CS Education in Community Colleges

Community and Technical Colleges are two-year college institutions that offer a variety of educational degrees such as associate’s degrees (academic and applied sciences), certificates of completion, and remedial degrees to assist students/workers and institutions to collaborate through educational and workforce initiatives. For the past 50+ years, Community Colleges have been the intersection of many educational initiatives and partnerships from K-12, four-year colleges, and workforce/industry partnerships. Several educational programs have emerged that assist the student in focusing on a specific pathway in their education. Community Colleges offer a large variety of computing programs, including Computer Science degrees, notably Associate in Arts (AA) and Sciences (AS) (also known as academic transfer degrees). Ideally, these transfer degrees align learning outcomes and objectives to the ACM/IEEE curricular guidelines versions, mainly to create two-year programs, align curricula, and ease transferability to four-year colleges.

Additionally, computing programs that community colleges produce are influenced by regional workforce/industry needs and aspirations from advisory boards/committees since many jobs are generated based on these recommendations. Although curricular efforts that specialize in these transfer degrees (such as the ACM Committee for Computing in Community Colleges (CCECC)) assist CC with the inquiries mentioned above, it is “desired” to capture challenges, needs, and recommendations from the CC perspective while designing the general curricular guideline recommendation. This paper describes a community college education context and perspective during the design and development of curricular guidelines (such as the CS202X project). Finally, this paper provides a vision for the following years for considerations in curricular development and administrative efforts.