UDC could and should be a perfectly serviceable junior college, and that is probably its future. The current school was formed by a series of mergers that over time amalgamated the District of Columbia Teachers College with Federal City College and the Washington Technical Institute. This was an experiment that has not worked and that needs to be unravelled
DC Teachers College had honorable 19th century roots in two earlier girls schools (white/black, DC being a southern town at the time) that were classic old-time teachers colleges with no pretensions of grandeur. Tbe other two were 1960's creations; Federal City College was supposed to become a liberal arts "state university" and the Washington Technical Institute was meant as a junior college. The idea was that DC, with aspirations to statehood, should have the full spectrum of "state" institutions of higher learning.
This was always as farcical as the notion of DC statehood itself and has always been recognized as such by the sober remnant here in town. But DC politics at the time was dominated by empire builders with delusions of grandeur and Great Society enablers on Capitol Hill. So a perfectly serviceable teachers school and a perfectly serviceable junior college were crammed together with a doomed-to-fail experiment in building a serious municipal liberal arts university in a city of 600,000. Once launched, D.C.'s very own "state" university aped its role models across the country: it bloated. This is not unique to UDC; we just have less of a tax base to support it, and there is no residual core of academic excellence at UDC to maintain the pretence that the institution is still credible.
As it stands today, UDC does a reasonably solid job of technical credentialling at a junior college level, and I have the impression that it is a hit with many of our immigrant communities, most of whom I very much respect, btw. DC is an immigrant magnet, and moving our Indian and Vietnamese and Ethiopian, etc. newcomers up the ladder is a worthy purpose. But DC is just flat-out too small to even pretend to support a quality liberal arts university, especially since we have the University of Maryland and George Mason within the metro area. (Not to mention Georgetown, Catholic, George Washington, or AU; the issue here is access to public education.)
This is overlong, but it is useful background to an important point. DC now has arguably the best college situation in the country for high school graduates. The Congress in 1999 finally gave up, more or less officially, on turning UDC into a full-service, high quality public university. Most of the country, however, takes access to such an institution for granted, with the flagship state university setting the standard and second and third tier public universities rounding out the picture.
To provide public university access to DC high school graduates, Congress authorized a grant program of up to $10,000/year towards the tuition of any accredited public college or university across the country (as well as private non-profit schools in the metro area). This is a voucher program on steriods; imagine taking the taxpayer subsidy your young-un is getting at State U. and applying it anywhere in the country. This is a model to be emulated, as long as the dollar amount of the voucher is competitive with national norms.
Before you grumble that this is an unfair subvention for a favored constituency, consider that this approach is vastly cheaper than trying to create a high quality public liberal arts college in DC. The real solution to the DC statehood issue is retrocession to Maryland, which would give DC high school grads access to the Maryland system. But it is important to the health of Our Nation's Capitol (as a real city, where real people actually try to raise families) that DC high school grads have access somewhere/somehow to quality public (aka affordable) public universities. This is a great way to do it. We now have a national voucher for undergraduate college eduction ... while the DC pols who take great pride in this situation still oppose vouchering k-12, but that's a story for a different day.
Sorry for the length, but a national voucher model is worth commenting on. And UDC should be more than the butt of jokes; it just needs to slough off yet another grandiose Great Society mistake and get back to doing what its predecessor institutions used to do, and very competently.
Informative post, with a lot of wisdom embedded in it.
Yes, I have nothing against a well-run community college. Academics all seem to think that community colleges are a step down for them, so their faculties long to convert them into universities to increase their own dignity. But they fill a useful purpose as they are. And it’s important to keep them affordable, for taxpayers and students alike.