Preserving and Promoting Democracy: University Demands and the Importance of the Community College in Post-War America, 1946–1953

Abstract

Resulting from the want and need to secure higher education as a means to become an active, engaged, and contributing citizen in the United States after the Second World War, institutions of higher learning were flooded with students. Exacerbating and supporting this influx of students was the Truman Commission’s 1947 Report, Higher Education for American Democracy. It was in this document that the social role of higher education in the United States was defined, and perhaps, equally important, the junior college’s role was defined and re-named the community college, positioning the institution to serve specific areas. It was during these formative post-War and early Cold War years that higher education was called to recreate and support the national agenda, forcing the tertiary institutions to stake their, and their students’, claim in the socio-economic hierarchy by defining the potential market position of graduates based on policy and practice.