At a time when community colleges in Massachusetts and elsewhere are enjoying a rebirth as bridges to well-paying jobs or higher education, Indian colleges are thwarted by everything from geography to lack of expertise. The real challenge is now to figure what do the colleges want to become. When Hopkins receives her diploma in cultural resource management this December, she will graduate into a system of contradictions. Many of her classmates won t find jobs on a reservation with 80 percent unemployment, yet few will ever leave to find work. And while graduates are supposed to start small businesses and take over tribal management, few entrepreneurial or leadership seeds have been planted inside the makeshift classrooms.
Government funding is nearly half of what traditional community colleges receive.
Designed in the spirit of community colleges, tribal colleges opened in an effort to reverse the dismal success rates of Native Americans in higher education. Even now, more than 85 percent of Indians in traditional colleges drop out and return to their reservation. That tether sparked the tribal college movement in the 1960s, smack in the middle of the country s largest integration movement in education. Still feeling the pain over a series of failed government assimilation experiments, including forced English programs in faraway boarding schools, they wanted separate and equal schools and looked to historically black colleges as examples. But unlike historically black colleges that were educating students to compete in the larger society, Indian colleges wanted to educate their own to stay on the reservation, replace the many non-Indians in administrative jobs, and rebuild their nations.