Compared with its world-famous universities, America's community colleges are virtually anonymous. But over half of the nation's 20m undergraduates attend them, and the number is growing fast. Poor, minority and first-generation-immigrant students are far more likely to get their tertiary education from community colleges-where two-year courses offer a cheap route to a degree-than from universities. And, increasingly, many policymakers are wondering whether more attention to the colleges might be a low-cost way of resolving the nation's shortage of skilled workers.
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