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Dear Commons Community,

Using LaGuardia Community College as a case study, the New York Times has a featured article on the difficulties community colleges have in attracting private giving. The chart above says it all. Community colleges, a critical sector in American higher education generally rely extensively on public funding and student tuition. They attract very little private giving yet serve students with the greatest needs. As the article mentions:

“The chief impediments to fund-raising at community colleges are the most obvious ones: There is no base of well-off alumni from which to draw, and no accompanying reserve of pride that might be exploited. Community colleges are places of departure rather than arrival. A gilded education begets more privilege, and privilege itself has had a long tradition of expression in munificent reciprocal giving. At community colleges, there exists not a legacy culture but whatever might be considered its opposite, given that the ambition of anyone who makes it through the system successfully is to send a child somewhere far beyond it. When students from a community college ascend to the affluent classes, they tend to feel a stronger affinity to the institutions that eventually graduate them than to the places where, often, they had no option but to begin.

The larger and more profound challenge is the marketing of the mission itself — the entirely worthy but unglamorous cause of moving poor young adults, many of whom have been inadequately educated, up to the ranks of middle-income earners. How to sell this vision to the broader world?

The plight of community colleges has not captured the interest of the wealthy donor class, where the narrative of the young child plucked from poverty and channeled through a system that will get him to Princeton and repackage him in the image of his benefactors has proved to be so mythically compelling. In 2012, more than twice as much money — $297 million — was awarded to charter schools from the country’s largest foundations as was given to community colleges, even though two-year colleges educate nearly four times as many students.”

Community colleges are jewels of American higher education and have the most difficult missions of any of our postsecondary institutions. They should be celebrated and deserve the attention of America’s donors and foundations.

Great article!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Former President Bill Clinton said yesterday that Democrats lacked a “national advertising campaign” in the recent midterm elections. Speaking during an interview with Politico: Clinton said:

“Republicans were helped by a larger bloc of voters who felt more strongly about the elections than members of his party. Democrats could have benefited from a national message that reinforced the party’s positions on refinancing student loans and promoting equal pay for women, he said.

“The people who were against us felt more strongly than the people who were for us. The people who were for us just in all the din couldn’t hear what was actually a fairly coherent economic message coming out,” Clinton told the publication during an event surrounding the 10th anniversary of his presidential center.

It was Clinton’s first extensive comments on Democrats’ sweeping losses in the November elections. Republicans gained control of the Senate majority, strengthened its hold on the House and won governor’s offices in several Democratic-leaning states. Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has not yet publicly discussed the recent elections, but her advisers are closely studying the results ahead of a potential presidential campaign in 2016.

The former president noted that in 2014 there was a “collapse” in the youth vote and Democrats saw a slight drop in the Hispanic vote. He suggested it may have been attributed to President Barack Obama’s decision not to issue an executive order on immigration, which he called a “tough call.”

He also urged Obama to avoid becoming a “lame duck” in his final two years in office “by continuing to have an agenda and using the budget process to make deals with Republicans.”

Good analysis!

Tony