Examining Employers’ Perspectives and Needs for Community College Baccalaureate Degree Programs

• In Event: Examining Community College Baccalaureates (CCBs) as Tools for Social Mobility and Equity

Abstract

The expansion of community college baccalaureate (CCB) degree offerings has been growing across the United States since the 1990s as a strategy to increase access to educational opportunities and meet workforce needs (Fulton, 2015), with some evidence showing programs meeting workforce needs (Petek, 2020; Petrosian, 2013). While many CCB administrators tout the social mobility these programs provide, particularly for low-income students, an explicit focus on racially minoritized communities is less common (Cuellar & Gándara, 2021). Such race-evasive approaches are likely to maintain racial equity gaps in social mobility outcomes within CCBs and higher education more broadly.

At the same time, employers hold tremendous power in ensuring that programs are designed with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to prepare and hire students for employment (Dailey et al., 2017). While a growing body of literature around CCB programs has examined college and university stakeholder perspectives, little attention has been focused on employers’ and industry partner perspectives (Bragg & Soler, 2017).

Through a literature review, this paper aims to examine the role of employers and industry partners, and how their perceptions and recruitment and hiring practices can shape the employment opportunities of CCB graduates, particularly for students of color given persistent gaps in social mobility (Libassi, 2018). A scoping review was conducted on the extant CCB literature to explore employer engagement and perceptions on CCBs. Using key search terms that include combinations of community college, applied/baccalaureate/bachelor degree, employers, and labor market to identify peer-reviewed papers on the topic, results from three different search engines WorldCat, Google Scholar, and ERIC yielded only 69 total unduplicated articles that were published since the 1990s.

In Texas, employers’ need for workers with baccalaureate degrees strongly influenced the development of CCBs (Petrosian, 2013), and while Bragg & Soler (2017) found that employers reported limited understanding understanding of these programs from a nationwide study, they tended to perceive them favorably perceiving them as meeting a local and regional workforce need. In California, an evaluation of the CCB pilot showed some evidence of graduates meeting local workforce and training needs by filling management-level positions upon graduation, and requiring less on-the-job training than those with comparable bachelor’s degrees (Petek, 2020).

Although limited, research on employers’ perspectives around CCB programs reveal general support for these programs to train and retain workers to support their local economies (Bragg & Soler, 2017; Grothe, 2009). However, past research has found that employment opportunities differ for Black and White graduates based on prestigiousness of their credentials as determined by employers based on institutional selectivity (Gaddis, 2015), raising questions around what hiring and recruitment practices employers employ that support inclusive and equitable employment opportunities, and how that shapes the opportunities for graduates for CCB programs and the programs broadly.

With limited attention on the role and perspective of employers on CCB development and implementation, opportunities to ensure CCB programs address historical completion and employment inequities at community colleges are missed if the employers’ perspectives and their diversification and/or equity efforts are not considered.

Authors

• Marcela G. Cuellar, University of California - Davis

• Tadria Cardenas, University of California - Davis

• Alyssa Nguyen, University of California - Davis

• Adrian H. Huerta, University of Southern California

• Gabriela Torres, University of Southern California