The Community’s College: Bridging Research and Practice

Catalog description

What does it mean for a college to belong to a community? This course examines the history, development, challenges, and future of community colleges in the United States, with particular attention to the Community College of Philadelphia (CCP) as a key institutional partner. Founded on the promise of open access and local opportunity, community colleges have long served as gateways to higher education for first-generation, working-class, immigrant, and adult learners. Through a sustained focus on CCP, the course situates national debates about access, equity, workforce development, and public funding within the lived realities of an urban-serving institution. Students engage the college not only as a subject of study, but as a community-based partner embedded in the social, economic, and educational landscape of Philadelphia. We examine the structural challenges community colleges face - including funding constraints, shifting policy priorities, and evolving student support needs - alongside the innovative practices and institutional commitments that sustain them. By analyzing CCP’s mission, programs, partnerships, and role in the city, students consider how community colleges function as engines of access, mobility, and civic engagement. Together, we ask: What does it mean to be a “community’s college”? How does CCP embody -and complicate -the democratic promise of open-access higher education? And what might its future reveal about the future of public higher education in the United States?