Education That Defies Its Second-Rate Image

Nicole Naclerio never thought it would happen to her.

The gifted San Pedro High School cheerleader had always assumed that community colleges were for students who, as she delicately put it, “wouldn’t have a chance of going anywhere else.”

But last year, rejected by all the prestigious universities to which she had applied, Naclerio became one of thousands of California high school graduates who overcame reluctance, braved embarrassment and enrolled in community colleges.

In doing so, she confronted an enduring prejudice: the perception that community colleges are for losers.

“It was this sense of failure,” Naclerio said, still wincing at the memory of enrolling in El Camino College in Torrance. “I felt everything I did in high school was worth nothing.”

A few educators are now fighting back, arguing that, besides being inaccurate, the stigma hurts students. More than pride is at stake, they say: Dissing community colleges can sap students’ confidence and encourage them to adopt ho-hum attitudes. Further, they say, it may influence students and their families to make poor consumer choices about college.

“It’s a serious social issue,” said Los Angeles Pierce College President Rocky Young. “In the end, if this higher education system is going to work, we need to get over the status issue.”

As a new tidal wave of California high school graduates hits the college system, more students are finding that they can’t get into their preferred University of California schools or other elite universities. Many others won’t go to four-year universities for financial, personal or academic reasons.

Community colleges present a practical, if sometimes unpopular, alternative. While these colleges enjoy strong political backing, they carry a taint of shame among status-conscious high school seniors besotted with the prestige of UC.

“This time of year I get 30 calls a day from parents and students saying, ‘I didn’t get into the college I wanted; what should I do now?’ ” said Donne Davis, outreach officer at Foothill College near Mountain View, Calif. “They tell me their life story.”

Davis knows what these families are going through. Her own son went to Foothill. “It’s such an issue. I went to four-year university, and my daughter did. I expected him to.”

Plenty of community college students, especially older ones, don’t give prestige a second thought. Plenty of alumni say the community college system rescued them from educational obscurity. Plenty of faculty members dismiss the concerns as the whinings of a few wounded egos.

Yet among students, especially those steeped in high expectations, a certain snootiness about two-year colleges remains.

Sarah Neyssani, a senior at El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, will go to Pierce College for financial and personal reasons, even though she was accepted at UCLA. “My friends yelled at me,” she said. “One called me a retard.”

It lingers even within the colleges. Pierce College student Christine Dunn, 17, made her disdain clear recently as she glanced around the campus. “It honestly does seem like high school, only it’s really big,” Dunn said. “It’s, like, no big deal.”

Such attitudes are self-destructive, maintains Janice Albert, an English professor in the Chabot-Las Positas Community College District in the Bay Area. She is the head of a new faculty group called the Committee on the Public Image of the Two-Year Colleges, part of the National Council of Teachers of English. Members write articles on the community colleges and keep track of slights against the system.

“Students come into our classrooms with the feeling they’ve been sent to some gulag,” she said. They work at outside jobs too much, study too little and harbor bad attitudes.

Worse, they sometimes internalize the stereotypes, said Jody Millward, an English professor at Santa Barbara College and a committee member. “They think, what if it’s true that only dumb students go here?”

Students Conscious of Place in Hierarchy

This fall, as always, huge numbers of Californians will start their higher educations at community colleges--more than 30% of all high school graduates, compared with about 8% going to UC. The system is supposed to work that way: By statute, UC should absorb the top one-eighth of high school seniors, the California State University system the remainder of the top one-third and community colleges the rest.

The state’s community colleges have played such an important role in expanding college opportunities that they hold a kind of landmark status in the history of education. But their ranking in the hierarchy is not lost on students.

Students still refer to community colleges as “high schools with ashtrays,” breathing life into a joke that is at least a quarter-century old. Words like “slackers” and “rejects” come up a lot. The snide nicknames haven’t gone away either: “Harvard on the Hill” for Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, “UC Pierce” or “Winnetka Tech” for Pierce College.

“There definitely is a perception we battle,” said Kurt Hueg, a marketing director for Foothill College, referring to the ashtray joke. “ . . . I mean, you can’t even smoke here anymore! . . . For some reason, we can’t seem to shake it.”

Community colleges are stepping up marketing and recruiting efforts, often in the hope of projecting a four-year university image.

Among some boosters, even the words “community college” are to be avoided. Backers are relieved that the phrase is conveniently omitted from many college names, as with Santa Monica College.

Naclerio was so despondent about attending El Camino College that shortly after arriving there, she tried to leave, gaining admission to several good private universities as a sophomore transfer. She was ecstatic.

But then her parents did the math. For a fraction of the cost, they realized, she could stay another year, then transfer to UC Berkeley or UCLA--schools she wanted in the first place.

El Camino College suddenly didn’t look so bad. Naclerio stayed.

The institutions look better from within than without, she now says, adding that her classes in the honors program have been surprisingly hard. “It’s been a very humbling experience,” she said. “Being here has changed my opinion about community colleges.”

Cost is one of the strongest arguments for a community college. For $11 per unit, the successful student can spend two years at a community college, then end up with a bachelor’s degree from a highly regarded university. Neither straight A’s nor SAT scores nor lengthy freshman applications are required for transfers.

Community college students who complete required courses for transfer have priority status for admission to UC and Cal State schools as juniors. Top students can also compete for entry to prestigious private schools, even in the Ivy League.

Christine Schultz, a political science professor at Santa Monica College, worries that students who are rejected from their first-choice colleges often make the wrong choices, enrolling in expensive schools they don’t really like, because social pressures steer them away from community college.

Said John Lovas, English professor at De Anza College in Cupertino: “People do crazy dances to get into UC Berkeley and UCLA on the belief that if they go to a two-year college, something terrible will happen.”

Neyssani, the El Camino Real senior bound for Pierce, thinks UC fever has gotten out of hand. “What is UCLA? It’s just a name.” she said. “I’m Persian, and in the Persian community now, you go to UCLA or nowhere. It’s stupid. It’s spread like a plague.”

Pierce President Young cited another problem created by overemphasis on status: a tendency for students to overspend on their undergraduate educations, leaving them too broke to afford graduate or professional schools.

Recruiters Lonely at Elite Schools

Community college recruiters confront the stigma often, especially at more elite high schools.

At a recent college day at Chaminade College Preparatory school, “I was actually lonely,” said Ariela Nissim, a recruiter for Los Angeles Valley College. “Everyone was crowding around UCLA’s table. They would walk up to me and say, ‘What school are you?’ and when I told them, they would hurry up and keep walking. . . . It was like they were not to be seen with me.”

Boosters argue that community colleges offer significant advantages over universities. These include student diversity and small classes. Most of all, they contend, the colleges offer the benefits of good teaching by professors who prefer teaching to research.

Young contends that the education the colleges offer is equal to or better than that of many universities--especially in the honors programs. “Get past the bad-mouthing, and students will say they know quality is not the issue,” he said.

But there are also drawbacks. Some students get lost at community colleges, wasting years on classes they don’t need. Students and faculty sometimes complain of classes being dumbed down--although this concern is not limited to community colleges. Some of the colleges have abysmal records in transfer.

The milieu is also different. Santa Monica’s Schultz echoed several other community college professors in saying that although the top- and middle-range students at community colleges are similar to their peers at universities, “the bottom is something you would never find at a university.”

“A lot of students fall asleep in class. That’s demoralizing, you know?” said Schultz. “If you are in a class where other students are eating, chewing gum, falling asleep, it can have a bad influence on you.”

Most important to many restless young adults is that the colleges don’t offer the same social experience as big universities.

“They won’t have a rich campus experience, lunch on campus every day, that sort of thing,” said Schultz. “If you want a country club environment, you will be disappointed.”

Yet the cherished experience of being a freshman at a university--living in a dorm, going to fraternity parties, savoring independence--may not always be precisely what parents have in mind for their money.

Freshman Joselyn Nussbaum, 19, the daughter of state community college Chancellor Thomas Nussbaum, raves about living in a dorm at UC San Diego. But at the same time, she notes, some of her peers have gone “completely hog wild.”

“I’ve lost a lot of sleep. A lot of sleep,” she said. “People are loud and up. I am not partying, but I am always up. There are people just everywhere, in and out of your room. There is constant stimulation. It’s overload.”

Parents are well-advised to consider that before bundling their teenagers off to college, said Esther Choy, a Los Altos mother. “I learned from that mistake,” she said.

Choy and her husband sent their son Stephen to the University of Oregon after he graduated from an elite private high school. She and her husband, an engineer, had both followed that path. “We always looked down on public schools,” she said, and “I never considered community college.”

But Stephen quickly wound up on academic probation, the result of too much partying and too little studying, he said. After a year, he was back at home, shamefaced and facing what once seemed unthinkable--enrolling at De Anza, a community college.

Privately, his mother said, she worried that he was a failure.

But Stephen thrived at De Anza and transferred to UC Santa Barbara, where he earned a degree. At 24, with no regrets, he has returned to De Anza to work as an advisor.

She now tells other parents not to push their kids toward top schools. Focus on values instead, she counsels.

She even tried to convince Stephen’s younger sister to go to a community college.

But it didn’t work. “No way! Nobody goes there,” Choy said her daughter told her.

Choy sighed, adding: “You know these kids, they have this thing that only students who can’t make it” go to a community college.