Approximately five years ago I pointed out that two-year and community colleges provide many valuable contributions to chemical education (1). The recent publication of the third edition of the ACS Guidelines for Chemistry in Two-Year College Programs (2) provides a good reason to revisit the important role these colleges and their faculty play in U.S. education.
In the U.S. there are 1195 two-year colleges (institutions where an associate’s degree is the highest degree awarded) and they enroll 11.5 million students every year. Students are about 60% part-time, their average age is 29, and about 40% are the first generation of their families to participate in higher education. In science and engineering, 44% of recent recipients of bachelor’s and master’s degrees had taken at least one course in a two-year college. Two-year colleges contribute significantly to increasing the racial/ethnic and gender diversity of science and engineering. Roughly 180,000 students are enrolled in chemistry classes at two-year-colleges each year and the average college has eight chemistry lecture sections.
Coming up with standards appropriate for the broad range of two-year colleges is a tall order, but since 1988 the ACS has done so every ten years. The Two-Year College Chemistry Consortium/Conference (2YC3) had developed its own guidelines before that. The latest guidelines were approved by the ACS Society Committee on Education at its meeting in Salt Lake City in March. They have been thoroughly updated, especially with regard to meshing with the recent changes in the ACS guidelines for bachelor’s degree programs (3). Taken together these two sets of guidelines provide excellent criteria that all undergraduate chemistry programs should aspire to meet.
The two-year college guidelines emphasize that there must be a strong commitment to students’ learning and success, that there must be enough full-time, well-educated faculty to teach the range of courses offered, that adequate facilities and support staff must be provided, that pedagogy must be based on chemical education research, and that it is beneficial to involve students in undergraduate research during their first two years. The guidelines recognize that curricula must be designed both for students whose career goals involve chemistry and science and for those who will not take many science courses but need to be aware of the methods of science. As in the bachelor’s degree guidelines, self-evaluation of two-year programs is encouraged as an ongoing process of assessing whether goals are being achieved.
The new guidelines are excellent, but guidelines are only as good as those who implement them. Effective chemistry education requires dedicated teachers who are knowledgeable in their fields, can work effectively with students, are willing to use guidelines to prompt their institutions to greater commitment, and can prepare both science majors and other students to think effectively about science and scientific issues. At present two-year colleges have many such teachers, but within 10—15 years more than half of the full-time faculty members at two-year colleges are expected to retire (4).
What will happen after that depends on all of us. If two-year colleges are to continue their major contributions to science education, we will need to recruit a great many more top-notch students to teaching careers in two-year colleges. At the moment it seems that most of us in the four-year institutions are neither aware of the gravity of the problem nor doing much to address it. I know of several excellent two-year college teachers who were discouraged by their mentors from taking positions in what were considered to be “lesser” institutions.
We should encourage high school, undergraduate, and graduate students to join the profession of teaching, where they can provide the foundation for the future scientific and intellectual capabilities of our country. We should point out that two-year colleges encourage students who might otherwise not consider science, but who might become super scientists of tomorrow. We should celebrate our many colleagues who teach by choice in two-year colleges because they have the desire and passion to make a real difference and because they believe that every student is important. We should not expect students, even graduate students, to become carbon copies of ourselves but rather should encourage them to find out where their talents can best be used and then dedicate themselves to use those talents to improve our society. All of us need to rededicate ourselves to the goals that attracted two-year college teachers to choose their preeminent positions in education.
Literature Cited
1. Moore, J. W. J. Chem. Educ. 2004, 81, 1239.
2. ACS Guidelines for Chemistry in Two-Year College Programs, ACS Society Committee on Education: Washington, DC, 2009; a PDF version of the guidelines is available at http://acs.org/, click on Education and then on Two-Year College Guidelines (accessed May 2009).
3. Undergraduate Professional Education in Chemistry: ACS Guidelines and Evaluation Procedures for Bachelor’s Degree Programs, American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2008; a PDF version of the guidelines is available at http://acs.org/, click on Education and then on ACS Approval for Bachelor’s Programs (accessed May 2009).
4. Barnett, Lynn; San Felice, Faith; Patton, Madeline Teaching by Choice: Cultivating Exemplary Community College STEM Faculty, Community College Press: Washington, DC, 2006; see http://webadmin.aacc.nche.edu/Resources/aaccprograms/Documents/stemfaculty.pdf (accessed May 2009).
great post.. thnx for sharing