An exploration of community college service settings: Managing for selected minority participation through cultural inclusion

The purpose of this qualitative study is to determine the way community college administrators perceive the public space inside their campus buildings, and plan the interior design to manage the impression or image presented to the cultural minorities that they seek to serve. The target population for this study was community colleges administrators and community colleges in the southwestern United States serving minority populations. Colleges were selected through input from expert informants in architecture, interior design, and higher education.; Sites were visited and in-depth guided interviews were conducted with community college presidents and administrators at the identified colleges. College servicescapes were analyzed for evidence of cultural inclusion. Data were analyzed using the constant-comparative method to determine emergent themes from the interviews and comparisons were made with written documents and visual data from sites.; The findings demonstrated community college administrators were aware of diversity and minority cultures in their service region. Their focus was on general impressions of the campus for the community. Facilities managers existed at the colleges, but their roles were primarily supervisory and maintenance oriented. When giving consideration to developing messages through tangible elements of the campus and the interior public space, most administrators did it intuitively. Only two of the six presidents were deliberate in their approach to the visual environment and the communication of cultural inclusion to visitors and users of the campus.; All presidents retained the development of messages at the executive level and considered it connected to capital construction. They did not relate the design of interior public space to marketing the institution to minorities. A significant finding in the customer services orientation of the presidents was the assumptions made about language proficiency and lack of awareness of language symbolism for minority members in their community colleges. The college presidents did not manage interior public space in the services area for cultural inclusion in a systematic manner.; This study points out that architecture, interior design, and educational administrators are not using the interiors of buildings to convey cultural inclusion and welcome to all members of the community.