Obama tailors community college plan to corporate interests

by wsws (reposted)

Thu, Jul 16, 2009 7:41AM

Thursday, July 16, 2009 : In a speech delivered Tuesday on the campus of Macomb Community College in Warren, Michigan, Barack Obama unveiled the American Graduation Initiative (AGI). The initiative proposes to coordinate the educational goals of community colleges with the interests of the corporate elite in order to provide the latter with a larger cadre of technically trained workers from which to recruit.

The central component of Obama’s plan, providing $12 billion in funding to community colleges by 2020, is an effort by Obama to restore America’s position as the nation with “the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.”

The title of the program, and the exclusion of four-year universities from access to the funds, are indicators of Obama’s central purpose. He aim is not to enable low income individuals to transfer to four-year universities, but to encourage them to seek associates’ degrees and certifications from community colleges as an end in itself.

“We know,” says Obama, “the most successful community colleges are those that partner with the private sector. We want to encourage more companies to work with schools to build these types of relationships. That way, when someone goes through a training program, they know that there’s a job at the end of the training.”

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For more information: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/...

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