On a recent Monday evening in Michigan, about 40 miles north of Flint, a group of community-college students built and rebuilt hydraulic circuits. The 14 men in the night class — they were all men, most of them bearded and baseball-capped, still in their boots and uniforms from their factory jobs earlier that day — worked in pairs at specialized training boards. They plugged in hoses, opened valves, hit start on motorized pumps that shot pressurized fluid through the components, their hands turning silver and shimmery from the hydraulic oil. The students were early-career skilled laborers at some of the area’s largest employers, at Dow, Nexteer Automotive, Hemlock Semiconductor. These companies needed to develop and retain a skilled work force, so they paid employees to take this class and ones like it, at a community college called Delta just outside Saginaw. The students wanted to advance professionally, to rise from apprentice machinists and pipe fitters to full journeymen in their trades.
“When they get finished, they’ll get promoted,” the instructor, Robert Luna Jr., who also installed and repaired machinery as a millwright at Dow, told me. “They’ll get raises. So everyone’s motivated to do well.” Luna grew up in the area, and he attended Delta College himself; his children went to Delta as well, before transferring to four-year state universities to complete their bachelor’s degrees. By Delta’s estimate, in the three counties it serves, one out of every eight people between the ages of 17 and 70 has taken classes at the college.
As his night students looked on, Luna emphasized what he considered the most important part of his lesson on hydraulic circuits: how to troubleshoot a failing one. “When we get called, it’s not when it’s working,” he said. “We get called when there’s something wrong.” Hydraulic circuits run forklifts and steering systems and also the heavy machinery that filters chemicals or stamps metal car parts. The students began adding to a checklist of reasons a circuit might malfunction. A bad seal. A faulty relief valve. Overheated fluid. “What’s another one? Don’t let me down,” Luna encouraged, calling on a student with his head down who worked at Michigan Sugar, which turned locally grown sugar beets into a significant portion of the country’s sugar supply.
“A plugged filter,” someone else shouted, before the other student could answer.
“Soon you’re going to get pretty fast, pretty efficient,” Luna assured the group. “You’re going to have this system down. You’ll know exactly what to look for.”
Since January, the Trump administration has waged war on the nation’s wealthiest and most prestigious universities, freezing billions of dollars in research grants to Harvard and blasting away at Columbia’s institutional autonomy. But collateral damage from these attacks has engulfed schools of all types, including the country’s 1,100 community colleges, which educate about 6.4 million undergraduates each year — roughly 40 percent of the national total and more than twice as many as are enrolled at every highly selective college and university in the country combined.
Like their four-year counterparts, community colleges are grappling with disappearing federal grants, shuttered D.E.I. offices, eliminated programs, canceled cultural convocations and panicked students and staff. At Delta, many of the grants that fund financial aid for low-income students and the staff that support them have been eliminated or threatened. I went to see the hydraulic-circuit class in part because of how much government funding, a great deal of it federal, it takes to make the teaching possible. It was hardly the only class I could have chosen: Federal funding helps pay not just for heavy machinery used in courses like the one taught by Luna but also, elsewhere on the Delta campus, for the full dental lab for aspiring hygienists; the X-ray machines surrounded by lead-lined walls for radiography students; and the robotic medical mannequins, one that pushed out little baby mannequins and could simulate everything from a breech birth to a health emergency.
I also came to Delta to meet its president, Mike Gavin, who in this moment of fear and uncertainty has emerged as a kind of spokesman for America’s community colleges as a whole. Gavin heads an improvised coalition of community-college presidents and administrators called Education for All, which, amid the responses to the federal government’s assaults, has been the rare example of collective action among higher-ed leadership. In his office on the Delta campus, Gavin, who is bald and burly, apologized to me for getting “nerdy” as he plunged into detailed explanations of blocked funding or the particulars of raising graduation rates for Black and Hispanic students. Gavin grew up outside Chicago, in Evanston, Ill., and at his diverse high school, he saw how honors-tracking and other opportunities for advancement remained extremely segregated along lines of race and class. He didn’t have the words for it then, but when he started teaching in and running community colleges, he felt he had landed in one of the few spaces in American society that had the potential to disrupt those entrenched barriers.
The idea for Education for All came about in early 2023, when Gavin started chatting with Keith Curry, the president of Compton College, a community college in Los Angeles County. Curry already led a group called Equity Avengers, focused on closing racial-equity gaps on campuses. Florida and Texas had just passed some of the first laws in the country banning D.E.I. on college campuses, and Gavin and Curry wanted to do something, even if they didn’t know what, to support their peers in those states and to sound the alarm about what they saw as looming dangers to higher education more generally. They started meeting on Zoom with a dozen other community-college presidents. Unlike elite universities, community colleges often can’t afford to keep an in-house counsel on payroll, let alone the teams of lawyers who have been advising Ivy League schools on their present predicament. So Education for All members, in addition to offering solidarity and support, provided advice on how their schools could navigate all the hurdles being thrown in front of them.
Today the group has 2,200 members, including 250 community-college presidents, many of whom gather regularly on Zoom to reflect and strategize. Gavin and others have been offering training sessions: to help, for example, dissect the “dear colleague” letter the Department of Education sent to every postsecondary school in the country in February, accusing the colleges of breaking civil rights law each time they considered race when making decisions about hiring, scholarships, classes or any aspect of campus life. The letter insisted that the schools had only days to comply, or else. But Gavin warned his fellow leaders against overcompliance, detailing which of the injunctions were actual law — the parts the schools needed to follow to survive — and which, for now, remained just threats.
More recently, he has organized discussions with other community-college presidents and their cabinets about the ways the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill will hit their schools in the near term and in the years ahead: the cascading effects of federal Medicaid reductions, which will force states to shoulder more of the financial burden and use up discretionary funding meant for their schools; the possible end of free community-college tuition for recent high school graduates in states that offer it. Education for All collated all the concerns, giving college leaders the information to report internally to their staffs and trustees as well as externally to lawmakers and foundations who might help fill the coming financial shortfalls.
Among the dozens of community-college leaders I interviewed this year, none of them believed the federal government or statehouses were deliberately trying to undermine their work. But in the Trump administration’s attempts to “vanquish” elite schools, it seemed to overlook what it might also be smashing in community colleges, which aren’t just an essential part of the country’s complex network of higher education but integral to the health of a thousand local economies.
Community colleges differ from one another in the ways they reflect their local demographics, politics and economic needs. On a day this spring when the secretary of education, Linda McMahon, proclaimed that Harvard, with its “ugly racism,” shouldn’t even bother applying for federal grants in the years to come, I stood on the quad of another community college, Durham Tech, in North Carolina. It was finals week, early morning, and three students sat under birch trees checking their phones. A pair of nursing students passed by in pastel scrubs. Banners above the walkways declared, “Do Great Things.” The campus consisted of a dozen or so buildings, most of them redbrick and low-slung and easy to count because of their numerical names. A young man with long braids carrying a motorcycle helmet made his way toward Building 10, which housed the bookstore and student services, followed by a woman in a hijab. Durham Tech’s 17,000 students are primarily a mix of undergrads pursuing two-year associate’s degrees and continuing-education students completing work certifications. Most of them come from the area and remain there after finishing at Durham Tech. “We’re not going to be Duke University that’s pulling students from England or California,” the school’s director of communications, Nancy Wykle, told me.
While Delta College supported the heavy manufacturing that still emanated from Detroit, Durham Tech was a short drive from Research Triangle Park, the business hub created in 1959 that succeeded in advancing the central North Carolina economy from textiles and tobacco into technology, clean energy and pharmaceutical production. IBM, Cisco Systems and Eli Lilly were among the thousands of companies to expand into the region, drawn there by the proximity of three top-tier research universities. Duke, also in Durham, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State, in Raleigh, formed the points of the research area’s triangle and offered companies pickings from tens of thousands of highly educated graduates each year, along with dynamic research partnerships and the innumerable benefits of academic labs producing groundbreaking scientific and technological advances. But Durham Tech was also a critical part of this growth.
Across the United States, community colleges have come to serve as the work-force-development arms of their local economies. In the Triangle area, the pharma company boosting its production of a diabetes drug or the manufacturer of electric-vehicle charging bays moving there needed a steady supply of workers — hundreds, sometimes thousands — who were trained for specific jobs but didn’t require a degree from Duke or U.N.C. The Durham metro area was one of the fastest growing in the country, and the labor market was incredibly tight. Durham Tech helped maximize labor-market participation, producing the needed human capital. It acted as a bridge to bring more women, racial minorities, immigrants and first-generation college students into higher ed and the skilled work force. “Our work is not quota based,” Matt Gladdek, who heads economic development for the Durham Chamber of Commerce, told me. “It’s very much focused on our community, and our community is diverse.”
Like other community colleges, Durham Tech partnered with all sorts of area employers, figuring out their exact labor needs, and offered students customized training for those jobs. When the city of Durham realized it had a shortage of emergency-dispatch operators three years ago, Durham Tech developed a program in less than three months that credentialed workers for those jobs. Plumbers taught classes at the college and hired the best students. The health care giant Novo Nordisk recently donated $6 million to Durham Tech to help build a new life-sciences training facility that will funnel graduates into careers in biomanufacturing and pharmaceutical production. Just as in the Saginaw area and across much of the United States, Durham Tech couldn’t graduate enough nurses or surgical technicians to meet the local demand. Walking around Durham Tech’s academic buildings, I peeked in on mock hospital rooms with mannequins in medical beds hooked up to IVs. I saw high school students who were being trained for jobs in the health sciences as technicians, assistants and researchers.
Durham is a very diverse city, majority minority, and its open-access community college, which admits all who apply, is even more so, with nearly equal numbers of Black, white and Hispanic students. And unlike Delta in Michigan, Durham Tech is in one of 18 states (five of them just since January) that have anti-D.E.I. legislation on the books. In 2023, North Carolina passed a bill banning diversity statements and training at state institutions; the governor at the time, a Democrat, vetoed the legislation, saying that North Carolina’s diversity was its strength and that there was a basic need for “training that can help us understand the unconscious bias we all bring to our work and our communities.” The State Senate overrode the veto. This year, state lawmakers passed additional legislation that forbids the teaching or promoting of “divisive concepts” and eliminates all “discriminatory” D.E.I. practices from public higher education. The governor, a different Democrat, vetoed the bill (“We should not whitewash history, police dorm-room conversations or ban books”), sending it back to the State Senate for another potential vote. “The Trump administration’s message is: Get on board or get out of the way,” Scott Yenor, a fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, who helped shape the anti-D.E.I. legislation in North Carolina as well as in other states and federally, told me. “The Trump approach makes a race-conscious approach to student success and to accreditation illegal.”
At the time of my visit, Durham Tech did have job-training initiatives that explicitly recruited women and students of color. I caught part of a lesson on grouting and tiling for students in a program — a partnership with a nonprofit called Hope Renovations — that prepared women and nonbinary people for work in the construction trades. With the population booming in the Triangle region, I heard a common refrain: Good luck getting an electrician to come to your house in a reasonable number of days. Or a construction worker, plumber or HVAC technician. Of the students enrolled in the nine-week course, which also provided stipends and assistance with child care and career services, 77 percent found jobs within three months of graduation.
I also spoke with Armond Shaw, a graduate of Durham Tech’s Bulls Academy, which recruited young Black and Hispanic Durham residents for its training program in pharmaceutical manufacturing; the program also provided its students with advising and $10,000 in living expenses to help them focus on their classes. The initiative was intended to increase the pool of eligible workers, at a time when the Research Triangle’s biomedical employers had thousands of entry-level positions they needed to fill. Shaw now worked at the multinational biotechnology company Biogen, as a Manufacturing Associate III, which, he explained, meant he grew cells in a bioreactor to produce medicines.
Durham Tech’s president, JB Buxton, tall and sporty and seemingly ubiquitous on campus, told me he had long-term concerns about the “downstream, collateral-damage impacts” of Trump-administration policies that could reach his students. Community colleges were part of the same postsecondary ecosystem as their transfer partners. U.N.C. Chapel Hill and Duke each received hundreds of millions of dollars annually in threatened N.I.H. grants alone. When four-year institutions were starved of resources, students from community colleges hoping to matriculate there suffered. But federal grants had also been axed at other big science and technology employers in the Triangle region, threatening not just college campuses but also the entire local research economy. That could mean fewer clinical-trial jobs for Durham Tech grads, as well as fewer internships and entry-level pathways to careers. The growth in electric-vehicle and clean-energy manufacturing there was also suddenly at risk.
Buxton said he was less worried about Durham Tech’s programs or policies running afoul of existing or pending anti-D.E.I. legislation. “Employers are telling us we’ve got a shortage of qualified workers,” he said. “We need to find more women.” We were in his office, overlooking the school’s center for applied technology (Building 11). “Is that D.E.I.?” he asked rhetorically, confident that anyone, regardless of political affiliation, who heard the obvious value of a program like the Hope Renovations partnership — the common-sense logic of training women for a glut of unfilled construction jobs — would embrace it. Employers in the region could not afford to ignore half the potential work force. “We’re being responsive to market need and demand, and we’re trying to give our students access to great careers and lives.” Buxton said that the Bulls Academy, by targeting students of color for jobs earning upward of $45,000 a year, was also supporting the region’s big pharma companies and the local economy. “Is that D.E.I.?” he again asked rhetorically. “Our mission is we’re going to connect the full range of talent to the full range of opportunities.”
A day later, DOGE killed a couple of dozen federal grants supporting female workers. Durham Tech learned that among the canceled grants was one from the Department of Labor that funded the Hope Renovations partnership.
The country’s first community college was established in 1901, the brainchild of the University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper, whose vision was both elitist and democratic. Harper wanted to divide the four-year college experience in two, preserving for the university the second half, a “senior college,” for students who were done with their general education and introductory courses and ready to get down to the advanced stuff. Harper partnered with a high school in Joliet, Ill., an hour’s train ride away, to create the “junior college,” postsecondary 13th and 14th grades. Other junior colleges soon opened in Indiana and across California, local schools providing ready access to vocational training or the first part of a bachelor’s degree.
In 1947, a Truman-administration report on “higher education for American democracy” called for the creation of many more two-year colleges as a way to deliver free post-high-school education to everyone in the country, regardless of region, race, religion, gender, age or income: “The name used does not matter, though ‘community college’ seems to describe these schools best; the important thing is that the services they perform be recognized and vastly extended.” The number of Americans enrolled at community colleges quickly rose, with many students entering the schools on the G.I. Bill. But the largest expansion happened in the 1960s, when the era’s baby boomers reached college age. About half the nation’s community colleges were created during this decade, an average of one per week. The percentages of Black and Hispanic Americans in higher education, as well as rural students, increased significantly in the next decades, largely because of enrollment in community colleges.
Durham Tech was one of those baby-boomer schools, opening its classrooms in 1961. On the campus this spring, Buxton was eager to clarify to me a fundamental difference between community colleges and the four-year institutions everyone else seemed fixated on. Those other schools, through their rigorous admissions process, he said, “They go out and identify talent. Our job is talent development.”
By accepting everybody, community colleges were on the front lines of serving students with legacies of exclusion. These schools then had to do the hard part of developing talent — helping their historically un-college-educated students actually catch up. They had to make decisions about tailored supports for their diverse student bodies and the different barriers specific groups faced, about basic academic programming and affordability; they had to figure out whether faculty and coursework and campus life reflected the makeup of the students in ways that helped them succeed. With the sweeping attacks on D.E.I. — the all-encompassing, catchphrase notion of it — that fundamental core of what community colleges do was now in jeopardy.
“They’re after the Ivy League institutions, but we’re affected by the same legislation, the same executive orders,” George Boggs, emeritus president of the American Association of Community Colleges and also a founding member of Education for All, told me. “Except it can be worse for us, because our students are more diverse, and they need different kinds of support.”
At Durham Tech, I spoke to many students who helped me understand what the equity work of talent development meant in reality. Laura Harris, a Costa Rican immigrant in her late 30s, was taking five classes, and once she completed her associate degree, she would begin at U.N.C. Chapel Hill as a junior. She hoped to major in psychology at U.N.C. and one day become a professor. “Therapy really worked for me, and I would like to extend that knowledge and that kind of help to others,” she told me. When Harris started at Durham Tech, though, she was divorced, the single mother of a child with special needs and desperate to train for a career. Only a few years after her arrival in the United States, she had to begin with English-learner classes. More than half of the students enrolled in basic skills courses at Durham Tech were Hispanic. The school had a Center for the Global Learner that assisted international students and nonnative English speakers, and its HVAC repair and residential-wiring classes taught in Spanish were oversubscribed. Durham Tech had special support for military veterans, students with children and certain other groups that needed customized advising, tutoring, financial assistance and encouragement to help them navigate and stay in college. “I use all the resources the school has, for real,” Harris said with a laugh.
The Trump administration’s policies now imperiled many of the resources that students like Harris at community colleges depended on. Proposed cuts to the Department of Education budget would eliminate most funding for English-as-a-second-language courses. In California, nearly 300,000 students took free noncredit English-learner language classes at state community colleges, but frightened immigrants in the program had shifted to doing their lessons online or skipping them altogether. Montgomery College, a community college in Maryland, ran a class this spring for more than a hundred nonnative English students, instructing them on the step-by-step process to citizenship. When the Department of Homeland Security grant supporting the class was canceled, the school found internal funds to keep it going, at least for that semester.
When I met Harris, we were inside the school’s food pantry, a converted classroom that was now refrigerated and stocked with canned vegetables and jars of peanut butter. The pantry fed 500 students a month. Harris was a regular there, coming most days to grab chips or a granola bar, as well as on the two “shopping” days a week on which students could take groceries home at no cost. Federally, the Republican spending bill that was signed into law in July decreases funding to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and to Medicaid; those cuts, along with plans to further restrict access to these social-service programs, will wallop low-income community-college students. Food pantries and emergency assistance were common at many of these schools. The $75,000 Durham Tech gave out annually for emergency assistance wouldn’t be enough to keep students in class and on their way to better jobs. Iesha Cleveland, Durham Tech’s director of student supports and basic needs, told me about dipping into that fund the previous weekend to pay for a hotel room for a student and her children because they were homeless. The school was in the process of building an affordable-housing complex on campus.
I sat down with another student at Durham Tech, James Martin, who introduced himself to me as lower-middle-class, born and raised in Durham, a first-generation college student. “No one in my ancestry has even been to college,” Martin said. In a survey of Durham Tech students last year, 42 percent said they were the first in their families to attend college, but based on the small response rate, as well as numbers at similar institutions, the school believes the percentage is probably higher. Martin, who had a long reddish-blond beard and long hair extending from a knit bucket hat, worked for four years at a sushi-burrito restaurant after he finished high school. “A friend asked me if I could do anything right now, like no worries about cost, ‘What would you do?’” Martin recalled. He told me he answered his friend almost instinctively: “‘I would go to school and study literature.’” Martin was now a man in the throes of passion, unable to contain himself as he talked about his Durham Tech assignments on Renaissance poetry. “Milton is the GOAT!” he cried out. “‘Paradise Lost’ is everything that I love!”
Like Harris, Martin had also been admitted as a transfer student to U.N.C. Chapel Hill, where he planned to study literature, of course. When he was accepted, he sent a screenshot of the letter to his father, a local locksmith for the past 32 years. Martin said, “I texted him and was like, ‘Who’d have thought that Jason Martin’s kid would get into a Top 5 university?’” But that pathway to greater heights of higher education was also in danger of being blocked in Trump’s second term. The Trump administration was slashing federal funding to a host of programs designed to support first-generation and low-income students, the sort of upward-mobility, American-dream work done by community colleges. Funding for Federal Work Study, AmeriCorps, Job Corps and Gear Up were on the chopping block. Perkins grants, created to get more people into vocational and technical fields, were now in question. In North Carolina’s community colleges alone, more than 111,000 students received some Perkins funding last year. The Trump administration announced, too, that it would seek to end funding of TRIO grants for students who were the first in their families to pursue a college degree, calling the program dating back to the 1960s “a relic of the past.”
The Trump administration had also cut staff in half both at the Department of Education, which historically managed the country’s enormous portfolio of student loans, and at the Small Business Administration, where the loan portfolio was now supposed to be moved. How was the federal government going to process millions of applications or answer questions from people like James Martin, who aren’t familiar with the process?
Tuition and fees at Durham Tech, as well as at the other 57 schools in the North Carolina community-college system, were set at the state level at about $2,500 a year for a full-time curriculum student, but three-quarters of students were part-time, meaning most worked jobs while in school. The Republican spending bill initially proposed gutting funding for federal Pell grants, which helped low-income students pay for college, and limiting access to these grants for part-time and working students — the very definition of most people attending community college. After much lobbying and pleading from community-college advocates in red states as well as blue, warning of a coming catastrophe, Republicans in Congress removed those provisions and actually increased some Pell funding for job-training programs. But Mike Gavin told me that he worried that the groundwork had been laid for future rollbacks. “You put something crazy on the table,” he said, “and then all of a sudden it becomes normalized.”
The Trump administration talked about expanding manufacturing at home. But across the country, 400,000 factory jobs were currently vacant. “That’s what’s so crazy about this,” I was told by another community-college leader who asked not to be identified, out of fear of retaliation from federal and state officials. (“The stakes are too high for the students that we serve.”) Why short-circuit the schools that were the local engines of building the work force? Community colleges already subsisted on budgets that most four-year schools would find laughable, lean operations that delivered hefty returns on investment for their areas. Get care at a local doctor’s office, or prepped for surgery at a hospital, or treated after an accident, or have someone come to your home to do repairs — “those are all community-college grads, all of them,” the community-college leader told me. “This collateral damage is going to end up being regional economic damage.”
On its website, Education for All offers downloadable spreadsheets of many of the programs and funding streams that have been upended by Trump-administration policies and new state legislation. The list wasn’t updated regularly enough to keep pace but still gave community colleges a tool to help track real and potential harms. Numerous community colleges had already eliminated positions and initiatives having anything to do with racial equity or diversity. In Virginia, the body governing all state postsecondary schools scrapped a five-year goal to increase diversity among staff by 5 percent and to increase Black, Hispanic and Indigenous student enrollment by 66 percent. Some community-college leaders said that D.E.I. bans had hit their faculty the hardest, casting a shadow over how professors are recruited and what they’re allowed to do in their classrooms. Many students were also reeling, though: In a recent survey of L.G.B.T.Q. college students in Texas, more than half said they now felt unwelcome and were considering leaving school. “A lot of our students don’t think they belong in college,” Gavin said. “So the out-of-classroom stuff, the affinity groups, helps them say, ‘I have some connection here that makes me feel like I belong.’”
At community colleges, the total amounts of canceled N.I.H., National Science Foundation and other federal grants were minuscule when compared with those at the Ivies, but so were their budgets and endowments. Grants had ended that channeled community-college students to jobs in U.S. cybersecurity, semiconductors and automotive technology. Rural community colleges didn’t know about the future of Department of Agriculture support. This summer the Trump administration froze nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars in funding for adult education and work-force programming that was supposed to be spread out among the states, releasing the money only after appeals from numerous Republicans. And the Department of Education pulled the plug on millions in funds for teacher training that was happening at community colleges, calling the programs “divisive” and focused on subjects that were “inappropriate” and “unnecessary.”
For leadership teams at community colleges, who were always stretched thin, trying to react to the bombardment and whiplashes of these changes — a threat one day, a grant canceled the next — seemed impossible. The head of a college described to me all the time that was being devoted every single day to repeatedly “pressure-testing” the school’s ability to endure, redoing budgets and staffing, precious time taken away from other essential work. A “chaos tax,” it was now being called. Gavin told me about a session he and others led at a community-college conference this spring: A college president from a state that passed a highly restrictive D.E.I. ban this year laid out its impact so far. The legislation and the censorious rhetoric around it were pushing students, many of whom were part-time and on the fence about whether they believed themselves to be college material, over the edge toward giving up. Another president, hearing this testimony, began to cry, and the two presidents embraced. “It provides catharsis, therapy, whatever you want to call it,” Gavin told me. “But the heartbreak I’ve seen among our peers has been real. It’s because their life’s work is being eviscerated.”
At the same time Gavin and I were meeting in Michigan, Republicans in Congress were voting to defund NPR and PBS, potentially decimating the public broadcasting station that Delta housed on its campus, a service it had provided the wider Saginaw community, including its rural parts, since 1964. Gavin had been gathering lately with other community-college leaders to develop a strategy that was less defensive and more forward-looking. Education for All was starting a voter-education drive for students; it was developing a communications strategy that enlisted students on their campuses to talk publicly about their real-life experiences with inclusion and advancement; it was joining with other organizations to promote pro-higher-ed legislation and assist with mounting legal challenges. This year, a handful of four-year colleges and universities adopted statements of solidarity. At Big 10 schools, faculty (not administrators) had written up a “mutual defense compact,” an agreement to speak up when other member universities came under attack. But nearly all postsecondary schools were, for the most part, still going it alone when trying to respond to the assaults on their institutions.
It was far too late to stop the war on higher education, Gavin noted bitterly, but he saw an opportunity for community colleges to play a more prominent role in how the country saw the entire sector. Open-access and affordable, these colleges offered pathways for all Americans into the upper reaches of education and better careers in their own communities. Local economies throughout the country couldn’t thrive without them. Community colleges, in all their diversity and inclusion, were the hubs of economic mobility. As Gavin put it, “We are situated more than any other institution in America to deliver on the promises in our original founding documents that everybody deserves a good life.”
Ben Austen, a frequent contributor to the magazine, is the author of the books “Correction” and “High-Risers.” His documentary podcast “The Parole Room” won a 2024 George Polk Award.
The post How Trump’s War on Higher Education Is Hitting Community Colleges appeared first on New York Times.
