United States

In New Jersey, slightly more than half of the state's nineteen community colleges are called county colleges, not merely in name but also in descriptive speech. This is because there is one community college, often with satellite branches, dedicated to each county of the state. The term is also used by some community colleges in Texas (where community colleges are funded by county residents via property taxes assessed by a special "community college district") and Illinois.

In several California cities (including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego), New York City, and Chicago, community colleges are often called "city colleges," since they were municipally-funded and designed to serve the needs of the residents of the city in which they are situated. The City University of New York is arguably the best known example of a municipally-funded community college system, although the system includes both junior and senior (4-year) colleges, in addition to graduate programs. The Los Angeles Community College District is the largest community college system in the United States. The Maricopa Community College District in the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area, is the largest community college district in the United States in terms of enrollment.

In California, a large number of community colleges do not have the word "community" in their name, nor did they ever have the word "junior." This is because Calvin Flint, who supervised the founding of three such colleges during his career, famously opposed the term "junior" or any kind of qualifier as unnecessarily pejorative. His colleges "would not be junior to anyone."[1] Flint served as the first Superintendent and President of Monterey Peninsula College as well as both Foothill and De Anza Colleges. Flint Center at De Anza College is named in his honor.

Enrollment

In North America, community colleges operate under a policy of "open admission". That is, anyone with a high school diploma or GED may attend, regardless of prior academic status or college entrance exam scores. Although community colleges have an "open admission" policy, students have to take assessment tests before enrolling at the college, due to not all courses being "open admission." In California, students who have reached the age of 18 are not required to have completed secondary education; instead, they must simply show an "ability to benefit" from a college's educational program. Under certain circumstances, community colleges will also accept high school students or dropouts.

The "open admission" policy results in a wide range of students attending community college classes. Students range in age from teenagers in high school taking classes under a concurrent, or dual, enrollment policy (which allows both high school and college credits to be earned simultaneously) to working adults taking classes at night to complete a degree or gain additional skills in their field to students with graduate degrees who enroll to become more employable or to pursue lifelong interests. "Reverse transfers" (or those transferring from a university) constitute one of the fastest growing new community college cohorts.

One threat to enrollment at community colleges is the rapidly increasing popularity of for-profit e-learning and online universities, such as the University of Phoenix, which is now the 16th-largest university in the world. Market research firm Eduventures estimates that 10% of college students will be enrolled in an online degree program by 2008[2] Many community colleges have supplemented their offerings with online courses to stave off competition from exclusively e-learning schools. For example, Northern Virginia Community College's Extended Learning Institute [1] has been offering distance learning courses for over thirty years. Texas offers the Virtual College of Texas whereby a student at any community college in the state can attend classes from any of the state's 51 community colleges or four Texas State Technical College campuses, paying local tuition plus a VCT fee of around $40.

California has the lowest community college enrollment fees in the nation, currently set at $20 per unit.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-13