There are few marvels of American ingenuity more extraordinary than the retail grocery store business.

The advent of refrigerated trucking (yes, yes, it’s nice to “buy local,” but give me a break) has led to the explosion of every imaginable retail grocery outlet, from the super-sized grocer to the tiniest convenience store; from the Whole Foods-type marketing colossus that promises that your chicken never took Sudafed when it had a cold, to the corner drug store selling Campbell’s condensed tomato soup for a nickel as a loss leader.

The marginal urban downtowns lust for a modern, full-sized grocery store, as a symbol of prosperity and success and appeal to cool professionals whose checks don’t bounce. There are few symbols of choice and consumption and customer-driven supply more dramatic than the food-store ability to sell you any food-stuff that won’t bite back.

That’s how community colleges should be. There should be a raucous, crazed, diverse, unpredictable market for two years of college education. They could offer up a range of solutions from cranking out mediocre Shakespeare scholars to producing hordes of heating and air conditioning repair technicians and everything in between – except for newspaper columnists, of which there are already too many.

Gov. Patrick’s soaring rhetoric of late, promising to centralize authority over the state’s community colleges, is exactly the opposite of what should be going on in the current environment. Not only should the Patrick administration not impose a Soviet-style dictatorship over community college administration, it should dismantle the feeble governance that already exists, wish the boys Godspeed, and unleash them to find the right market strategy for their particular region.

There can be a handful of snobby community colleges, designed to feed graduates into decent four-year schools at a discount. There can be community colleges at the other end of the academic pecking order, focused almost exclusively on blue-collar training for chores that may not require a thorough understanding of Thoreau.

What the community colleges need today is a marketing plan for each campus, an advertising budget, and a customer base empowered to pick and choose the right grocery store for intellectual food.

Filling Needs

Iowa and Michigan, for instance, have aggressive tax incentive plans that encourage local manufacturers to use community colleges as friendly training centers, with students (reimbursed for tuition by the hiring companies) wandering between “work” and campus.

Nonprofit and industry-supported initiatives are popping up across the country to invade community colleges and focus the faculty and administration on putting employables in desirable jobs.

Gov. Patrick claims his reorganization will energize the community colleges to fill all manner of unfilled jobs, but the heavy hand of a layer of state bureaucracy can’t really be the answer to the “problem.” To be sure, community colleges may not be the most elegantly managed or efficient operations in all creation, but the answer is to empower students (Dare we say it? Give the students vouchers, instead of merely feeding money into the community college system.) and let the market sort out what each campus should offer up.

Even Gov. Patrick’s reasonable-sounding initiative to eliminate the somewhat goofy line-item budget process for each and every community college could backfire, if the alternative is an automatic doling out of generous funds to every campus, whether or not it shines.

Poor Education Secretary Paul Reville has bordered on the incoherent, as he mumbles his way through an explanation of how the community colleges will remain independent. But they will also be encouraged to collaborate, except, of course when they aren’t, in which case they will be smacked on the nose and told that education is a “state” function, as well as a “local” function.

Let the schools “collaborate,” but at the end of the day, unleash some red-blooded marketeers to go out into the local communities and ask the consumers what they want from each campus. It sounds heavenly to the bureaucratic mind to suggest a system in which schools would offer up a universal program, blessed by the state and fulfilling every need.

That’s not going to happen. My favorite little grocer has fresh sushi on Sundays. Who would have thought?