The diverted dream - Steven G Brint

Although seldom discussed, the most dramatic institutional development in American higher education has not involved the Ivy League colleges or research universities so often considered the crux of the American educational system. Rather, this drastic change centres around an institution which has expanded so rapidly in the last quarter century that it now enrols four out of every ten first-time freshmen - the community college. Concerned about the ramifications of this growth on the American ideal of the equality of opportunity, sociologists Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel trace the transformation of these two-year colleges from the small, predominantly liberal arts colleges of the past to the large, vocationally orientated schools of today. Arguing that neither consumer nor employer preferences dictated the fifty-year effort to expand and vocationalize the schools, Brint and Karabel contend that college administrators championed vocationalization in order to secure a long-term place for their colleges in the educational hierarchy.