Colleges train natural gas drillers
Job seekers lined up at a natural gas job fair at Broome Community College in Binghamton, New York, even though New York hasn’t yet lifted its ban on hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” for natural gas.
Even ahead of the 3 p.m. start at Broome Community College, job seekers and exhibitors gathered outside the doors. Business reps ranged from titans of the oil and gas industry to scientists, wetland specialists and experts on construction site erosion control. More than 700 people turned out for leads on a job.
The college is in the sweet spot of the Marcellus Shale region, a gas-rich formation that underlies parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.
“I’m optimistic in saying the industry will be working in New York state fairly soon,” said Broome County legislator Steve Herz, an event organizer.
Twenty miles away in Pennsylvania, thousands of natural gas wells have been drilled in the last five years.
Five community colleges in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New York make up the ShaleNET coalition, which is funded by a three-year, $4.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor.
Janet Hertzog of Broome Community College in Binghamton said the school is ready to start a three-week, intensive program to certify roustabouts, or general laborers on a drilling rig. “It’s tough work but it pays well, for someone willing to work 14-hour days for three-week stretches.”
The median salary for a roustabout is $38,000 and overtime can push it higher.
Funding doesn’t follow success
Kevin Drumm, president of a New York community college with an above-average completion rate, complains that funding rewards enrollment, not success, reports Inside Higher Ed.
Broome Community College’s three-year federal graduation rate is nearly 28 percent, above the national average of around 23 percent. It’s ranked 15th in the nation for student retention out of 210 colleges that submitted data in the National Community College Benchmark Project. Some 87 percent of Broome graduates who transfer to a four-year institution complete a bachelor’s degree, the best performance among New York’s 30 community colleges.
But Broome was hit by a 15 percent cut in state funding. The college’s relatively high completion rate depresses funding, Drumm argues.
“Given that we graduate 25 percent more students in three years than the typical community college our size, that amounts to 300 more graduates for us than most other colleges with [6-to-7,000 students],” Drumm says. “Three hundred students for us — who for our competition remain in the income pipeline to attend — means we start the next fiscal year with $1 million less potential enrollment revenue in the pipeline than similar sized colleges. Therefore our budget is being inadvertently punished for successful outputs because we are funded by an input model.”
Tthe foundations pushing for higher completion rates, such as the Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation, have ignored Broome, Drumm complains.
“The big foundations are spending money at lots of big schools with poor numbers when what we’ve been doing here for quite some time has been working and we’d like to figure out why. . . . Does anybody care about the 20 percent or so of community colleges that are above average and out there doing well?”
The Gates Foundation looks for “colleges that are beating the odds,” regardless of size, responds Mark Milliron, deputy director of postsecondary improvement. Gates and Lumina are funding success through the Developmental Education Initiative, which will disseminate new ideas in English and math remediation, Milliron said.
George Boggs, president of AACC, notes that if there is any bias in how grant funding is distributed, it favors those community colleges that serve large numbers of traditionally “at-risk students” — typically minority, first-generation or financially needy students.
Broome may not be able to maintain its performance if funding falls, Drumm warns.
