Chicagoland students find an impressive array of community colleges in Chicago competing to serve their needs. There are literally dozens of schools, and many of these schools maintain multiple locations. They have geographic locations designed for convenience, and class schedules designed around the needs of young people and working people.
Like community colleges nationwide, these organizations exist to provide two-year associates degrees, and affordable academic coursework meant to be transferable to four-year colleges.
More than that, though, community colleges also focus on job training, practical skills, and vocational training. Chicago-area schools seem to have an especially tight focus on job training and coordination with local employers. Given the city’s business-minded reputation and appetite for work, this may not be too surprising. Community college options exist in every section of Chicagoland, with a variety of non-profit and for-profit schools.
Standing at the core of all metropolitan community colleges in Chicago stands the city-run City Colleges of Chicago, founded in 1911, with the historic foundation of Crane Technical College. Like the city it serves, the CCC system is vast, complex, diverse, and concentrated on business opportunities. The stated CCC mission is to “deliver exceptional learning opportunities and educational services for diverse student populations in Chicago”.
It runs seven separate colleges and, as of early 2012, combined enrollment in those seven colleges of the CCC system is just under 63,000 students. It offers more than 200 academic programs altogether, with a tight focus on job training, and longstanding college-employer partnerships.
Within the system, the downtown City Colleges school is Harold Washington College, at State and Wabash in the Loop. It runs the only site in the city of Chicago for taxi driver certification), and it also runs the Workforce Institute, which coordinates and delivers on-the-job-training services to local businesses and the community.
The other sites (moving from south to north) include Olive-Harvey College, which serves the Pullman Community (the far south side) and operates a second campus in the Ainsworth neighborhood of the near south side.
Richard J. Daley College is on Pulaski, a little bit south of Midway Airport, and has as a sister school the Arturo Velasquez Institute, a technical training facility.
Kennedy-King College in Englewood runs its own campus along with the Dawson Technical Institute and the Washburn Culinary Institute, which operates two public restaurants on student labor.
Malcolm X College serves the Near West Side, with its campus on the Eisenhower Expressway at the site of the oldest such institution in the city, the 1911 Crane Technical School mentioned above. Malcolm X concentrates on the healthcare industry and offers the largest selection of college-level healthcare degree programs and certification programs in the entire county.
Rounding out the seven community colleges in Chicago, are Wilbur Wright College, northwest of the city on Montrose and Narragansett, and Harry S Truman College, formerly Mayfair College, in Uptown a few blocks away from the lake.
On January 20, 2012, Mayor Raum Emanuel delivered a speech to the U.S. Conferences of Mayors which outlines his vision for the future of a modernized City Colleges system. The emphasis is to be on even more targeted coordination with business, specifically the healthcare industry (with programs centered at Malcoln X College) and the transportation and logistics industry (with programs centered at Olive-Harvey College).
National businesses like Walgreens and UPS have even been invited in to help develop curricula. In the speech Emanuel urged other mayors to take similar action, describing the community colleges in Chicago as an economic engine that can “catapult millions of people into employment and into the middle class.”