BY HOLLIS F. GLASER

As a community college professor, I’ve been hearing a lot about “workforce development,” the importance of getting our students ready for jobs. This has been coming down to us with a particular degree of alarm and urgency, an initiative that is college- and university-wide. We are hearing about it in our president’s state-of-the-college address, and our chairs are hearing about it in their meetings. In short, it seems to be something we all need to attend to.

I work at Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of the City University of New York system, in a department where we teach public speaking, mass media, interpersonal communication, and a variety of other courses, including theater classes. Call me naïve, but I thought by teaching critical thinking and reading and writing and speaking that we were already preparing our students for jobs. We’re also preparing them for other roles, like how to be a strong community member, a leader, a citizen in a (semi-)democratic society. So, this urgent call for workforce development confuses me.

As my BMCC colleague Robin G. Isserles has discussed in her book The Costs of Completion, community colleges have always had a mission to prepare our students for jobs. And we have a variety of programs that do just that. BMCC offers instruction in nursing, teaching, computing, accounting, respiratory therapy, and so forth. We also have a substantial number of programs that prepare our students for four-year colleges: those in the liberal arts as well as those in engineering, business administration, and human services among others. Most of what we do prepares our students for jobs. So why is there such a big initiative for “workforce development”?

I’m sure there are many forces at work, but when I look around, I see the “big boys” of community college associations and institutions. The League for Innovation in the Community College promotes projects for “pathways in retail management” and “alternative pathways to the workforce.”  The American Association of Community Colleges has a portion of its website dedicated to “Workforce and Economic Development.” Teachers College, Columbia University has conducted a significant amount of research studying how to get community college students into the workforce.

When I look up “workforce development” on the CUNY website, I see numerous programs and initiatives, staff, and research to help us figure out what our students need to be successful in the workplace. And when I look up the same thing on Columbia’s website, I see studies about community college students—not about their students. Evidently, Columbia’s students don’t need help with getting jobs.

Of course, I want our students to get jobs. Most of our students are of color and from low-income households. More than half are first-generation college students, and many are immigrants. They want and need good jobs. But I also don’t want to give our students a poor kids’ education that simply prepares them for their first job but not their second or third or last.  Will this workforce development initiative help our students build a career? Build a good life? Or will it create a perpetual working class that never reaches the heights of the Columbia students’ careers?

Glynn Wolar rightly states in a previous Academe Blog post that faculty need to be involved in instituting any workforce development programs. In addition to concerns of shared governance and academic freedom, we must also be cognizant of the way race and class intersect with these programs. I’ll give the last word to my colleague Robin Isserles, whose book (reviewed recently in Academe) is critical of the pressure toward completion for community college students:

I think that this dichotomy between general education/liberal arts vs. career readiness/workforce development is truly misguided . . . a quality college education does both. Harvard does workforce development too; we just don’t call it that. Eroding the liberal arts/humanities/social sciences/creative arts from Community Colleges is robbing students—and in particular students of color of a quality education. Community Colleges must make room for both.” (personal correspondence, April 13, 2023)

Hollis F. Glaser is professor of speech, communications, and theater arts at Borough of Manhattan Community College and chair of the AAUP’s Committee on Community Colleges.