Neoliberal Urbanism, Race, and Community College “Reform” in Chicago

Over the past two decades, the community college landscape has been transformed by a neoliberal reform movement now known as the “college completion agenda.” As part of a reform initiative called “Reinvention,” City Colleges of Chicago pioneered many institutional reforms that have since become pillars of this movement. As such, it is an important case of a broader phenomenon to reform community colleges nationally, demonstrating the neoliberal racial logics and processes that drive it. This case study explored the neoliberal ideologies and racialized logics that shaped City College’s Reinvention between 2010 and 2016. Grounding my analysis of public and archival documents in theories of racial capitalism and neoliberal urbanism, I argue that Reinvention was a neoliberal racial project that restructured curriculum and programming to align with the labor demands of the city of Chicago and targeted City Colleges students, the large majority of whom were students of color, for human capital development to power Chicago’s economy.