The President’s Plan for Community Colleges
Education July 14th, 2009Dear friends; we ran across two articles on our current administration’s support of community college initiatives. These are exciting inititives and show the president recoginizes the importance of the Community Colleges.
President Obama To Discuss Plans For Expanded Community College Education:
Bloomberg News (7/12, Giudice) reported, “President Barack Obama, writing in today’s Washington Post, said he will discuss plans this week to strengthen the U.S. network of community colleges to ‘clean up the wreckage of this recession’ and ‘rebuild something better in its place.’” Noting that jobs increasingly require an associate’s degree, Obama wrote that “it’s never been more essential to continue education and training after high school.” While “the president didn’t offer specifics,” he noted, “It’s time to reform our community colleges so that they provide Americans of all ages a chance to learn the skills and knowledge necessary to compete for the jobs of the future. … We can reallocate funding to help them modernize their facilities, increase the quality of online courses and ultimately meet the goal of graduating 5 million more Americans from community colleges by 2020.” Regarding the question of “how much more money” the government is “prepared to spend on community colleges,” the Chronicle of Higher Education (7/13, Parry) reports, “One possible indication comes in an e-mail alert sent out Friday by the National Center on Education and the Economy.” According to “the unofficial summary….the proposal could provide $9-billion in aid over 10 years for community colleges to ‘develop and improve programs related to training and retraining.’ The alert said $500-million a year could be awarded over the first five years for a ‘community-college training program, with grants awarded competitively to community colleges.’”
President Obama To Discuss Plans For Expanded Community College Education:
Bloomberg News (7/12, Giudice) reported, “President Barack Obama, writing in today’s Washington Post, said he will discuss plans this week to strengthen the U.S. network of community colleges to ‘clean up the wreckage of this recession’ and ‘rebuild something better in its place.’” Noting that jobs increasingly require an associate’s degree, Obama wrote that “it’s never been more essential to continue education and training after high school.” While “the president didn’t offer specifics,” he noted, “It’s time to reform our community colleges so that they provide Americans of all ages a chance to learn the skills and knowledge necessary to compete for the jobs of the future. … We can reallocate funding to help them modernize their facilities, increase the quality of online courses and ultimately meet the goal of graduating 5 million more Americans from community colleges by 2020.” Regarding the question of “how much more money” the government is “prepared to spend on community colleges,” the Chronicle of Higher Education (7/13, Parry) reports, “One possible indication comes in an e-mail alert sent out Friday by the National Center on Education and the Economy.” According to “the unofficial summary….the proposal could provide $9-billion in aid over 10 years for community colleges to ‘develop and improve programs related to training and retraining.’ The alert said $500-million a year could be awarded over the first five years for a ‘community-college training program, with grants awarded competitively to community colleges.’”
Also an article in the Chronicle for Higher Ed caught our eye and suggests the president plans to propose using federal funds to bring together experts to develop online course materials that are designed to improve student learning, including through multimedia courses and other interactive technologies. The courses would be made available at no cost to students and others through community colleges and the Department of Defense’s Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative, which has worked to identify and develop information technologies that advance learning.
Mike Lesiecki
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