An Ivy Stepladder

Roy Guzman found himself in an educational no-man's-land. A bright, industrious teen who came to Miami from Honduras nine years ago, he scored well enough on his SAT that he was being recruited by Stanford University. But despite the tuition aid he could have received, Guzman felt that he and his family weren't ready for the heavy financial burden of four years at a prestigious college. And despite his good grades, Guzman was worried that he wasn't ready academically either.

But just as he was about to delay college and join the Marines, Guzman heard that Miami Dade College, one of the largest community colleges in the U.S., had created an honors college offering an advanced, university-level core curriculum that would allow him to fine-tune his skills and do it without having to pay Stanford's $29,847 tuition. Now in his second and final year at Miami Dade, Guzman, 19, is as confident as a Connecticut preppy about tackling Stanford or an Ivy League college next year. "If I had gone to Stanford, I might be failing," he says. "But now I won't be wondering if I'm just filling a [minority enrollment] quota. I'll know for sure that I'm ready to take on those schools' requirements."

Guzman has taken advantage of the fact that community colleges--the democratic, blue-collar institutions of U.S. higher education in the 20th century--are trying on more upscale caps and gowns in the 21st. They're still a bargain; a year of tuition and fees at Miami Dade runs about $3,000. But more than a third of the 1,157 community colleges in the U.S. have developed some kind of honors program designed to attract higher-quality students and professors. As cash-strapped states cap enrollment at public universities--despite a rise in the number of 18-year-olds--community- college honors programs offer talented students a respectable place to start their higher education. As a result, the median age of community-college students has dropped, from 27 in 1990 to 23 today.

But does the greater academic cachet betray the community college's original mission to provide a refuge for remedial undergrads and midlife career switchers? The honors college at Miami Dade uses less than $1 million of the school's $643 million budget. But its approximately 400 students, who all get scholarships, enjoy an enviable student-professor ratio of less than 15 to 1, compared with about 25 to 1 for regular students. And while more than 80% of Miami Dade's honors students are black or Latino, students in similar programs at other community colleges have been predominantly white females. "We have to be careful that in the scramble for prestige we don't lose our most important focus--open access," says Richard Romano, director of the Institute for Community College Research at SUNY/ Broome Community College in Binghamton, N.Y. But Miami Dade president Eduardo Padrón argues that "it is unfair to restrict community colleges to that traditional role and allow only the four-year colleges or research universities to teach more élite students." Having these more ambitious scholars on campus, he says, creates a "motivational role model" for the rest of his 160,000 students.