Community College Global Counterparts: Historical Contexts

Abstract

Since 1971, scholarship on community college global counterparts has documented the nuances of these institutions and charted their similarities to one another. The purpose of this article is to detail the first three decades of community college global-counterpart scholarship from 1971-2001. Within each decade there exists scholarship that corresponds to changing global communication patterns over the past 45 years. The discussion on scholarship in each decade is divided into two perspectives. The first depicts US consciousness of Others as the impetus for comparative discourse. The second examines perspectives of non-US scholars whose scholarship celebrates developments in their home countries. Combined scholarship during these years illustrates how variability of institutional type denotes economic, historical, political, and cultural patterns of educational borrowing.

Access and Social Capital: A Profile of Community College and Global Counterparts

“…We recognize that the term community college is vague, even in those countries where these institutions exist. Complicating this discussion is a stereotyping of the community college as a United States phenomena, which leads to a misinterpretation of form and a lack of acknowledgement that these institutions exist in many countries (Raby and Valeau 2013). In fact, in our review of 1,083 publications, we found that no other institutional type within this sector is found in as many countries as the community college.…”

“…In 2012, we conducted a literature review of print and on-line peer review journal articles, chapters in books, dissertations, and ERIC documents written in English from 1971(Raby and Valeau 2013. For this article, we added publications from 2011-2014 as well as new publications found from earlier years.…”