Dr. Gavin Moodie - Progress Report on the Social Role of Colleges
This reports progress with the project to institutionalise colleges’ social role, by which we mean community colleges and similar types of organisations’ support of social, educational, cultural, and economic development in their local communities and regions.
The roles of colleges have alternatively been considered so multifarious that they cannot discharge any satisfactorily, or so narrowly concentrated on filling employers’ needs that they overlook other important roles. These different conceptions of colleges’ roles vary by time and place.
The paper analyses explorations of colleges’ social role in the seminar series so far, in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, England, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, and the USA.
The paper proposes that all post secondary organisations including colleges share three roles, although these roles may have different emphases in different organisations and in different programs of different orientations and levels: educational, occupational, and social.