By Bob Gibson

Community colleges are the durable and reliable Rodney Dangerfields of higher education in America.

Despite attracting more students of all ages, abilities and interests, they “get no respect.”

Regardless of new demands, they also get fewer resources than they need.

Right here in our backyard, Piedmont Virginia Community College is a quiet success story facing the same stresses as many of its two-year counterparts.

This nation’s more than 1,100 community colleges are being asked to play a larger part in higher education and workforce training, yet are not being given the tools to do the job as well as they could.

A lack of sufficient funding from states coupled with an inability to raise tuition the way four-year universities handle state shortfalls leave community colleges struggling to handle increased enrollments with insufficient full-time faculty.

In short, the states are asking community colleges to do more for more students and to figure out how to do it on the cheap.

PVCC serves close to 8,000 students a year with fewer than 90 full-time faculty members and more than 175 part-time instructors and an average class size of 20 students.

A diverse range of courses and workforce training opportunities allows students to successfully transfer to the University of Virginia or James Madison University after two years or to study wine making or nursing.

In 2009, 88 PVCC students with an average grade point average of 2.94 transferred to UVa and more are successfully making the jump from Piedmont and other community colleges to UVa, JMU, Old Dominion and Virginia Commonwealth. State officials expect these numbers to continue to grow robustly and successfully.

But community colleges also are being asked to fill new and important tasks in job training.

They can learn a few things from Canada, where community colleges appear to excel at one of the tasks that American community colleges are increasingly being asked to handle. In Canada, providing a two-year degree for students whose main goal is a college credential helps them quickly enter the job market.

American community colleges can handle that task well, as PVCC is doing.

Canadian community colleges lack their American counterparts’ 111-year history of being “democracy’s colleges.” In our state and across America, the two-year colleges give substantial new access to lower- and middle-class Americans who lacked collegiate family histories.

Canadian colleges also appear to lack the large numbers of high school graduates in need of remedial courses to compete at the college level and successfully complete degree coursework who inhabit American college classrooms. High schools across America are graduating large numbers of students who are not ready for college academic work.

American community colleges are trying to deal with students who are ready, as well as students less than ready, a difficult task. They also are trying quickly to credential those seeking jobs.

Our community colleges can do more of the job preparation, credentialing and training functions than they currently handle, but they need more state and even federal support to keep tuition reasonable and hire and better compensate full-time faculty.

Last year, PVCC’s revenues of $22.4 million came from 38 percent state funding, 34 percent from tuition and 28 percent from grants, contracts and other sources.

Tuition, which is set and limited by the state, was pegged at $122.15 per credit hour for Virginians and $313.75 per credit hour for out-of-state residents.

In new partnerships with business, our two-year colleges could better market themselves as providing new and rewarding paths to successful employment. Taking on that role more publicly could boost support for their multiply-tasked mission.

American politicians and the public could support a larger job-preparation role for our community colleges, which are marketing themselves as lower-cost entry portals to U.S. universities, another of their attractive roles.

Community colleges in this country face the tough task of trying to be all things educational to all students as they respond to many aspirations and many masters.

This task is tougher if they don’t get respect. The public can help with more support for these higher education Rodney Dangerfields.