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SALT LAKE COMMUNITY COLLEGE
SALT LAKE COMMUNITY
COLLEGE
A COLLEGE ON THE MOVE 1948 - 1998
By Ernest W. Randa, Ph.D.
Hard Cover 8.5 x 11 For information, Contact
Us
ISBN 1888106468
Library of Congress 99-067830
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From converted horse stalls and hay
lofts to modern laboratories and high technology, Salt Lake Community College
has experienced a remarkable one-half century. Opening its doors in September
1948 to 175 students registered in 14 courses, the College had modest
beginnings.
Now, more than 50 years later, Salt Lake Community College
serves over 53,000 students, who are registered in more than 80 credit and
non-credit vocational and traditional academic courses at ten locations
throughout Salt Lake and Tooele counties. Indeed, one of the institution’s
founding fathers, E. Allen Bateman, Superintendent of Salt Lake Public
Instruction, was correct when he predicted, "The school will become one of
the greatest vocational institutions in the Intermountain area." The
College has not only achieved that vision, but has expanded to become a
prominent, nationally recognized community college.
SLCC’s foundations are based on the belief in an open door,
student-focused, comprehensive community college, responding to the
ever-changing needs of the local population. Consistent with this focus, and its
community-driven teaching mission, the College has active partnerships with more
than 500 businesses and industries. In cooperation with local school districts,
SLCC strives to serve current and future needs of a growing workforce.
The 1990's brought special challenges of an expanded
institutional mission and significant and steady enrollment growth. While this
necessitated the addition of new buildings and sites, it can never be forgotten
that the special quality of Salt Lake Community College is its people.
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The
College’s faculty are dedicated to assisting and enriching the lives of
students. They work tirelessly to provide instruction and personal attention to
our students. Through involvement in clubs, sports, and community service,
students gain new knowledge, earn national honors and awards, and acquire life
skills which will serve them, their communities and their nation in positive
ways.
SLCC’s staff and administrative personnel also share the
vision and commitment that, "Students are our highest priority."
Indeed, because of all the good people who serve this fine institution, Salt
Lake Community College is a great place to be.
In the coming years, the most significant growth in the Salt
Lake Valley will occur in the southern part of the county. Accordingly, in
December 1998, the College broke ground on its Jordan Campus, which borders the
cities of West Jordan and South Jordan. The first phase of this 114-acre site is
underway; the full campus is expected to be constructed in about 12 phases
during the next 30 years. Time will tell how these plans manifest themselves in
the decades to come.
In addition to new sites and facilities, the College recently
dedicated its new electronic campus. This form of educational delivery uses
advanced technology to reach students who live a distance from any site, as well
as those traditional students seeking other forms of classroom access. This is
just one way the College is seeking to deliver education to students who cannot
attend a campus or center.
SLCC has made phenomenal strides in the past 50 years and
there is no reason to expect anything less in the coming century. SLCC’s
commitment to our students, residents, businesses, and industries of Utah, and
beyond, will remain the focus. Rest assured, Salt Lake Community College will
continue to be "A College on the Move."
President Frank Budd
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When speaking about the roots of
community colleges, educators and community college administrators are fond of
quoting Thomas Jefferson’s passage about the need for local schools to teach
citizens useful arts. In fact, Jefferson’s was an isolated statement, which
neither he nor anyone else acted on for a century after his death. While free
public education was a common demand of working people in early 19th century
America, their goal was to enable them to exercise their rights in a society
becoming increasingly democratic. As universal white male suffrage became common
in the 1830s, the new voters felt a need to understand the issues on which they
were voting. They did not see education as having economic benefits. Skills,
including many of those now defined as "professional," such as those
needed by doctors and lawyers, were learned on the job, by working with those
who had the skills, sometimes with and sometimes without formal apprenticeships.
With citizenship as the primary goal, free public elementary and, especially in
cities, secondary education became widely available by the mid-19th century.
Before the Civil War, post-secondary education was restricted to a few
professions and classes. Ministers and military officers were expected to have
college degrees and, slowly, people attached similar expectations to doctors,
lawyers, engineers, and other professionals, who increasingly had college
training. In an era with few government or private scholarships, however, most
college students were the sons of wealthy families who went to have fun and to
make connections that would serve them in later life. College was more of an
extended rite of passage into upper class America than it was a training ground
for professionals.
America’s industrialization and urbanization after the
Civil War caused changes in both occupational and educational systems. The
growing middle class aspired to the growing number of professional jobs at the
same time doctors, lawyers, academics, and other professionals, especially in
the 1880s, created organizations that began to set educational standards to
enter those professions. The result was a proliferation of liberal arts colleges
throughout the country. The older colleges preserved their status as places for
the social and intellectual elite partly by remaining so expensive only the
wealthy could attend, and partly by adding graduate schools, a German innovation
that first appeared in America at Johns Hopkins University in the 1880s.
Although formal college education became more important as a
pathway to the professions, the connection between education and great wealth
remained tenuous throughout the nineteenth century. A count of prominent
businessmen in the 1900 edition of Who’s Who in America showed that
eighty-four percent had only high school educations or less. This did not
dissuade the middle and laboring class parents who increasingly saw access to
post-secondary education as their children’s road to success. To them, access
meant affordability, and this led to the first junior colleges shortly after the
turn of the century.
The first junior colleges were established between 1900 and
1910. Many of the early ones were established by local school boards and
operated by high schools using high school teachers as faculty. Governance was
usually by the school boards, and remained so until a nationwide push for
separate governance in the 1960s. Curriculum concentrated on the liberal arts,
because parents and students were interested in classes that would ease the
transition to four-year institutions.
There was limited interest in vocational education before the
Second World War. The public viewed four-year degrees as the goal of
post-secondary education. Most employers expected to train their own employees,
and did not yet perceive taxpayer-funded vocational education as of benefit to
them. Elected and appointed government officials supported liberal arts and
four-year preparatory junior colleges as a relatively cheap means of meeting the
public demand for increased availability of higher education, but agreed with
most that vocational training was the responsibility of business. In the 1920s,
few vocational classes existed, and most of those were business-oriented,
limited to secretarial skills and basic accounting. The Great Depression of the
1930s brought more interest in vocational retraining on the part of the
unemployed, and vocational classes became slightly more common, although most
students and parents were still more interested in transfer courses.
Heavy duty mechanics, 1950.
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Whatever their goals were, the number and proportion of
American students in two-years colleges grew in the period between the two world
wars. In 1918 there were forty-six institutions enrolling 4,504 students, or
about one-percent of post-secondary American students. By 1940 there were 456
institutions enrolling 149,854 students, or about one in ten college students.
During the 1920s and 1930s, it was primarily junior college
administrators who argued that their institutions were the place where Thomas
Jefferson’s dream might be realized. . . .
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