Every major city in every state in the country has a public community college, as do U.S. territories such as Guam and Puerto Rico. President Bush, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and civic and business leaders of all stripes are increasingly talking up community colleges as critical to training U.S. workers for ever-changing job needs in the global marketplace. However, despite near-universal agreement that community colleges are instrumental to the prosperity of communities everywhere, one major city is lacking one--the nation's capital. In 1977, Washington's only two-year institution, Washington Technical Institute--which had opened in 1968--was merged with the district's Federal City College and Washington Teachers College to form the open-access University of the District of Columbia. The merger was part of a push for statehood and for equal access to higher education in the district, movements that had picked up steam in the 1960s. The unprecedented consolidation led to a decline in total students, from 14,000 in 1977 to less than 5,000 today, as well as to a decline in two-year offerings. In this article, the author discusses the lack of community colleges in Washington and the problems it has created in serving the higher educational needs of its growing minority population.