CONTEMPLATING SECOND CHANCES. A Joanne Jacobs post, "Leave No Motivated Adult Behind," points to a Community College Spotlight spotlight on a Baltimore Sun editorial by Susan C. Aldridge, president of University of Maryland University College, not to be confused with University of Maryland Baltimore County or Towson State. The president focuses on the difficulties non-traditional students face. (Her opening anecdote identifies one of the problems a military that relies heavily on reserve units faces: a graduating student's son picks up a diploma for dad, called to Iraq.)

But each year, thousands of community college students who want to earn a bachelor's degree — particularly those from modest-income or minority families — cannot continue. America's four-year colleges don't accommodate them.

Perhaps, perhaps not, as her column illustrates.

This is not just a tragedy for them. It is a tragedy for our nation. Researchers estimate that baby boomer retirements will soon leave our workforce 14 million shy of the number of four-year degree recipients we need.

The four year degree is not necessarily a prerequisite for many of those jobs; rather, it has become a precondition to employment thanks to the failure of K-12 to do its job, in part because accommodating recalcitrant learners or incorporating trendy but non-academic topics has crowded out the fundamentals, something the current emphasis on testing addresses, if in a crude way.

What stands in the way? First, cost. Students paying about $2,500 a year for community college tuition cannot always afford the $7,000 average for public universities, much less the $26,000 average for private institutions.

It's in the interest of a public university president to ask the taxpayers to pick up more of the tab, even if it becomes a regressive transfer. (As regular readers know, I benefitted from an economy in which state subsidies were generous and a factory job in the summer and a 20 hour commissary job during the school year met the bills.)

And there are other obstacles. Four-year colleges and universities often reject credits from transfer students. They schedule courses at challenging times for students who work. Sometimes they cannot even provide enough parking spaces for people rushing from work to class.

Transfer credits do pose an obstacle, whether the student is transferring from Montgomery County to Maryland or from Zoo Mass to Harvard. Within a state, articulation agreements among community colleges and state universities make sense. Classes outside of prime time for resident students (before 10 am and after 3 pm) might have low opportunity costs, if one neglects the lives of the faculty. Parking hassles and rushing to class, on the other hand, can reflect the poor life-management skills of students who have become nontraditional because of previous bad decisions, or enabling behavior by their elementary and secondary schools.

How do we change? Once we understand that 65 percent of adults in this country do not have a college degree, it becomes obvious that our traditional public colleges and universities need to adapt. They must work with community colleges to remove obstacles and create pathways for these students to earn degrees that employers value.

This paragraph does not cohere. At one time, K-12 prepared people for adult life: that 65 percent aggregate presumably includes many such people. Some might take an interest in academic subjects later on, not necessarily for workforce development. Workforce preparation, on the other hand, is not necessarily the objective. In many cases, employers spend a lot of money on technical training the universities, and K-12, have failed to do. In other cases, workforce preparation is hard (think rocket science or derivatives trading or civil engineering) and it will take more than a few evening classes or more parking spaces to provide those pathways.