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What's Wrong with Community Colleges? Nothing

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What's Wrong with Community Colleges? Nothing

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The United States is largely segregated along education lines. Those who went to college usually know mostly other people who went to college, so they tend to think their experience is universal. Yet only three in ten Americans age 25 and older have a bachelor's degree.

Too often and for too many Americans, the word "college" means a four-year degree. The two-year degree gets a bad rap, and so do the community colleges that offer them.

That's especially the case among politicians and parents who themselves hold bachelor's degrees. In their minds, the four-year degree is the only route to a respectable and rewarding career.

It's unfortunate that community colleges suffer from such a negative stereotype because so many people who end up going to a four-year college-and usually end up dropping out-would be much better off starting or even finishing at a two-year college.

For one, small first-year classes and low cost of community colleges allow students to explore careers before committing to a major at a four-year school, all while they earn valuable credits. Community colleges could also be an end in and of themselves. Only 17 percent of community-college students end up earning a bachelor's degree within six years of starting school.

Secondly, in some cases, a two-year degree pays off more than if students went on to get a bachelor's degree. In Virginia, for example, graduates with an associate's degree in technical fields earn around $40,000 annually right out of school, more than the average bachelor's degree recipient.

Thirdly, community colleges are the gateway to the jobs of tomorrow that can't be easily automated by robots. Most of those are "middle-skills jobs," positions that demand more than a high-school diploma but less than a bachelor's degree. There are roughly 29 million of these jobs today. Some 11 million of them pay $50,000 or more a year, and 4 million pay $75,000 or more, according to Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce.

Despite the demand, a lot of these jobs in advanced manufacturing, health care, and information technology remain open because employers can't find qualified candidates with enough education to fill them.

Take repairing a John Deere tractor. When Andy Winnett started repairing tractors for a John Deere dealer in 1977, all he needed was a toolbox. "Today your toolbox is a computer," says Winnett, who now directs the John Deere technology program at Walla Walla Community College in Washington state. John Deere partners with several community colleges around the country to train technicians for its dealer network.

About 15 to 20 students come through the program each semester, which graduates students in two years. Because they are sponsored by a John Deere dealer, where the students work for half the program, most graduate with a job in hand. On average, a technician can start earning between $31,000 and $39,000 a year plus bonuses.

But as Winnett explained to me during a visit to Walla Walla earlier this year, students need "both brawn and brains" for these jobs today. "There's at least $1.1 million in equipment here," he said, as he looked at a lineup of the iconic green John Deere tractors outside his office. John Deere tractors have at least 24 computers embedded in them, mostly focused on emissions.

Most of the students who struggle or can't make it in the program, he said, lack the critical math and comprehension skills to succeed. Jobs like the ones John Deere offer are still associated with students who performed poorly in high school. But the students I found at Walla Walla easily had the academic credentials to get into a four-year college, they'd just rather be here to work with their hands.

One of them, Oscar Tapia, a 19-year-old from Bakersfield, California, told me he had plans to go to a four-year college for an engineering degree, but changed his mind when he heard about the John Deere program at a diesel mechanic class while a junior in high school. After he graduates from Walla Walla, he plans to work for the dealer sponsoring him in Bakersfield. Still, he hasn't ruled out getting that four-year engineering degree some day. "I want to show John Deere engineers how to design a better tractor," he said.

Walla Walla is a great example of what a community college should be. It was forced to become an engine of economic development a decade ago after the local agricultural, food processing, and lumber industries started to decline and unemployed workers arrived at the college searching for retraining opportunities.

"We looked at what we were doing, and it wasn't good enough for a community that needed our help," said Steven L. VanAusdle, the college's president. "That was a turning point for us, a wake-up call."

Now, the college of some 10,000 students offers more than 100 degree and certificate programs, with about 60 percent of them in workforce and technical areas. One of the most competitive is a degree in enology and viticulture. When the college started it in 2000, the region had just 16 wineries. Today, there are nearly 200 local wineries, and they have spawned a vast hospitality sector in the region.

Perhaps attitudes nationwide are beginning to change about community colleges. Students and parents who have a wide variety of choices about where to go to college are increasingly landing at two-year schools. Some 25 percent of students from households earning $100,000 or more now attend community colleges, up from 12 percent just five years ago, according to an annual survey by Sallie Mae.

We always hear about the predictions that the U.S. will face a shortage of computer scientists and engineers in the decade ahead, but rarely do we hear that the nation will also face a shortage of nutritionists, welders, and nurse's aides.

By 2020, it's projected that nearly four in ten U.S. workers will have a only high-school diploma or less at a time when more jobs will require additional education. Middle schools and high schools have essentially given up on career and technical education, leaving behind a whole generation of students uninterested in pursuing a four-year academic track in college and community colleges as the stepchild of the nation's higher-education system.

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What's wrong with going to a community college? How two-year colleges can be better than four-year universities.

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The United States is largely segregated along education lines. Those who went to college usually know mostly other people who went to college, so they tend to think their experience is universal. Yet only three in ten Americans age 25 and older have a bachelor's degree.

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Community colleges and our collective future | Heather Wylie | TEDxRedding

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Heather Wylie, a first generation college student from a low income, rural Northern California community, became a college professor in large part because of connections she made with individuals, ideas, and communities. In this talk, she challenges us to change the conversation from community colleges as places of last resort to institutions of innovation inspiration and social change.

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Four Ways Community Colleges are Different

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Four Ways Community Colleges are Different

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Personality Traits You Need to Teach at a Community College

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Personality Traits You Need to Teach at a Community College

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ChronicleVitae for higher ed jobs, career tools and advice

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When I go around the country speaking about teaching careers at two-year colleges, people assume I must be out proselytizing - trying to entice some of the nation's brightest graduate students to join the community-college faculty.

Not necessarily. Of course I'd like to build a deeper candidate pool for two-year colleges; that only benefits our institutions and, ultimately, our students. Plus, anyone who has read my columns on The Two-Year Track in The Chronicle for the past 12 years knows I'm a cheerleader for community colleges. I believe they serve a vital function and, on top of that, are pretty good places to work.

But the truth is: Teaching at a community college isn't for everyone. Two-year schools have their own culture, their own way of looking at things, and their own set of customs and norms, which may be very different from what some people are accustomed to or even interested in.

There's no shame in that. People's preferences and priorities vary widely. Perhaps teaching at a community college would suit your personality and help you reach your professional goals - but perhaps not. And if you're still trying to figure that out as we enter the fall application season, here are some signs that a community college teaching career might not be for you.

You don't really like to teach. I use the word "really" here advisedly, not as a throw-away modifier. If you plan to become a community-college faculty member, you'd better really like to teach, because that's what we do: We teach. A lot. A typical load for a full-time faculty member is five courses a semester, 10 for the year. Whenever I say that to a group of graduate students, jaws drop.

No doubt most people who pursue a faculty career do so because they like to teach. But not everyone does. Some are drawn to the profession because they're extremely passionate about their field of study. Graduate school provides them the opportunity to completely immerse themselves in it, and they want a faculty position to be an extension of that.

Even for people who generally like to teach, five courses a semester may still seem like a lot. That's because it is. But if you're not prepared for that - if you can't imagine yourself doing that for the next 30 years - then you probably shouldn't even apply to community colleges.

Underprepared students annoy you. Most of us, when we're young and imagining a faculty career, picture ourselves leading a stimulating discussion with a bunch of well-prepared high achievers. Anyone who has actually taught college courses, however, even at a selective university, knows that isn't always the case. Some teachers are able to adjust to that reality, while others go around grousing about how poorly prepared their students are.

If you're in the latter group, you should probably steer away from community colleges. While we have some very bright students - and thriving honors programs - statistically, most of our students are underprepared for college. And if we hire you, many of those students will be in your classes.

"If you plan to become a community-college faculty member, you'd better really like to teach, because that's what we do: We teach."

That, in a nutshell, is the challenge of teaching at a two-year campus: You will have students who are relatively well-prepared for college sitting right next to students who under-achieved in high school. Grousing about that won't help. You either have to figure out how to best serve both sets of students - along with those in the middle - or else don't put yourself in that environment to begin with.

You're looking for prestige. Along with picturing yourself teaching the best students, you might also have seen yourself working at a top institution - or at least one with an impressive-sounding name, preferably with the word "university" in there somewhere. "Flyover County Community College" just doesn't have the same cachet.

That sort of prestige-mongering is certainly encouraged in graduate school. That's why so many advisers actively steer their students away from community colleges, even when that sector of academe is providing most of the faculty openings.

If prestige matters to you, you probably won't be happy at a community college. No one - not your graduate-school advisers, your former classmates, or even your parents - will be particularly impressed that you landed a job at FCCC. Only your new colleagues will care - and maybe your annoyingly underprepared students.

You dream of becoming a well-known scholar. There are some (relatively) famous college professors: Paul Krugman, Stanley Fish, Cornell West, Camille Paglia, Noam Chomsky, Michael Eric Dyson. And one thing they all have in common is that none of them teaches at a two-year college. Honestly, the only community-college professor anybody's ever heard of is Jill Biden - and most people know her only as the vice president's wife.

Of course, "fame" is relative. The people I just mentioned all have national reputations. But I have known a handful of community-college faculty members who became fairly well known in their discipline or in their local community, like the professor who wrote the definitive history of the small town where his college is located. Even such meager recognition is difficult to achieve, though, because so much of your day at a two-year campus is spent on teaching and service-related activities. Few of us have the time or resources to write books or articles or pursue an active research agenda. But some do, so it clearly isn't impossible - just hard.

You hope to get rich. I'm being a bit facetious because, of course, it's highly unlikely you'll get rich at any level of academe, unless you become a football coach or a president at a major university. But even if we substitute "relatively affluent" for "rich," that still might be a stretch at a community college.

True, most two-year colleges offer competitive starting salaries - for their location, that is, and within the field of education. Generally speaking, you can live reasonably well on a community-college professor's salary; and in a two-earner household, that same salary can help a family afford a decent home in a good school district.

That said, whereas full professors at research universities routinely earn six figures, few community college professors ever approach that mark (except perhaps in parts of the country where people making $100,000 a year still can't afford to buy a house). Administrators at two-year colleges can make significantly more than faculty, but nowhere near the Gordon Gee range.

You think of it as a "starter job." One of the most common questions graduate students ask me - and one I wrote about in a recent Vitae blog post - is whether they can teach at a community college for a couple years and then "move up" to a four-year institution.

Well, that depends on what you mean by "move up." The idea that two-year colleges are inferior, by definition - such that a job at a four-year campus would necessarily be an improvement - is offensive to many community-college folks. For the most part, we like what we do and have no desire to go anywhere else.

That whole "publish or perish" thing? You can have it.

But the reality is that teaching at a community college - especially on the tenure track - marks you as more or less permanently unfit for a position at a four-year institution, in the eyes of many university professors and administrators. So not only is the "starter job" mind-set likely to be a nonstarter with a search committee but "moving up" is actually highly unlikely.

You need a back-up plan. What you want is a job at a research university, but what you need is a job. Any job. So why not include, along with all those university applications, a few community-college apps? You know - as a back-up plan.

Such reasoning is understandable, but it has two serious flaws. First, it assumes that a position at a two-year college is probably easier to get than one at a four-year campus. Not necessarily. In fact, if a community-college search committee sees any indication that we are your Plan B, that is perhaps the quickest way to sink your candidacy. And we probably will pick up on it - which is the second flaw in the "back-up plan" approach. Candidates often signal their intent in numerous ways, in both the application and the interview, and we aren't stupid. We will pick up on your signals.

Now, if you're very, very careful, you just might be able to fake your way through the entire process and land a full-time job. But even if you do, you won't be happy, for all the reasons mentioned above.

Yes, I know the faculty job market is abysmal. I understand that job seekers do need to cast a wide net. But if you know you absolutely will not be content working at a community college for the rest of your life - teaching five classes every semester, never becoming rich or famous - then do yourself a favor and don't even bother applying. Community colleges are simply not for you.

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When I go around the country speaking about teaching careers at two-year colleges, people assume I must be out proselytizing - trying to entice some of the nation's brightest graduate students to join the community-college faculty. Not necessarily. Of course I'd like to build a deeper candidate pool for two-year colleges; that only benefits our institutions and, ultimately, our students.

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Observations from Teaching at a Community College

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Observations from Teaching at a Community College

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Given the current state of the economy and the challenges of the job market for historians, it is increasingly necessary for new PhDs to consider broadening their career options. One such career path that is often overlooked is teaching at two-year institutions. My hope is that my own experiences of teaching at a community college can be useful for others who may be thinking about teaching history at a two-year institution.

The first major adjustment I had to make as an instructor at a community college was the shift from the specific to the general. Before taking my first job at a two-year institution, I had just finished my dissertation, and as an adjunct I had taught specialty courses at a university. Most of my prepared syllabi were for upper division courses. At that point, for me, a "general" survey course meant early modern Europe: a topic that made up at most one third of a semester-long Western Civilization course. So a great adjustment was needed when I began teaching Western Civilization I and II, as well as the first half of American history.

Initially, I was worried about how limiting it would feel to be primarily teaching survey courses. I don't think this question can be answered comprehensively after only a few years of teaching, but it has not felt constraining so far. As the two Western Civilization courses cover vast geographic and temporal areas, I have found them to be an invitation to pursue whatever has struck me as academically interesting. Teaching these courses has given me perhaps the greatest intellectual freedom I have had since looking for a dissertation topic at the start of graduate school. I have read widely this year on topics from ancient Rome to medieval philosophy to World War II, and I have been able to bring most of my research directly into my classes. And it has also become clear from conversations with my colleagues that there are many ways to avoid simply teaching the same two classes for decades. The real joy of the survey course is that it is broad enough to contain just about anything that an instructor wishes to include. My colleagues constantly add to their survey courses based on new readings and research. Many shift the focus of their courses from year to year, depending on their interests at the time, or based upon input from the students at the start of the semester. Most community college programs include 200-level specialty courses for further diversity, and some professors teach as adjuncts at local universities to broaden their teaching opportunities.

The second major transition I faced at the community college was the teaching load. The standard course load for two-year schools is five classes per semester. And most instructors, at least in their first years while dealing with debt from graduate school, student loans, and saving for a house, often choose to teach overloads. This often leads to teaching loads of as many as six or seven classes a term in addition to summer classes. Teaching five or more classes each semester seemed overwhelming at first, especially coming out of a research institution where anything over a 2/3 class load was seen by many to be a "bad job." But what the 5/5+ load reflects is the central focus of community colleges: that professors are expected to put teaching first, last, and always. So, what did the 5/5 class-load mean for me? Depending on the school, class sizes tend to be capped somewhere between 25-35 students, so I taught roughly 150-175 students per semester at the low end. These five courses will typically be sections of two to four different classes. The load indeed is heavy, but it is manageable. And when compared to teaching at a four-year state university with huge lecture classes, possibly not a much greater number of total students. Where the teaching load really has an impact, however, is in grading. There are no teaching assistants at community colleges; so the professor has to grade every paper and exam. Given this, it puts a real limit on how much an instructor can work on writing with students, and for better or for worse, in many classes (although I am still resisting this), multiple-choice exams become the norm.

Behind the question of how one manages a 5/5 teaching load lurks a more challenging query: Is it possible to maintain one's own research and ties to the scholarly community while teaching at a community college? While a 5/5 teaching load is certainly manageable, it also clearly means that the focus of the job will be on teaching and not on research. From speaking with my more experienced community college colleagues, I have learned that the teaching load and lack of institutional focus upon research does make it a continuing challenge to carve out time for scholarship. But having acknowledged the challenge, many professors at two-year colleges do manage it. It is not unusual for instructors to have their PhDs, and many of these keep up their own scholarship, publish articles and books, and take active roles in the scholarly community. While resources directly supporting research may be very limited at community colleges, most institutions are serious about providing aid under the rubric of "Faculty Development" for conferences. Overall, I have found that community colleges both expect and support maintaining one's scholarly interests and connections, even if pursuing extensive research may become more difficult.

Given the focus upon teaching, students take on a central role in the experience of teaching at a community college. From the very beginning, I was told that "community college students are their own group." What I quickly found was that this did not mean that they are "bad" students. Some are indeed less well prepared, and need more attention to help them develop their skills, but overall they seem to be pretty much the same kinds of students who enter the bulk of the four year institutions. Many of my students chose to do their first two years of study at a community college and then planned to transfer in their third year to finish their bachelor's degrees. Moreover, many students are enrolled in four-year universities concurrently, and are using the community colleges to fill out requirements for their degrees. Obviously, economics has a great deal to do with this. Given the rising costs of education, it is often significantly cheaper to do the first two years of a degree at a community college before finishing at a university. But many students also choose community colleges because they offer much better support networks, tutoring, smaller class sizes, and more personal attention than can be found at many universities.

What does make the students at community colleges different is the amazing diversity of their experiences and skills. A general class will have people from many ethnic and economic backgrounds, and in many cases from many countries. There will be a significant number for whom English is a second language. Many will have just finished high school, some will have years of college under their belts, and some will be returning students who have advanced degrees and decades of work experience. Most will be in their teens, but many will be in their 20s and 30s, and some will be significantly older. What makes this group challenging is that a good class allows those who are less experienced to develop their skills, while still offering the most dedicated students a chance to pursue their academic interests as fully as possible. I am still working out the best way to address this, and probably will be doing so as long as I am in the classroom. I try to include multiple levels of material, from the basic narratives of history to detailed work on primary sources, to the limited inclusion of monographs. I have found that this allows me at least to give students a taste of where they could go if they choose to study history further, while still engaging the students who will never take another history course.

There is no doubt that such diversity poses special challenges from a pedagogical point of view, but at its best it makes for an amazingly dynamic classroom. Besides the broad variety of their backgrounds, students at a community college are often working full time, they have families, some are retired from the work force, and some are veterans. For most of them, school is something they have chosen to do, and have made significant sacrifices just to get through the classroom door. All of this means that they have a great deal of outside personal experience to bring to a historical discussion. This was deeply intimidating at first, but I quickly realized that the discussions in class were some of the most vibrant and purely interesting ones I have ever encountered. It was discussions like these that drove home to me a real answer to the question of "why does history matter?" In the discussions, my students connected their own experiences to the history they were studying, not as an academic exercise, but as way to talk about very real questions of religion, politics, family, war, and others that they were dealing with as part of their daily lives.

So, in the end, I have found my first year teaching at a community college to be a very rewarding one. It has required a shift away from the world of research and writing, which is a change I am still working through, but it has offered a significant amount in return. I have found a great deal of freedom in the classroom, institutional backing for maintaining my scholarly connections, and interesting and supportive colleagues. Perhaps most important of all, I have found students who have challenged me to rethink how I look at history. And in the end, isn't that the best thing one can find in one's classes?
John Ball teaches history at the Dale Mabry Campus of Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Florida.

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Teaching at a Community College: Some Personal Observations

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Given the current state of the economy and the challenges of the job market for historians, it is increasingly necessary for new PhDs to consider broadening their career options. One such career path that is often overlooked is teaching at two-year institutions.

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The Challenges of Teaching at Community Colleges

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The Challenges of Teaching at Community Colleges

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Degrees and Difficulty

Three years ago, Eduardo Vianna, a professor at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, had a student who passed an entire semester without speaking in class. Like many others, the student, Mike Rifino, had come to LaGuardia requiring remedial instruction.

But the following semester Mr. Rifino turned up in Dr. Vianna's developmental psychology course. This time he took a seat closer to the front of the room. Taking that as a positive sign, Dr. Vianna asked him to join a weekly discussion group for students who might want to talk about big ideas in economics, education and politics, subjects that might cultivate a sense of intellectual curiosity and self-understanding among students whose backgrounds typically left them lacking in either.

"The group met on Friday afternoons," Dr. Vianna said, "and Mike's friends were asking him why he was wasting his time; the students who came weren't getting any credit."

At the time, Mr. Rifino was working as a cashier at a Gap in a mall on Queens Boulevard, and feeling despondent about it. Dr. Vianna then introduced him to Erich Fromm's writing on Marx, and something in Mr. Rifino ignited, as he began to examine his own sense of alienation. He quickly finished his work at LaGuardia, and transferred to Hunter College in 2012. In the fall he began a doctoral program in psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Among trajectories for community college students, Mr. Rifino's path is decidedly out of the ordinary. Of the full-time students who started at LaGuardia in 2008, as he did, less than 17 percent graduated within three years. Only a quarter of LaGuardia students complete their associate degree in six years, a figure that is high for urban community colleges.

Five years ago, with Detroit's deadened factories as a backdrop, President Obama announced an initiative to mint five million more community college graduates by 2020. The announcement coincided with a report from the Council of Economic Advisers anticipating a significantly greater demand for jobs requiring analytic skills. Two-year colleges enroll nearly half of all undergraduates in this country, the majority coming from the lower half of the income distribution. In the case of LaGuardia, more than two-thirds of its students come from families making $25,000 a year or less. It is hard to see how economic mobility might regain momentum, or how an educated citizenry might be maintained, without community colleges accomplishing their mission of graduating the poor and struggling.

In the years since the president's announcement, education scholars have argued, too little focus has been placed on what would intuitively seem to be one of the most crucial elements of increasing success rates: improving the quality of teaching. "The teaching of teachers," Gail O. Mellow, LaGuardia's president and the author of books and papers on community college education, said recently, "is the single most neglected aspect of higher education." And teaching at community colleges bears little resemblance to teaching anywhere else. "It really cannot be emphasized enough," a group of researchers wrote in a paper four years ago, "that perhaps no other cohort of instructors in American education confronts such a consistently low-performing group of students on a daily basis."

LaGuardia loses about one third of its students during their first year; without engagement, the prospect of their success seems all but impossible.

As a specialist in developmental psychology, Dr. Vianna has spent much of his career examining the way young people from disadvantaged backgrounds acquire knowledge and use it, the way the identities they have forged in the face of myriad deprivations can influence and impede the process of learning. At LaGuardia, where some of the city's least-prepared students land, and where he has taught for 10 years, he is, in some sense, involved in a near-constant project of professional development. His classroom is his laboratory.

One enormous challenge for community college instructors is that many students arrive with the notion that a college education is essential, but remain unconvinced that what they will learn during the course of their studies is equally so. To create a world of young people skilled at analysis you first need to create a world of young people receptive to complexity, and many of Dr. Vianna's students, he said, "cringe at complexity."

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Students taking a final exam in one of his classes this month. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

"There's a mistrust and antagonism between teachers and students because authority hasn't traditionally been good to them," he said. "Their experiences in the education system have been coercive. It's not really clear to them what the value of academic knowledge actually is. If they come here with the goal of doing something very specific - to become a stewardess, or a makeup artist - they may think, 'What's the point?' "

Dr. Vianna got an illuminating look into how deeply some students question the intrinsic value of learning when he gave students an assignment on the work of the psychologist Edward C. Tolman, a pioneer in the concept of latent learning. Dr. Vianna gave students a graph with two curves that corresponded to the conditions in Mr. Tolman's famous experiments with rats, which showed that they learned to navigate mazes even when they were not rewarded. Despite the evidence that learning could occur in the absence of external incentives, many students looked at the data in front of them and determined precisely the opposite.

"They could not contrast the curves and generalize what they meant in context," Dr. Vianna said. "What it suggests, is that data contradicts their assumptions and confuses them. Often learning requires changing one's position toward some issue and they resist this."

Dr. Vianna came to the United States in the late 1990s to study developmental psychology, after he had already obtained a medical degree in Brazil and practiced child psychiatry in Rio de Janeiro. There, he had seen patients who were autistic, defiant or struggling in school, but he resisted the notion of viewing them through the lens of psychopathology. Instead, he sought to explore more about learning theories and to develop new ones. He enrolled at the Graduate Center and received his doctorate in 2006.

His course load leaves little time for reflection. Dr. Vianna teaches five classes a semester, which is typical of instructors at two-year colleges; as a tenured faculty member at a top private college he might be required to teach two. Compensation is hardly robust; the average salary for a professor at a two-year college is $61,000 a year, 28 percent lower than the average at a private four-year institution.

Despite the demands, community college professors are not relieved of the obligation to publish. Across the board at CUNY, which includes LaGuardia, there has been a greater push toward scholarship, Paul Arcario, LaGuardia's vice president of academic affairs and provost, told me. "When I started 25 years ago, many people were hired simply with a master's, " he said. During the past year, LaGuardia has hired 70 new full-time faculty members (for a total of 400), nearly two-thirds of whom have Ph.Ds. The other 800 instructors, however, are adjuncts.

"For me personally, in terms of my career," Dr. Vianna said, "how much to keep investing in the practice rather than in my own writing and grant writing is a struggle." Were it not for the fact that his work is to a great extent informed by his students, he told me, his time for scholarship would be virtually nonexistent.

"Some professors at the grad school said, 'Don't go to a community college, you'll never do any research,' " he said. "In my case, I was so happy to have a job. I didn't have a green card. The population deeply interested me, and I knew that I could make a difference."

Life for academics at community colleges scarcely resembles a David Lodge novel. Dr. Vianna and his wife, Dusana Podlucka, who has a doctorate in psychology and also teaches, part time, at LaGuardia, live in a 506-square-foot rent-stabilized apartment with their 8-year old daughter, Paula, on Lexington Avenue downtown. Paula, an avid cellist, occupies the bedroom and her parents sleep in the living room, on a foldout sofa.

LaGuardia instructors face an additional challenge unique to a school that is arguably one of the most ethnically diverse in the world, as it draws many of its students from the immigrant neighborhoods surrounding its campus. A professor might have students in a class who have completed undergraduate degrees in New Delhi or Baku and others who have barely received high school equivalency diplomas here.

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Dr. Vianna teaches five classes a semester, which is typical for instructors at two-year colleges like LaGuardia; a tenured faculty member at a top private college might be required to teach two. Credit Brian Harkin for The New York Times

One afternoon a few weeks ago, in a review session for a test he was giving in his general psychology class, Dr. Vianna presided over a conference table. One student had no difficulty understanding the arguments presented, about the neurobiology of mood disorders, and the history of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Others struggled fruitlessly with the concept of causality versus correlation. "What are the causes of depression?" Dr. Vianna asked. "A deep sadness," one student answered.

Professors at elite four-year colleges can trust that students share a bank of references, that they will understand principles of critical inquiry, that they will appreciate conceptualization for its own sake. None of this can be assumed at a community college, where "the idea of academic discourse is completely foreign," Melinda Karp, assistant director of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University, said.

To introduce and make uniform the expectations of college, LaGuardia and some other two-year colleges across the country have recently begun requiring new students to take a freshman seminar, which is aimed at connecting students to faculty members in their majors. Beyond that, its purpose is to guide students toward the habits and styles of thinking that college, and by extension, adult life, demand. This past semester, Dr. Vianna taught the freshman seminar for the first time, in two sections, focusing on the subjects of inequality and climate change. He asked students to read works by Naomi Klein and David Harvey, who ties the rise of neoliberalism to the growth of various manifestations of economic imbalance.

Some of the material was very difficult - students learned about credit default obligations, for example, and their role in the Wall Street crash - and some of that difficulty was unwelcome. Students balked when Dr. Vianna demanded nuanced answers. Many of the students in the class had never heard of the financial crash of 2008. (Only two of the freshman seminar students knew what the G.O.P. was when Dr. Vianna made a reference to it.)

"The thing about the 1 percent owning 40 percent of the wealth, they were shocked," Dr. Vianna said of his students.

LaGuardia Community College Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

One student, who had started the semester wearing his headphones, had eventually become engaged. But another, who had been fidgety and distracted much of the time, completed the course announcing that she saw no need for an understanding of history. A third, in the midst of a final oral presentation on gender in which she talked about the media's prejudicial representation of women, simply stopped short and sat back down.

Most students were, if not transformed in every instance by what they had learned, at least unsettled, and by the end of the semester they could challenge one another's beliefs based on what they had absorbed in class, arguing for example about whether it was hard work or native talent that drove success.

Much of what Dr. Vianna is skilled at doing - teaching material that speaks to students' experiences, leading and facilitating discussion rather than dictating, continually assessing what works and what does not - might seem like an entirely obvious approach. But these methods have yet to be widely adopted in the universe of colleges educating the most vulnerable students. Teaching is rarely mentioned in doctoral programs, and at elite colleges and universities it is not nearly as relevant to the outcome for students. In a forthcoming book titled "Taking Teaching Seriously: Why Pedagogy Matters!" the writers, including Dr. Mellow, LaGuardia's president, cite studies suggesting that by the time students enroll in an Ivy League institution, college itself only negligibly affects their intellectual development.

Data on what kind of teaching works most effectively at the community college level is scant. But what is known from learning theories generally is that constructivist methods, which prize active student participation over passive receipt of information, are intensely valuable.

"There's a lot of talk about moving community colleges to more constructivist approaches," Ms. Karp, of Columbia's Center on Community Colleges, said. "The challenge is how do you get there?"

He and his wife, Dusana Podlucka, who teaches part time at LaGuardia, live in a 506-square-foot apartment in Manhattan with their daughter, Paula. Credit Brian Harkin for The New York Times

One paradox of life at a community college is, in some sense, the absence of a community. There are no residence halls and students often live far from one another, typically juggling jobs and parenthood as well.

Three years ago, Dr. Vianna began a program at LaGuardia called the Peer Activist Learning Community, or P.A.L.C., where students under his guidance gather weekly for sessions of self-directed learning. They often decide together what texts they will read and delve further into. The group is based, in large part, on the theories of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who believed that learning was crucially dependent on social interactions. It was as a proponent of Vygotsky that Dr. Vianna became interested in collaborative learning.

P.A.L.C. offers a venue for the kinds of heady conversations that might otherwise occur late at night over red wine of middling quality, in a dormitory lounge. Some students have come voluntarily, others have been coaxed into it by Dr. Vianna. But out of approximately 30 students who attended P.A.L.C. sessions regularly for at least one semester, 25 have transferred to four-year colleges. One of those students was Mr. Rifino.

The group has been such a success that Dr. Vianna, along with Mr. Rifino and another CUNY graduate student began an offshoot for high school students. One afternoon when I visited the group, the students were making their way, line by line, through an essay by the feminist political scientist Iris Marian Young, wrestling with the meaning of phenomenology.

That same day, Mr. Rifino spoke to a second group of high school students, in the spirit of someone telling a conversion narrative at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Some of the students in the room were struggling with the same issues he had. "I didn't take learning into my own hands," Mr. Rifino said. "I didn't care about current events; I didn't understand the BP oil spill when it happened," he said.

Mr. Rifino then spoke of his days behind the cash register at the Gap. "These activities for me were naturally unsatisfying," he told the group. Through P.A.L.C. he was exposed to Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," as well as Marx. He acquitted himself with rigor, and decided that he wanted to pursue a life in academia.

Dr. Vianna, who was also there, asked students if they, too, felt stuck at times. One student responded that no, he did not, things came easily to him. Many of the others rolled their eyes. Another student said that though he had done well in history he struggled with math. "I derided myself," he said. Another talked about getting a 57 on a test.

Mr. Rifino nodded in recognition.

"My skills, my abilities, I thought they were fixed and they weren't," he said. "We all have unlimited potential, I think."

Degrees and Difficulty: Articles in this series are looking at obstacles confronting LaGuardia Community College and its 50,000 students, most of them low-income. Degrees and Difficulty Online, the previous articles in the series and a video about a student at the school: nytimes.com/metropolitan

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Raising Ambitions: The Challenge in Teaching at Community Colleges

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Degrees and Difficulty Three years ago, Eduardo Vianna, a professor at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, had a student who passed an entire semester without speaking in class. Like many others, the student, Mike Rifino, had come to LaGuardia requiring remedial instruction. But the following semester Mr. Rifino turned up in Dr. Vianna's developmental psychology course.