Obama pushes community colleges to serve corporate America

As part of its effort to tailor higher education more closely to the needs of corporate America, the Obama administration and state governments are pushing four-year universities and colleges to drop remedial or developmental education. Instead these courses, which are chiefly used by working class students, are being shunted almost exclusively onto community colleges.

One way this is occurring is by restricting state and federal funding to four-year institutions. Over a dozen states have cut funding for remedial education at four-year universities and colleges.

Oklahoma and Nevada have taken the additional step of simply denying state funding for remediation at four-year institutions, while Colorado and South Carolina shifted remediation to community colleges several years ago.

This policy is not being implemented to improve access to remedial courses. Rather, it is being done with the intent of creating an even more unequal system of higher education in which working class students will have little or no access to a university-level education. Either working class youth will be denied a college education altogether, or they will be relegated to the community college system, which the Obama administration wants to transform into little more than training centers for low-wage jobs in manufacturing and the service industry. Read more.....