Changing and Evolving Relationships between Two- and Four-Year Colleges and Universities: They're Not Your Parents' Community Colleges Anymore

This paper describes a summit on Community Colleges in the Evolving STEM Education Landscape organized by a committee of the National Research Council (NRC) and the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and held at the Carnegie Institution for Science on December 15, 2011. This summit followed a similar event organized by Dr. Jill Biden, spouse of the Vice President, and held at the White House in October 2010, which sought to bring national attention to the changing missions and purposes of community colleges in contemporary American society.1 The NRC/NAE event built on the White House summit, while focusing on the changing roles of community colleges in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. An in-depth summary of the summit was prepared by the NRC and NAE for publication in late Spring 2012 by the National Academies Press (NRC and National Academy of Engineering, 2012). This paper provides a synopsis of that report, which is available at www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13399, and emphasizes how we can use the report to improve STEM education for our students, but also how much progress still needs to be made to realize this ideal. As participants at the summit emphasized, the traditional notion of a cadre of students moving smoothly through a pipeline from high school to a community college and then to a 4-yr college or university is providing an increasingly inadequate and incomplete picture of today’s postsecondary students. The presentations from the summit, summarized here, collectively make a compelling case that it would be