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Although the City Colleges of Chicago (CCC) are rooted in the tradition of providing transfer education to Chicago's working class youth, the current administrative acceptance of a market-oriented, vocational philosophy has resulted in a decline in general education courses and has jeopardized equal access to higher education. This vocational orientation, developed in the late 1960's and 1970's, has been deliberately encouraged by an informal web of national and state institutions for the benefit of employers. State differential funding of community colleges has increasingly favored occupational, rather than baccalaureate, education, and policymakers have restricted open admissions policies to two-year colleges. As a result, administrators came into conflict with general education faculty, and the "new students" of the 1960's and 1970's were shunted into two-year, terminal, vocational programs and denied upward mobility via additional higher education. This trend is mirrored in the 1974 CCC Master Plan, which proposed that general education be provided only in order to service career programs. In planning for the 1980's, however, administrators must look beyond the immediate goal of meeting manpower needs and develop general education curricula to provide students with the imagination and judgement to deal with global problems. The resolutions to strengthen general education precede the paper. (JP)