President Obama came to Michigan yesterday to announce a major new initiative aimed at strengthening America’s community colleges. Michigan Radio’s Political Analyst Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about their real importance...
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Four years ago, Lt. Gov. John Cherry presided over a high-powered commission that took a hard look at higher education in Michigan. Not surprisingly, it concluded that we needed a lot more of it. The Cherry Commission called on this state to double the number of students who get bachelor’s degrees within the next decade.
That’s a fine idea. But the Cherry Commission’s report gave essentially short shift to community colleges, and virtually ignored the need for vocational training and retraining.
That‘s a big part of the mission community colleges have in this nation and perhaps especially in Michigan, where there are nearly a quarter of a million community college students.
Yesterday, President Obama took a major step to give community colleges new respect, and shift the focus of higher education thinking in this country. He did that at Macomb County Community College, which has been a leader in this field for many years, and has gotten too little notice. If you thought this was some place that offered welding courses and taught remedial reading, you couldn’t be more wrong. This spring, Macomb presented an intellectual and cultural series examining the 1960s in America. It attracted the likes of Ted Sorensen and Andrew Young, and compared favorably to something Harvard might have done.
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