Jill Biden vaunts community colleges at UN forum

PARIS — Jill Biden, the wife of the U.S. vice president and longtime educator, says American community colleges could be a pillar of economic recovery and a source of new skills after layoffs — and a model for poorer countries struggling to educate their citizens.

The World Bank had a similar message in a report Monday that denounces the “hype” surrounding elite universities. The report says developing countries, especially in times of recession, would be better off meeting the educational needs of their local communities and economies than trying to build world-class schools.

Community colleges are “a gateway in this economy, as people are losing jobs and going for new training,” Biden told The Associated Press in a telephone interview late Sunday.

Biden, who teaches English as a second language at Northern Virginia Community College, called on 28 years of education experience in a keynote speech at a UNESCO forum on higher education in Paris.

While her experience is U.S.-based, she said the community colleges model could help “to fill in the gaps, technology, water programs, remedial education” in poorer countries around the world.

“At UNESCO, they want to look at the remarkable model of community colleges in the U.S.,” she told The AP. “We can all learn from one another.”

In her speech, Biden noted that the U.S. State Department offers scholarships to students and faculty from developing countries in fields that will advance economic development, such as waste treatment and energy policy.

She said the U.S. system of nearly 1,200 community colleges nationwide serves almost 12 million students and has faster growth in the past three decades than other universities and colleges.

The more elite end of the education spectrum got poor grades in the World Bank report, issued at UNESCO on Monday.

The report says countries aspiring to build world-class universities to compete in international rankings may be “chasing a myth.” It says that when developing countries rush to build elite universities, they can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and operate and still do not provide the social and economic rewards they were seeking.

“Even in a global knowledge economy where all industrial and developing countries are competing for a bigger slice of the economic pie, the hype surrounding world-class institutions far exceeds the education needs and research potential of many of these same countries, especially at this time of global economic crisis,” report author Jamil Salmi said in a statement.

The report notes that the most prestigious rankings, the Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Times Higher Education, are topped by American and British schools with huge research funding. Major economies such as France, Germany and Brazil are under-represented.

Biden, on her first trip abroad since the new U.S. government was inaugurated in January, observed U.S. Independence Day by visiting American troops in Germany.