Chapter 10: The Role of Career Development in Two-Year and Community Colleges

Cohen and Brawer (2008) describe the historical background and current trends that face contemporary two-year and community colleges. Among them are the ongoing tension between their college transfer function versus their vocational and other educational functions, how they operate conceptually and practically between secondary schooling and undergraduate and graduate education, as well as between more instrumental views of learning and views of learning as an end-in-itself. The authors describe the attempts to resolve other critical issues, such as the broad dichotomy between community colleges’ role to enhance individual mobility versus its sanction to improve social welfare through the leveling of social class by improving access to education. Cohen and Brawer (2008) review arguments over whether community colleges divert certain segments of the population away from achieving higher educational, and presumably higher economic, statuses. This has been described as the “cooling out function” of higher education in general and community colleges in particular (Clark, 1960) and continues to be discussed as democratization versus diversion (Rouse, 1995) and as educational expansion versus cooling-out (Grubb, 1989).