Community colleges face unprecedented demand and budget challenges. How does design serve higher education’s fastest-growing sector?

The nation’s first public community college, Joliet Junior College in Joliet, Ill., was founded in 1901 as an experimental postgraduate high school program. It would be safe to say that the experiment was a success. More than a century later, nearly 1,200 community, technical, and junior colleges operate in the U.S., educating some 11.5 million students per year, according to the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC).

Today’s community colleges serve three distinct missions, says Deborah Shepley, AIA, community college practice leader at HMC Architects, based in Irvine, Calif. One mission is to provide basic-skills instruction to help students succeed, whether they are at the community college, looking to transfer, or acquiring skills for the workforce; another mission is to provide lower-division education to support those who want to transfer to four-year universities; and lastly, they aim to provide workforce training. Community colleges need to be all things to all people—even as they have ever-decreasing resources to offer. Read the full article from Architect Magazine.