Our panel asks the question: “Are we preparing students to graduate and begin their careers or to transfer to four-year institutions or both?” As we consider this issue, we also need to understand how the answer is increasingly decided for us by funding decisions beyond our control. The current presidential administration’s Community College Initiative, with its emphasis on “high tech skills” rather than on liberal arts education (NEH spending has been cut, again), highlights a trend seen in many similar schemes in the past 30 years: more per-student funding for vocational education, which is already more costly. This funding differential too often determines what courses get offered and what programs prosper and ignores (or even undermines) the transfer mission of the two year college. Moreover, this funding differential occurs despite the fact that a) more students at most community colleges take transfer courses, and b) most businesses stress students’(desperate) need for both cultural awareness and critical thinking, skills taught by language and humanities courses.

I will briefly explore the impact of the vocational/transfer “funding gap” and some of its pedagogical implications by examining a series of (unfortunate) curricular decisions involving English, Spanish, and the humanities courses at my institution in the past year. Our experiences underscore how the pedagogical mission facing community college English and Language teachers is especially challenging in the current climate and how real is the need to equally fund liberal arts education.