Community Colleges and Contract Training: Content, Origins, and Impact

Abstract

Over the last three decades, most community colleges have broadened their economic development role to include contracting with employers to train current or prospective employees in job and academic skills. This article describes the main contours of the community college's involvement in contract training, explains how this involvement arose, and analyzes its impact on the community college. This analysis is based both on national data on the general prevalence and form of contract training and on case studies of the forms it takes in twenty community colleges in five states servicing five quite different industries. Contract training is sometimes quite elaborate, as in the case of the entry-level training of skilled workers in auto manufacturing, auto repair, and construction. Here the training often involves multiyear apprenticeships, combining both classroom and on-the-job training, with labor unions exercising a major role. But contract training often is much briefer and dominated by the wishes of companies. The origins of contract training lie in a combination both of business pressure and of initiative by community colleges and government bodies pursuing interests and values of their own. Contract training has broadly affected community colleges in such areas as enrollments, revenues, external relations, governance, internal relations, curriculum and pedagogy, and institutional mission. It has brought more students, revenues, and political clout, but also greater business involvement in community college governance and possibly a major redefinition of institutional mission away from education (especially transfer education) toward training.

The Complementarity Investment in University-Industry Collaboration

“…While the magnitude of this threat necessarily differs between disciplines, in the social sciences, we found that open communication and discussion about product outcomes and features dispelled these concerns. Furthermore, clarifying role expertise worked to equalize power relations, which, when unchecked, has been shown to negatively affect UICs (Dougherty & Bakia, 2000), while setting realistic expectations at the outstart of the partnership helped mitigate future disagreements about timelines or conflicting expectations (Austin et al, 2021;Locket et al, 2008). As a whole, we found that open, candid, and frequent exchanges were paramount to our collaboration with industry.…”

A policy inventory and analysis of career and technical education (CTE) promise programs

“…Private companies can collaborate with community colleges to design workforce training programs to suit their needs. Moreover, private companies have a voice in determining the curriculum of instruction that is offered to the workers (Dougherty & Bakia, 2000).…”

Accounting Teaching, Research and Accreditation

“…"Normal" schools were established with government funding in order for working-class individual to train as teachers, (Franklin 2020). Community-colleges emerged to help satisfy the growing demand for higher education (Allen, 1995), and vocational colleges (Dougherty and Bakia, 2000) can provide specific required industrial training.…”