vironment, the need to upgrade technology for teaching, and the challenge of various groups in society that are being given too little attention by the educational system.
The public junior college started as a logical extension of free public high school, with the aim of providing high school graduates in a given district with two more years of free education before they either took a job or entered a four-year college. The community college was modeled on the comprehensive high school and was intended to serve everyone in the district, regardless of previous academic performance. College-style academic courses would be offered for those who intended to transfer to a four-year institution, terminal education programs for those who wanted only the two added years after high school, and vocational and semiprofessional programs for those needing a salable skill. There were only a handful of these types of school prior to World War I, and more than 100 opened in the 1920s. The Depression did not slow their growth and instead seems to have accelerated the process. There were more than 200 community colleges at the beginning of World War II, and after the war they continued to increase, though more slowly until the late 1950s. Since that time, the process has accelerated until several dozen community colleges are being founded each year:
They have capitalized on the local backlash against national institutions and cosmopolitan values; on lower-middle and working-class resentment against professional exclusiveness and social snobbery at the universities; and on adult anxiety about the increasing emancipation of the young from adult supervision on residential campuses. . . [and] the entrepreneurs of the community college movement have also profited from the widespread (though in some ways erroneous) belief that it costs the taxpayers less to educate a given student in a community college than elsewhere, and from the undoubtedly c...