2004 enrolled at Montgomery College, a two-year school.

The community college system in the United States represents an
egalitarian approach to The Workhorse of Higher Education

By Jay Mathews

How many millions of people have changed their lives by attending
community colleges? How many adults with jobs and families have managed to
acquire new skills by taking night classes at what we used to call the local junior
college? How many underachievers have earned a degree by starting at a
community college and then transferring to a four-year school?

When I recently asked washingtonpost.com readers for personal stories
about community colleges, I received 600 e-mails, pretty close to a record
for me.

Karen Davis recounted how she enrolled at Southern State Community
College in Hillsboro, Ohio, when she was trying to raise a son on teacher’s
aide wages of $3.30 an hour, and found her life transformed by her
professors there. Now she is dean of instruction at the same college, and her son,
also a Southern State grad, is studying aviation management at Ohio
University in Athens.

Stephen Anderson recalled how he chose Lake Land College, his local
community college, rather than one of the nation’s top engineering
schools, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, after he discovered
that community college transfers did better at UIUC than students who
started there as freshmen.

Victor Zabielski, an assistant professor of geology at Northern
Virginia Community College, pointed out that the most recent hires in his
department all hold doctorates from well-known universities: Brown, Johns Hopkins
and the University of California at Davis.

With more than 60,000 students on six campuses, NOVA is the largest
college in Virginia, but you’d hardly know it from the way newspapers like mine
cover higher education. We mention community colleges about as
frequently as pig rendering plants. Most of the media focus — the best-colleges
lists, guide books and SAT-prep frenzy — centers on four-year schools, and
often the most exclusive ones at that.

I, for instance, rarely write about these two-year schools, though they
are educating nearly half of the college students in the country and
represent one of the best bargains in higher education. A 2004 survey
commissioned by the Bridges to Opportunity Initiative, a Ford Foundation program, found
that more than half of respondents had attended or were attending a
community college, and 63 percent had children or close family members who had
attended one.

The nation’s 1,200 community colleges are continually short of funds
but full of eager new students. Clifford Adelman, a senior research analyst
at the U.S. Department of Education, points out that even in highly
educated Montgomery County, known for the Ivy League aspirations of its
families, one out of four public high school graduates in higher education that
doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. Just ask the immigrants who fill many
community college classes. In this country, you can be a complete
screw-up in high school and still get into a community college, where a little
work will allow you to transfer into a four-year school and earn a degree.
Got a 620 on your SATs? No problem. Dropped out of high school and still
haven’t finished your GED? Not to worry. The community college will take you,
though extreme slackers may be required to take remedial courses before
tackling the college stuff.

The Mathewses, like most American families, owe community colleges a
great deal. Both of my parents graduated from Long Beach (Calif.) City
College. My brother, Jim, who got his bachelor’s degree after transferring from the
College of San Mateo (Calif.), retired recently from a 22-year career
at that community college as a senior media services technician. I also
attended a community college. That is where I learned calculus, in a
night class my senior year of high school.

And Jaime Escalante, the teacher whose story gave me my start as an
education reporter, could not have created his successful inner-city
calculus program at Garfield High School without the support of East
Los Angeles College, the community college where he helped his students
catch up on their math during the summer.

So maybe I ought to start giving community colleges their due. It
wouldn’t hurt to write a few stories about one of the best, and least-mentioned,
ways American prepare for their lives.

Jay Mathews’s e-mail address is mathewsj@washpost.com.