Theorizing About the Emergence of the Community College Baccalaureate

Abstract

In the period of more than a decade since community colleges began awarding baccalaureate degrees in North America there has been little in the way of theoretical exploration of this development. This paper applies a theoretical framework that was originally developed to explain the vocationalization of the American community college to the emergence of the community college baccalaureate in Canada's largest province, Ontario. In Ontario, as of September 2008, 15 community colleges were offering 51 baccalaureate programs. It was found that Dougherty's state relative autonomy model was very helpful for understanding the behavior of the provincial government in empowering the community colleges to award baccalaureate degrees, particularly in focusing on the role of ideology. The theories considered in this paper were less helpful in explaining institutional behavior. It was found that they did not support a sufficiently complex understanding of institutional motivation, and there were methodological problems involved in using such theories to disentangle various possible institutional motives for seeking to award baccalaureate degrees.