photo by steed media service
President, Kennedy King College
Clyde El-Amin, president of Kennedy King College in Chicago, says his community college is firmly positioned to help displaced workers and the general populace reinvent themselves during these perilous economic times. “The amount of business that we get in down times is kind of a sad reality. We get a lot more business when times are hard — especially community and technical colleges,” he says. “Interestingly, more people want to go to school in hard times because they correctly believe that additional training makes them more marketable.”
El-Amin says KKC aids traditional and nontraditional students in invaluable ways. “Because we have much more practical training, and we have many more short-term training options that can change their lives and their earning potential … we do well,” El-Amin explains. “It makes a four-year degree significantly less expensive. [At community colleges] there’s more attention, smaller classes [and] more patience. We have an organizational design that actually helps us deal with some of the remediation that they may need in order to become effective college students.”
Although, community colleges are also bobbing on the ripples of an economy sending out shock waves, El-Amin says they adjust accordingly. “We have to serve many more people and at the same time we have to serve them while cutting our costs. What we focus on is our core mission, and as we decide what to cut … we start as far from the core mission as we can.” –terry shropshire
