Quezada, one of his doctoral students who is now the dean of physical sciences and mathematics faculty at Universidad Central. The equation was thus: Jorge’s commitment to social justice by opening the doors of higher education plus Sergio’s desire to meet the workforce needs of Chile’s business and industry, multiplied by the Chilean exchange students’ enthusiasm for a flexible and responsive educational structure, equaled the impetus for the development of a community college.

In December 2008, LaGuardia Community College was asked to help finalize work to create the first community college in Chile. In joint meetings, the president of LaGuardia Community College and the rector of the Universidad Central received encouragement from the Chilean minister of education and the deputy minister of higher education; enthusiastic support from major business, governmental economic development agencies, and military organizations; and finally the formal approval of the Universidad Central’s Board of Trustees to proceed. With the support of LaGuardia, Universidad Central expects to open the community college to its first students by 2011.

Communicating the Value of the Community College

While the work being done in Chile is wonderful, it is only a beginning. Changing a centuries-old tradition of structuring higher education is challenging, to say the least. Even in the United States, one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world, the promise of the community colleges remains unfulfilled. We have not yet perfected the metrics or the pedagogy necessary to fully deliver on the promise of a college education to all who aspire to one.

And the funding of community colleges is still wildly inadequate, with public four-year colleges spending three times the amount spent on each community college student ($31,882 vs. $10,481). Community colleges have the lowest percentages of full-time faculty and often dismal levels of support for tutoring, remediation, and career development.

When we consider the outreach activities performed La Guardia, which serves over 50,000 credit and non-credit students in Queens in metropolitan New York City, we realize that our efforts to gain access to capital, to demand respect, and to engage national leaders in serious discussions about the efficacy of the community college model seem like so many drops in an educational ocean comprised of the Stanford’s and MIT’s of the world. If it is difficult to communicate the value of our own community colleges, it will be even harder to inform and catalyze an international strategy.

So it is essential that individuals in the US who care about promoting greater access to college globally join in taking concrete steps to increase the power of community colleges to deliver education worldwide. One suggestion is to train cadres of individuals who understand the philosophy of the community college model and place them in every government agency that promotes international development, in every philanthropic organization, in every company with international business interests, and in every other relevant non-governmental organization.

Moreover, international philanthropic organizations can be encouraged to rely more on community-college-like structures as key elements of educational and economic development activities. The focus of state-sponsored activities, such as the United States Agency for International Development or the World Bank, could be re-directed to ensure that community college models are actively promoted as development strategies. Government officials and college presidents can encourage corporate and business leaders to provide support to developing countries by advocating for, helping establish, and hiring from community colleges in country.

A Global Agenda

We also need to engage other countries as we struggle to develop appropriate metrics for US community colleges. We need to quantify the return on investment for the kinds of postsecondary non-credit education that is so common in the US and that would go so far to provide the kind of training necessary to developing societies, but whose effectiveness remains unmeasured.

Given the seismic shifts in social, political, cultural, and economic structures occurring throughout the world, there might never be a more important or opportune moment for a radical rethinking of how to deliver higher education worldwide. It is time to recognize that in order to create a Stanford in Rwanda’s future, it may first be necessary to create a community college system there.

And who knows? Such a revolution in educational thinking could lead to increased peace, prosperity, and freedom for unprecedented numbers of the world’s citizens.

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