The completion agenda, community colleges, and civic capacity

In this article, we present a new critique of the Completion Agenda as inscribed in Reclaiming the American dream, a policy document published in April 2012 by the American Association of Community Colleges. Our critique is grounded on the premise that community colleges should improve completion rates, but this should be motivated by a desire to empower students and prepare them for a richer life in an evolving democracy and not simply satisfy the national economic objectives commonly offered to justify the Completion Agenda. Accordingly, following our critique, we outline an alternative vision based on a text in the literature of democracy as problem solving, a body of work that remains largely unacknowledged in higher education research and scholarship. We specifically focus on Briggs (2008) who found that six different global communities were successful in addressing serious social and economic problems through an organic process grounded in a nontraditional view of democracy. Using Briggs’ work as a model, we propose that community colleges adopt a new vision that prioritizes the empowerment of students and their communities.