For 'bargain' community colleges, future looks bright

Well, it's over. For 73 years a Chalberg has been associated with the two-year school movement in Minnesota. That's now at an end. And, yes, it once was a movement, even if it hasn't been for quite a while.

Part of the movement idea was embedded in the original designation of "junior college." And a perfectly reasonable and accurate descriptor that was. It's long since given way to "community college."

Whether junior or community, full-fledged colleges they are not. Nor have they previously pretended to be — or aspired to become. And yet the pretense is increasingly there. In all kinds of ways and for all sorts of reasons, "community" is gradually being jettisoned.

Quicker and easier — and more pretentious — though it may be, something gets lost in the transition to just plain "college." Part of that something is the idea of a movement to offer lower-division college courses to primarily first-generation college students whose families could not afford to pay the going rate for a four-year residential college. And that was at a time when the "going rate" was a pittance compared to today.

My father was one of the pioneers of this movement in Minnesota. He was also a community leader. I am neither. It's always been the classroom for me, whether actual or, more recently, virtual.

I can say with both pride and assurance that my father did a good job. Did I? It's hard to know. The teaching process was a mystery to me when I began; it remains a mystery to me as I depart. I certainly tried to interfere in the lives and minds of my students. Of course, I wanted them to do well. Of course, I felt an obligation to them. But I also felt an obligation to the discipline of history. And sometimes those duties collided.

As I look back on it all, I find myself asking another question to which I have no answer: How many students truly take advantage of what our two-year colleges have to offer?

Given that likely reality, was it a mistake for the state to fund and institutionalize what began as a grass-roots, even populist idea, a project initially undertaken by local school boards across the state? No. The two-year college was a bargain three-quarters of a century ago, and, relatively speaking, it remains that today.

And tomorrow? Some day in the not-too-distant future the education bubble will burst. A futurist I am not, but of that much I am quite certain. I'm also of a mind to suggest that such a bursting will eventually prove to be a good thing for the country at large, as well as for students and their families.

In addition, it will be an especially good thing for the two-year college, which was never overpriced in the first place and has not been seriously overextended along the way.

The two-year college will not only survive, but may well flourish — and in ways that are reminiscent of its original movement spirit. Its success will likely depend upon the work of a new generation of pioneers. I was not that. Instead, I simply benefited from the spadework of others — and from what I expect will be looked back upon as the flush years of a bygone time.

In all likelihood, genuinely tough times are ahead for higher education. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Tough times can be good times, especially if they produce real pioneers, pioneers like my father who built a junior college on a shoestring and offered real, if limited, opportunities to students with big dreams and little money.