The Hiring Boom at 2-Year Colleges
Faculty slots -- with tenure -- are available, but not to those who boast
about their dissertations
By JAMILAH EVELYN
Tempe, Ariz.
It didn't matter that Keith Anderson hadn't finished the dissertation
for his Ph.D. in English, or that he was a half-hour late for his job
interview. He still landed a tenure-track, $48,000-a-year job teaching
creative writing in the Maricopa County Community College District.
Mr. Anderson's success is in part a testimony to his experience. He had
already developed 15 distance-education courses for another community
college, a feat showing that he possessed both a liberal-arts background
and the technology skills that community colleges love to see. But his
good fortune is also indicative of something else: Like the heat that
overwhelms this desert valley, the faculty job market at many community
colleges is hot.
This year, Maricopa -- with more than 200,000 full- and part-time students
in 10 colleges, one of the nation's largest community-college districts
-- had more than 100 openings for professors. Another 100 or so positions
are expected to be filled in the next academic year.
The growth is mostly a matter of demographics. A cohort of professors
hired in the 1960's and 70's is starting to retire, and the whole Southwest
is in the midst of a population surge. Also at work is Maricopa's flourishing
job-training program, which offers more than 113 occupational programs
to more than 90,000 students.
"With respect to growth, they've got the best of all possible worlds
at Maricopa," says Jim Jacobs, associate director of the Community
College Research Center at Teachers College of Columbia University.
While Maricopa epitomizes the trend, community colleges around the country
report faculty-hiring sprees unrivaled since the rush to fill new positions
30 to 40 years ago. The boom comes at a time when the prospect of a budget
squeeze in higher education has officials of four-year colleges scaling
down on hiring. In such an environment, community colleges have the opportunity
to reshape themselves -- and the landscape of higher education -- for
a long time to come.
The incremental retirement of the earlier generation has prompted much
of the activity. At Maricopa, officials say 40 percent of their faculty
members will be eligible to retire in the next four years. Nationally,
some 30 percent of the almost 100,000 community-college faculty members
are likely to retire or otherwise leave their teaching positions in the
next three years, according to the American Association of Community Colleges.
Lawmakers are pushing some of the hiring. In California, which has the
largest community-college system in the country, a 1998 law requires a
75-to-25-percent ratio of full-time to part-time professors at two-year
colleges, a mandate that has led to hundreds of full-time hires in the
past year.
What's more, two-year colleges located in fast-growing, high-tech corridors
are experiencing enrollment growth that they can barely contain. At Maricopa,
enrollment has grown by about 6 percent a year in the past several years.
In some areas, supply may not always fill demand for faculty hiring.
Even so, community colleges like Maricopa's are still thinking strategically
about whom they take on. "Each hire is a million-dollar investment,"
says Fred Gaskin, chancellor of the district. Because most of its faculty
members are hired for tenured or tenure-track positions, he says, "we'll
be stuck with them for the next 30 years."
In addition to retirements, the growth in job-training programs -- some
of them highly specialized -- drives the need for hiring at many two-year
colleges. Of Maricopa's 51 hires for new positions this year, 26 were
in job training. Those 26 positions -- all permanent -- are financed by
a $2.2-million state grant to help train the workers needed by the area's
high-tech firms.
The scarcity of faculty applicants with extensive technology experience
who are willing to forgo industry-level salaries has prompted Maricopa
to offer good work-force-development candidates more money than it has
in the past for similar positions.
To some extent, the growth in job-training positions may make it appear
that graduate students in the liberal arts are missing out on the hiring
boom. Indeed, every math or English position that Maricopa advertises
gets 60 or more applicants -- about 12 times as many as for occupational
disciplines. Of the 100 openings this year, 26 were in work-force development
and the rest were in the liberal arts and other traditional disciplines.
"The faculty job market right now is very complex, and there's not
an even exchange within the typical graduate-school pool and what community
colleges need from their faculty," says Kay M. McClenney, director
of the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, at the University
of Texas at Austin. "So there's good news and there's bad news."
The upshot is that graduate students interested in teaching jobs at community
colleges can't rest on their reading lists. "It would behoove people
with traditional liberal-arts degrees to pick up an occupational skill,"
says Mr. Jacobs, of the Community College Research Center, who also runs
the work-force-development division at Macomb Community College, in Michigan.
"Today, you've got to be a history buff and a tradesman."
Not that history professors need to get Microsoft certification. But
they should know how to design a distance-education course. And they should
at least be able to make history relevant to computer programmers.
Regardless of what faculty members will teach in community colleges in
years to come, they will not be trained in just one discipline, nor will
they get by on simply lecturing. Understanding how students learn is becoming
as important as actually teaching, and many community colleges have come
to expect professors to stay current on pedagogical theory. "The
array of teaching-and-learning methods that go on in community colleges
today is far more diverse than what you would find anywhere else,"
Ms. McClenney says. "Community-college instructors really have to
link courses across disciplines. They have to know their stuff."
Maricopa and other community colleges aren't just looking to hire, but
also to bring in people who reflect the ethnic and racial makeup of the
area. Currently, the student population at the district's 10 colleges
is 40 percent minority, while the faculty is about 70 percent white. While
those ratios suggest that Maricopa is far more successful than many other
colleges in achieving faculty diversity, district officials say they need
to do more if they are going to keep pace with the expected boom in minority-student
enrollment. Officials of other institutions are also concerned. With minority
groups at the forefront of population growth in many areas of the nation,
they expect minority enrollment to grow.
"We've got to do a better job of hiring faculty that reflects our
community," says Maricopa's Mr. Gaskin.
So the district has begun recruiting at institutions that serve large
numbers of minority students. This spring, for example, Maricopa held
receptions at career fairs for undergraduate and graduate students at
Howard University and at an Atlanta consortium of historically black institutions.
But with black and Hispanic graduates making up only 9 percent of the
nation's graduate-degree holders, diversity among faculty applicants can
be hard to come by. "It's a challenge," says Mr. Gaskin.
And regardless of race, he adds, graduates can win a teaching position
if they have developed skills that fit the market. A math professor who
can teach math to a non-English-speaking student, for example, "is
going to stand out as a job candidate."
The myriad needs of community-college students put even more importance
on candidates' passion for teaching, and their understanding of the mission
of two-year colleges and the student populations they serve.
"When I've interviewed candidates, they didn't get the job until
my spine would tingle," says Mr. Gaskin, who met with applicants
when he was president of Cerritos College, in Norwalk, Calif. "I
had 10 questions. They were: I want to hear 10 different reasons why you
want to be at a community college."
Community colleges are not usually interested in research-minded candidates
unfamiliar with the kind of learning that goes on at a two-year institution
and view it mainly as just a place to wait out a tight market.
"It's not hard to smoke those guys out," Mr. Gaskin says. He
once interviewed a candidate who distinguished between "academic"
libraries and community-college libraries. "I immediately said, 'Next.'"
Which is not to say that every Ph.D. from a research institution will
be out of the running. Richard A. Moyer, vice president for academic affairs
at East Los Angeles College, teaches seminars on the University of California
campuses at Los Angeles and San Diego on how to get a job at a community
college. He has seen an increase in graduate students who are interested
in teaching in that sector. But he warns that potential applicants would
be wise not to go into interviews brandishing their dissertations.
"We're much more interested in people who will fit in with our college's
community," he says. "If you come in sounding like you are more
interested in publishing than getting your hands dirty with the students,
then we don't want you."
He advises students in his seminar to volunteer to teach an unpaid workshop
at a community college, and to do their homework on colleges to which
they are interested in applying. "Go to the campus bookstore and
find out what texts they use," Mr. Moyer says. "If they are
contemplating buying new computers for the department you are applying
to, do some research and make a recommendation."
Mr. Anderson, 40, the creative-writing professor at Maricopa, never thought
he'd end up teaching at a community college. As a graduate student at
the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, he had dreamed of becoming a
university professor. "That's what all graduate students aspire to,"
he says simply, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses.
Love is what brought him to community colleges.
After completing his master's in psychology and creative writing, Mr.
Anderson followed his girlfriend to a Navajo reservation, where the only
nearby faculty jobs available were at two-year colleges.
While teaching at Dine College, a tribal institution in Arizona, Mr.
Anderson realized that he'd probably never work at a research university
-- and that this was just fine with him. "The community-college mission
is more in line with my own," to help underserved students, he says.
Today's graduate students, groomed by graduate advisers steeped in university
culture, aren't likely to gravitate to a community college on their own.
Like Mr. Anderson, many just stumble upon the route.
Graduate schools generally don't supply teachers-in-training with the
tools they'll need to succeed in the two-year-college world. And they
don't show any signs of doing so in the near future, though many experts
are now calling for community colleges and universities to work more closely
together to train two-year-college-level instructors.
"Perhaps this will create an opportunity for community colleges
and universities to do a much better job in the preparation of college-level
teachers," says Ms. McClenney. "But I think the graduates will
certainly figure it out long before the professoriate does."
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