Dimensions of Collaboration Between Community Colleges and Universities in Facilitating Attainment of Baccalaureate Degrees in Career and Technical Education

Abstract

Within the past two decades, many jurisdictions have tried to make the baccalaureate degree more attainable for a student who begins postsecondary education in a career or technical program in a community college. Two different strategies have been employed for achieving this goal: developing collaborative arrangements between community colleges and universities and allowing community colleges to award baccalaureate degrees. This chapter focuses on the first of these strategies and describes the approaches that have been developed for combining the contributions of community colleges and universities in the delivery of baccalaureate level vocational education. Finding existing typologies of models of collaboration between community colleges and universities deficient, this chapter instead identifies dimensions of collaboration which can be combined in different ways to create alternative models. This chapter draws particularly upon the experience of Canada. Among OECD member countries, Canada has the highest proportion of adults whose highest level of education is a community college credential. In order to facilitate baccalaureate degree attainment for those graduates, recently it has developed some innovative forms of collaboration between community colleges and universities. The author’s conclusion is that while the new arrangements offer valuable opportunities for students to combine the learning resources of the two types of postsecondary institutions, their usefulness is constrained by two problems: inflated admission requirements and inadequate amounts of transfer credit. Accordingly, there is still a need to increase access to the baccalaureate degrees that community colleges themselves offer.