Union College (New Jersey)
Union College (formerly Union County College) is a public community college in Union County, New Jersey. It was founded in 1933 as the first of New Jersey's public community colleges. The college has four campuses: Cranford, Elizabeth, Plainfield, and Scotch Plains. It is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. The college offers more than 80 programs leading to Associate in Arts, Associate in Science, and Associate in Applied Science degrees and certificate programs provided by the Continuing Education program. It also offers distance education classes. History The college opened as Union County Junior College on October 16, 1933, in Roselle, New Jersey, with 243 evening students. With massive numbers of people out of work, there was strong pressure to educate people as a way to provide jobs; one account suggests that the official who "established Union County Junior College" was the Union county schools superintendent, Arthur L. Johnson, who was seeking ways for people to find employment and better themselves. According to one source, it was the oldest community college in New Jersey. Still, the college was "pitifully underfinanced" and rented space from a local high school. Its initial budget was $17,000 for the entire school. Its purpose at the time wasn't so much to teach undergraduates but to "provide jobs for unemployed teachers" during the Great Depression, according to historian Donald R. Raichle. An early administrator was Dean Hubert Banks Huntley. Raichle described the college's emerging mission was preparing "students in the first two years of college to make possible their later transfer to other colleges and universities. But funding problems became even more severe, and a lack of funds from the federal government in the middle 1930s forced a change back from public to independent status. Vocational training was emphasized; the curriculum catered to students who did not plan to further their education at four-year universities. The college was to have four distinct homes from its founding until 1983. Twin challenges presented themselves in the next few decades: first, after World War II, returning soldiers bolstered by the GI bill swamped colleges and became a severe strain on resources in the late 1940s. In the 1960s, the college faced competing pressures from the "rapid proliferation of public community colleges in New Jersey." Career education became more varied, more sophisticated, more costly, according to Raichle. By 1983, another major change occurred. The college had grown to 6000 students. It merged with the Union County Technical Institute in Scotch Plains, and it once again became a public college with the official name of Union County College. The college's structure was established by state statute on August 17, 1982. Between its founding in 1933 and 2007, it taught 1,100,000 students, with large numbers of them advancing to four-year colleges and universities, and it has graduated more than 25,000 students as well. The merger was presided over by college alumnus Dr. Saul Orkin, who had been president since 1974; Dr. Orkin died the following year of a heart attack