The U.S. community college system is the largest public education system in the world, with over 5 million students. Community colleges traditionally have been used by students for remediation, life-long learning, training in specific skills, and for two-year degrees, leading to university.
Obama has announced a new mission — training the work force of today for the jobs of tomorrow. At the same time, community colleges are being cut by hundreds of millions of dollars. The same “public/private partnerships” that lead to corporatization and privatization are supposedly going to save the day. But what exactly are the jobs of tomorrow?
The introduction of electronics is destroying the unskilled and semiskilled jobs that marked the Industrial Era. Computers are transforming these jobs into temp jobs and precarious labor that works little, but is always on call.
It is simply a lie that the capitalist system will produce jobs that can sustain families for the whole working class. That’s not profitable. The capitalist class can use what they need of the huge U.S. population as an army of low-paid and contingent workers. Why would they fund a two-year community college degree program that equips people for anything more?
To restructure for this future, community colleges are cutting classes and driving out students. They will no longer permit students to re-take a course they fail, and will require every student to be on a job track and take only those courses. In community colleges, as in K-12 education and public universities, the government is being re-organized to directly conform to a for-profit system.
September/October 2012.Vol22.Ed5
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