Holloway: For most of the twentieth century, education's focus concentrated on learning for learning's sake. But is that enough for the twenty first century? On Black Issues Forum this week, we'll examine this and other pertinent questions as we explore the issue of learning for a lifetime.

Our guests this evening are Dr. Lloyd Vick Hackley, President of the North Carolina community college system and writer/researcher Milton Jordan. Thank you both for being here. Milton, you've certainly been a part of our program and part of our black issues forum here. And Dr. Hackley, you've really been a part of this program I guess for almost a decade with my predecessor Dr. Vandergrift and so it's a pleasure to have you back, and congratulations on your new capacity.

Hackley: Thank you very much. We were really happy when they began this program some ten years ago and I was fortunate enough to be there when it was conceived and first put into effect and I participated on several of the early shows. So, thank you for having me back.

Holloway: Certainly. Our pleasure. As the president of the community college system, which is one of the largest in the country I believe, you bring a unique perspective and a vision on how that fits in our education system in North Carolina. Tell us about that.

Hackley: Well, I've always believed that one should view education from the perspective of the student as opposed to the perspective of those people who operate the systems. In fact, I've always thought that one should stand at kindergarten and view education as an unbroken tube that goes straight on down as far as the student wants to go. And our job is to make sure that as a student passes through the tube that each of the segments of the systems operates as if they are part of one whole as opposed to having big gaps between say K-12 and community colleges and four-year schools.

If we see ourselves as merely segments in one unit, then the way we deal with that student moving through will make more sense to the student since the student doesn't see all the segments - administrators may, but the students do not.

Holloway: How far along are we in North Carolina now with - I know from my work that we're looking for this seamless system and that's another way of describing what you're talking about.

Hackley: I think we're closer to that now than we have ever been in our history. For several fortuitous reasons. One, the three individuals who right now are hitting up these systems know and like each other both as professionals and as persons. Dick Spangler, whom I have a great deal of respect for, Jay Robinson and I work together in the University of North Carolina system.

Holloway: Let me just clarify to our listeners. Spangler is the president of the university system. Jay Robinson is the chairman of the state board of education, K-12.

Hackley: Absolutely. And those three segments - the community colleges, which I'm the president of, and Dick Spangler from the University of North Carolina system, and Jay, all of us work together at one time in the same system. In fact, Spangler was our boss and Jay and I had offices that joined one another. We could walk through a door there and talk a lot, and in fact did. Jay talked to me a lot about what goes on in K-12. And so right now we are forging a universal transfer agreement to knock down the barriers as it were between K-12 and community colleges and in fact between community colleges and four-year schools which will make it infinitely easier for students to move through those segments, in and out of those segments, and not have a lot of trouble in doing so.

Jordan: Let me ask Dr. Hackley a question. Is your system switch from a quarter to a semester system part of that agreement? Part of that change?

Hackley: It certainly is. We were a little bit off kilter. Community colleges were off kilter with K-12 and four-year schools, they were meshed in a fairly standard way like they are in the rest of the United States. We're the last community college system in the United States to switch to the semester system, which will make it easier then for all three of those segments to be lined up. On the quarter system, our students were off getting into four-year schools and they were off kilter, the colleges were, in bringing students out of the public schools. It'll make it a lot easier for the transfer agreement to work.

Holloway: Now, in terms of educators seeing themselves as part of a comprehensive whole rather than segmented - you talked about that and Milton Jordan has written about you saying that. Clarify what you mean.

Hackley: Well, if we simply see our responsibility as starting when students get to our door and if we don't see any responsibility after the students leave our doors, then we will see ourselves as operating individual units. But if we say, "I have some responsibility" - for example, in the community college system and communicating with students in the K-12 segment - to tell them the kinds of courses and kinds of skills that they need in order to come into the community colleges and do well. A nd if the four-year schools do the same thing then we will find ourselves looking at the students as a team as opposed to looking at the students from the individual perspectives. It will make it a lot easier on the student if they know before they get to the next segment what is expected of them. Then the system will begin to operate like one unit.

Holloway: Last week we had Eddie Davis on and we talked about, from the African American point of view - recently there were some statistics showing the difference between these test scores and looking at it from your point of view and from the students' point of view. Now, these students, some of them may come out with a certificate but not having completed their college education. What unique opportunities does a community college offer this segment of the African American - and I know it's here for everyone - but there are some unique concerns in education for our African American students in North Carolina, aren't there?

Hackley: They do. The colleges do present some unique opportunities for all kinds of students that may need some catching up before they are ready to move into their career fields. I hate to use a personal experience to make the case, but I simply have to. I'm a graduate of a community college. I found myself in Traverse City, Michigan some years ago. In Traverse City, Michigan there was the Northwestern Michigan Community College and the best decision I ever made was to attend that college.

What that college was able to do for me was to make up any deficits that I brought out of high school with respect to college level work with small classes, with teachers who were more steeped in teaching students as opposed to the lecture format that you may find in four-year colleges. I was able to do exceedingly well when I transferred from Northwestern Michigan College in to Michigan State. As a matter of fact, I was able to take an examination while I was at Northwestern Michigan College, having b een there for about a year and a half. And the difference between where I was at the end of high school and where I was when I took that exam, there's a whole world of difference in there. I did so well on that examination that I was able to get my bachelor's degree, my master's degree and my Ph.D. at no cost to me at all because of the score that I had made.

So, I would suggest that a lot of students look at community colleges as a last ditch effort when I think more of them ought to see the community colleges as a first best effort for a great majority of them. Again, classes are small, teaching is more on the line of the K-12 system in that they are able to teach students things that they don't know to get them ready to move on. And one of the things that I'd very much like to see is more minority students opting for community colleges because it doesn't preclude their getting a four-year degree but often times it provides them with a nurturing environment that they may not get in the very large institutions.

I'll say this, and then I'll quit. The largest class I had at Northwestern Michigan College was about 25 students. And that was rare, because a lot of them were 15-20 students. When I got down to Michigan State, the smallest class I had was 225 students. And the largest was 615. Now the difference between meeting up with Michigan State right after high school and meeting up with Michigan State after the community college is that I knew I could handle college level work. I had already handled it. I t wasn't like trying to make the switch from high school level work to college work at Michigan State. It was like making the switch from college level work at Northwestern Michigan College in smaller classes to college level work at Michigan State with larger classes. The work was the same and I'd already proved that I could handle it.

Jordan: Doctor, let me ask you a question. It seems to me that you're talking about very interesting and intriguing paradigms here. Correct me if I'm wrong historically. It seems that somewhere back in the fifties there was an educational researcher named Christopher Jinx. Anybody remember the name? He did a report that essentially said - the title of the report, I think, was "Who Makes it in America."

And essentially what he said was that if you're doing well by the sixth grade then it makes sense to continue to invest educational values because you'll continue to do well. If you're not doing well by the sixth, it doesn't make any sense because you're not going to do any better. And out of that whole report, I think we got tracking, the whole idea of tracking students.

Did we inadvertently set community colleges up at the end of that tracking part of those who are not going to do well? Historically, wasn't that the role that community colleges began to play early in their existence? And you seem to be proposing an entirely different paradigm shift for their role now.

Hackley: Well, I think you're right. I think community colleges - every place but in North Carolina, that I've been able to understand, began as junior colleges. And they were for students who had done poorly in K-12 for the most part. And then they began to add some other kinds of things as time evolved. It was, again, a last ditch effort for students. But in North Carolina the community colleges began as industrial education centers for the most part with the idea that it would be work for ce preparation.

At the same time, though, in keeping with the statements that you just now made, the students were divided into two distinct tracks: the mind track (for the college bound student, and they got the best we had in cognitive development) and then the less well-prepared students who were at some point around the sixth grade, put off onto the hand track (and they didn't get a lot of cognitive development so they ended up later on not being able to do very well in so far as additional learning of what's conce rned).

What I'm suggesting to you in today's context is that community colleges provide that marriage between hand track students and cognitive track students in the right kind of way because the work force requires people not only to know technical information, but also to know cognitive kinds of conclusions so that you have bright people out there who are well educated but are also doing technical work. Now, if you take a look at the jobs being created, 85% of them require the kind of knowledge and skills th at are being imparted by community colleges. So we have to eradicate that difference between "hand track" students and "mind track" students and marry those back together.

So it is kind of a shift. It's a shift in people's attitudes about where you can go through a community college. There are no limits to what you can do at the end of community colleges because the range of students we handle go everywhere from those students, whether they are adult or young people, who are illiterate -I mean they can't read at all and they come to us simply to learn how to read a newspaper or read a book or to read to their children. At the same time, we have students that could start Harvard the same time that they started community college but for some reason, whether it's economic or geographic or some other family circumstances, they choose to begin at the community college.

So we've got to get people to understand that yes it's true, we span the gambit from the illiterate to the extremely bright. And for them to quit thinking about us on the bottom end, and start thinking of us more as a balanced set of institutions.

Holloway: I was about to move in that direction because we're talking about learning for a lifetime and so you've got that gambit. But, in terms of demographics in the community colleges system, what is the average age of student there?

Hackley: Well, it varies according to which segment you're looking at, but we're anywhere between 32 and 33 years old. Some schools will say 30, some will 31 or 32. That's considerably different from the 23 or 24 year old average for the four-year colleges. Last year the community college system in North Carolina handled 760,000 students when you take into consideration everything we do, from literacy all the way through the most technically sophisticated programs that we offer. And again, mo st of them are adults already working and simply need to upgrade their skills or change from one segment to the other.

Holloway: One of the things I happen to know, without sounding too self-serving, I know that, even by watching television, many of your students - over 8,000 last year - took community college courses by watching television.

Hackley: Yeah. Again, to go back to what Milton said, it's going to take an attitudinal shift about what education is - what is the context that education can be provided in? Everything from, as you said, sitting at home watching it at television or doing it in the work place by television and all the traditional ways. But there's a broad range of ways to deliver educational services to students and we've got to think about those.

Jordan: And of course, Jay, we have to keep in mind that this whole shift in change is not happening in isolation. We are probably in the most significant transformation in the nation's history. We are going - you recall that we came as a nation, as an agrarian economy. We made our living from the soil and so forth. Then we became an industrial economy. We are now almost fully an informational economy and the point is that the nation has made the shift, but a lot of people have not made it. And if you don't make it - I mean, that's the context of all these changes, where for, as you said in your opening, for most of the twentieth century you could probably afford to learn for learning's sake. I think that now we're at a point where you're going to have to learn because you're going to do something.

Holloway: Let me as Dr. Hackley along those lines - my observation is that the community colleges have been more aggressive and accepting of distance learning, the new technologies and involving technology in learning more so, and I hesitate to say this, than the university systems have.

Hackley: I think so. But the universities are catching up. They're beginning to break the old paradigm where you've got to have 30 students sitting in the class right in front of you in order to have school. They're beginning to experiment with more distance learning than ever before. And, in fact, since they have more fiscal resources, they move ahead of the community colleges because they are appropriated a lot more money than we are to do it and therefore they can afford the technology tha t goes along with it.

We went to Virginia some months ago to take a look at what Old Dominion was doing with technology. Old Dominion has become a statewide university by virtue of the use of technology and the use of community colleges. What they have done now is to hook up with the community colleges in Virginia, let the community colleges provide the first two years of work and then right on that same site without having to go any place, then they can get their junior and senior year.

And in fact, they've even been able to have commencement by technology. So a student - I mean, they are actually a statewide university. You sit right there in your community and go all the way from freshman year to the senior year and even have your graduation and not have to leave home.

Holloway: How close are we to that in North Carolina?

Hackley: Well, the legislature - there were legislators there on that trip and they came back really fired up with the possibilities for us in North Carolina and have stimulated our thinking about doing something to bring that about in North Carolina and we are working very closely together in doing that. Again, the system is being headed by people who trust and like each other and also have an abiding faith in the people of North Carolina and a deep commitment to education. And what it can do for people will bring about that kind of change, that paradigm shift that you are talking about and I think everybody will be better off.

I mean, people with a high school diploma today, who stop at a high school diploma will find their fortunes beginning to decline. I think it was 85% of the new jobs that require post-secondary education. They don't require four-year degrees, in fact they don't require the disembodied cognitive development - they require these application skills but they require it at a higher level than we've been providing heretofore.

So, I think we're on our way to not only doing this technology transfer into instruction, but also in working more closely together as three systems.

Holloway: We have a little less than five minutes and I want to take these last five minutes to talk about something that I know we're all familiar with - the role of the historical black college. We've done programs on this in this series in the past and I know five minutes is not justice for it, but where do we stand today in the role of historically black colleges in North Carolina in what we've been talking about?

Hackley: Well, I think - as you may know, I'm the chairman of the President's commission on black colleges and we've looked carefully at what the colleges have done historically, what they are doing right now, and what they will do in the future. And we have written a report and submitted it to the President within the last month or so. Our conclusion, again with some very objective looks at historically black colleges, our conclusions are that historically black colleges still have a major rol e to play in the education and training of all kinds of people. Not just the black students and their former clientele, but all kinds of people.

Again, with emphasis on both excellence and the best that there is to be provided in education, but also with respect to the nurturing - the providing people with an environment in which they feel safe and secure and unthreatened. That is still necessary in this kind of system. They are as important to both black students and white students - community colleges are - in that regard.

And they provide another source of motivation, too, in that they have black heads. There is no segment in America where black youngsters can look to see a black man or a black woman heading up a major enterprise like that. And again, given the importance of education in America, historically black colleges, by showing those students what we can run, how we can manage these enterprises, will also stimulate and motivate them to do better. I'm convinced that it will be a long time before we should ever e ven remotely consider removing historically black colleges from our communities.

Holloway: Milton, I'm sure you have a comment or question on that.

Jordan: Yeah. And in my experience I've been very fortunate in that I've had a chance to teach at an historically black college for a number of years - at the university over in Durham, NCCU. And one of the things that's been particularly intriguing to me is the way that a school like that can reposition itself for the new challenges. For an example, we see increasingly a number of students who need to come.

They might come from Research Triangle Park because they might have gotten their job as an administrative assistant, or say a secretary and they want to go to administrative assistant but they've got to know some other things. Well, it's a very reasonable, cost efficient education for one thing. The other thing is that the emphasis is on teaching. That's the key. That is really, in my judgment, the strong suit of these schools - that there is a conscious emphasis on teaching. Not a de-emphasis on re search, but a conscious emphasis on what happens in the classroom.

Holloway: Just a minute left, Dr. Hackley. What do you say to those perhaps in this audience that's watching that says it's still a form of segregation?

Hackley: Well, it is no more a form of segregation than any other kind of specialized institution in America. We have not moved so far in this country that we can disregard those institutions, whether they are women's institutions or historically black institutions or any other kind of specialized institution that actually provide opportunities for people to go beyond what is normally expected of them. With respect to the historically black colleges, we have never been segregated. We have neve r had a policy that excluded anybody. So the idea that these institutions would foster separatism is not a correct one. People choose to go to those institutions. And the one thing that I will close with - the institutions that had policies of separatism, were the historically white institutions and not the historically black institutions. So, certainly everyone is welcome at historically black institutions.

Holloway: Thank you so much. Time has run out very quickly. Milton, thank you so much again for the background information. Six years ago the national center of education and the economy in a report entitle "America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages" warned that to ensure a more prosperous future, we must improve productivity and our competitive position. We cannot do this by simply using better machinery because low wage countries can now use the same machines and can still sell their products more cheaply than we can.

The key to productivity, improvement for a high wage nation, lies in the third industrial revolution now taking place in the world. That revolution involves not simply a change in the economy, but as Alvin Tovler notes, a fundamental shift in the definition of power and its various relationships. In the final analysis, it appears that in this configuration, education will serve the economy rather than run parallel to it. Have a blest and good evening. Good night.