Community College Faculty Perceptions of Institutional Missions

EdInfo 01-02
February, 2001
ERIC Clearinghouse for Community Colleges

In 1995-96, the Community College Research Center at Teachers College's Institute on Education and the Economy conducted a national survey on faculty perceptions of the following five community college missions: workplace preparation, transfer, adult basic education, community service, and "other" functions. In the survey, completed by 1,725 faculty members at ninety-two institutions, faculty were asked to rank the four current and ideal institutional missions of community colleges on a five-point scale, from most important to least important. The following findings were reported by the Center in 1999:

Current Mission

• Faculty were relatively evenly divided between workplace preparation and transfer education as the two most important missions of community colleges. Workplace education received first or second rank from 57.1 % of the faculty, compared to 52 % in the case of transfer education.

• Basic skills education emerged as the third most important community college function, while community service was ranked as a distant fourth.

Ideal Mission

• Community college faculty would place higher emphasis on workplace skills and transfer education and believe that the current emphasis on basic skills instruction and community service is too high.

• The greatest increase from current mission to ideal mission was workplace preparation. This function was ranked as the first or second ideal function by 63.9 % of the faculty (compared to 57.1 percent for current mission). Basic skills education represented the greatest decrease, placed at third, fourth or fifth rank by 63.3 % (compared to 56.7 % for current mission).

Perceptions of Ideal Mission by Vocational and Academic Faculty

• Vocational faculty were more likely to view workplace preparation as the primary mission (47.5 %) than academic faculty (21.4 %). Similarly, 36.8 % of academic faculty ranked transfer education as the most important function, compared to 13.7 % of vocational faculty.

• The two groups of faculty were similar in assigning low priority to basic skills education and community service.

This information was reported in ED 440695, "How do Community College Faculty View Institutional Mission? An Analysis of National Survey Data" by Dominic J. Brewer. A full-text copy of this document may be obtained by contacting ERIC Document Reproduction Services (EDRS), 7420 Fullerton Road, Suite 110, Springfield, VA 22153-2852; or by calling (800) 443-ERIC.

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