A Study On American Community Colleges' Contribution To The Construction Of Their Communities

Clark Kerr (C. Kerr) said, "The invention of two-year community colleges is the greatest innovation of higher education in the United States in the 20th century." During the past century, community colleges developed a school of its own in the United States higher education system. It has provided more comprehensive services to those disadvantages to develop their academic and professional levels. It has also provided more extensive and more targeted services to meet the needs of residents' education, economic development of community and security defense. American community college vocational education is most unique, and it became a model all over the world in this field. Community college provides a lot of valuable experiences in the aspect of promotion of students and meeting the needs of community for China.In this paper, the community is divided into two parts: the community of the college itself and the community beyond the college, which can help to analyze the significant of community colleges contribution to the construction of their communities. Community colleges try to build a atmosphere of service, interaction, help each other and cooperation in both college communities and the community beyond colleges. Through academic and non-academic services community colleges make their students, underrepresented groups, elders, adolescence and business get what they need. Through the service community colleges mobilize the source from colleges and out-of-college, to join in the action of service, to make the best effect, especially in helping those underrepresented groups. During this participation process, the community of college and the community beyond the college are all form an circumstance and spirit of helping each other and cooperation. This spirit will make for the construction of communities, make for personal renovate and national renovate.This paper is divided into six parts. The first part is the exordium; it introduces the origins of the research, defining concepts of studying objects, domestic and international relative research, studying purposes and contents, the significance of the research and methods of research. The second part analyzes the concept basis and object backgrounds of community colleges participating in community-construction from inside and outside aspects. The third part introduces how community colleges construct their own college community. Community colleges provide students with academic and vocational courses, in order to meet students' developmental needs. They also provide a range of academic and non-academic support services, to commit itself to creating a good relationship between teachers and students, and forming a ministrant, interacting and mutual-assistance community circumstance, to help their students achieve greatest success. The fourth part introduces how to participate in community-construction outside colleges. There are three ways: providing services to community residents, providing services to local economic development, and participating security defense. The fifth part evaluates effectiveness of community-construction of community colleges in United States and brings forward its development trends, from the evaluation of the success of students and influences on students and community of community colleges. And the sixth part gives further analysis of experience of community-construction about community colleges in United States. Then it obtains some contents which we can draw from, for Chinese higher vocational colleges.