Training for energy jobs must match needs

The enthusiasm for “green jobs” will lead to disappointment unless community colleges align alternative energy programs with workforce needs in their area, writes Ellie Ashford on Community College Times.

Research the local market and talk to alternative energy employers before creating a new program, advises Todd Cohen of the American Association of Community College’s SEED (Sustainability, Education and Economic Development) Center.

 While a growing number of community colleges are investing in solar, wind and smart grid technology programs, it might make more sense for some to add alternative energy components to existing programs, such as incorporating alternative fuels into automotive technology programs, Cohen said.

In Michigan, Lansing Community College revised its associate degree in energy management in 2010 when it realized graduates weren’t finding jobs. There’s little solar or wind energy in Michigan, but there are jobs in energy auditing and weatherization. The college now offers an associate degree in alternative energy engineering technologies that prepares graduates to do energy audits.

Hagerstown Community College in Maryland offers an associate degree in alternative energy technology plus a two-year certification in solar and wind energy installation and service.  The college added alternative energy courses to existing programs, such as HVAC, plumbing and electricity. “That allows us to produce people with fundamental skills that are employable in many other industries,” said Anthony Valente, an instructor in industrial and energy technology.

A five-story science and technology building on the HCC campus opened in January with solar and wind systems that are used for teaching and also offset some of the college’s energy costs. The building uses geothermal wells to heat classrooms and has a rainwater retention system for irrigation and non-potable water.

In addition, HCC is building an “energy house,” a residential structure with alternative energy systems that will be used as a laboratory, where students can practice installing solar and geothermal systems, change air flow and conduct energy audits.

Opportunity denied: No community college in town

Build a community college to revive the local economy, a consultant told Erie, Pennsylvania. But it didn’t happen, writes Mandy Zatynski, an Erie native, in an Education Sector report. Opportunity Denied: How One County Fought For, and Lost, a Community College  explains what happened.

Erie has four-year colleges and for-profit technical schools, but “neither provided the affordability and flexibility that many local residents needed,” Zatynski writes.

. . . more than any other factor, the college fell victim to outdated ideas about higher education and public reluctance to make short-term investments for longer term economic gain. The college was also damaged by the anti-tax mindset that gripped the nation at the height of the tea party movement, a conservative base that rallied against tax increases and government spending, no matter what the cause.

Once, International Paper would hire new workers out of high school, train them and enable them to earn a middle-class wage, Zatynski writes. The paper mill closed in 2001. Now Erie’s remaining employers want skilled workers with strong science, math, and analytical skills. A high school diploma is not enough.

“We need a higher level of technical expertise,” said Ralph Pontillo, president of the Manufacturer and Business Association in Erie. “You don’t run the machines anymore; you run the computers that run the machines.”

While healthcare and education are increasingly big employers in Erie, manufacturing remains the second-largest sector thanks in part to a large General Electric locomotive plant, which employs about 5,500. County planners predict that manufacturing jobs will grow by 2 percent between 2010 and 2040. But Pontillo says manufacturing shops are also facing an immediate demand: they need skilled workers now to replace longtime, retiring machinists. And despite the region’s 7.8 percent unemployment rate, they can’t find them. “The disconnect,” Pontillo says, “is that [workers] are not prepared to take on these positions, even the most basic positions.”

Erie County has 7,500 unfilled jobs because of the skills gap, leaders estimate.

High school graduation rates are higher than the state average in Erie and its suburbs, but fewer adults have completed a bachelor’s degree. “We have a high graduation rate and (a low) rate of people who attend postsecondary education. What does that tell you?” asks Erie County Executive Barry Grossman. “It’s the absence of a community college.”

To reclaim the dream, look off-campus

Community colleges aren’t living up to their promise, writes Mark Bauerlein, an Emory English professor and author of The Dumbest Generation, on Minding the Campus. The solution lies in alliances with local employers, he argues.

The American Association of Community Colleges’ new report, Reclaiming the American Dream: Community Colleges and the Nation’s Future, details the problem:  Only 46 percent of credential-seeking community college students will reach their goal,  transfer or remain enrolled in six years. “Nearly half of all community college students entering in the fall term drop out before the second fall term begins.”

The report develops several recommended “institutional responses” to improve these abysmal results, including focusing on student success as well as student access, making faculty members think less individualistically and more collectively, and making the curriculum less fragmentary and more cumulative. But . . . the best driver of improvement is, in fact, off-campus . . .

. . . City Colleges of Chicago works directly with Rush University Medical Center and Midway airport to provide a pipeline of graduates tailored to their needs. Jefferson Community and Technical College in Kentucky has teamed up with UPS, the latter helping cover tuition and textbook costs while the former provides coursework designed to meet UPS’s job openings. And Walla Walla Community College has altered its curriculum to match the region’s tremendous growth in wine-making, the College now operating a commercial winery run by the students themselves.

South Carolina’s manufacturing boom relies on close cooperation between employers and colleges, according to the Wall Street Journal, Bauerlein notes.

“The area’s manufacturers have built a symbiosis between factory and school. Walking through GE’s gas-turbine plant some months back, I asked the factory manager how she coped with the nation’s shortage of engineers. ‘We don’t have a shortage,’ she said. She gets plenty from Clemson University, Greenville Technical College and other regional schools.”

. . . “Charles Wilson, who teaches at Greenville Tech, says GE is priming the pump with a new apprentice program. Students will study at the school and work at GE, and the company will pick up the tab. GE also sends some of its new hires to the college for a crash course in hands-on manufacturing, he adds.”

Greenville Tech and two other schools mentioned, Tri-County Technical College and Spartanburg Community College, are two-year public colleges, Bauerlein writes. “That’s the answer to low student performance: bring the workplace into the curriculum, let the students know a job awaits them after graduation, and accept the fact that for the majority of community college students, workplace readiness is the cardinal principle of learning.”

College isn’t for everyone

College isn’t for everyone, writes Richard Vedder in Businessweek.

As a general rule, I would say graduates in the top quarter of their class at a high-quality high school should go on to a four-year degree program, while those in the bottom quarter of their class at a high school with a mediocre educational reputation should not (opting instead for alternative methods of credentialing and training).

Those in between should consider perhaps doing a two-year program and then transferring to a four-year school.

I’m surprised Vedder didn’t recommend a two-year vocational certificate at a community college for in-between students.

Redesign, reinvent and reset

Community colleges must “redesign, reinvent and reset” themselves, concludes Reclaiming the American Dream, a report for the American Association of Community Colleges by the the 21^st-Century Commission on the Future of Community Colleges. “We need to completely reimagine community colleges for today and the future,” said Dr. Walter G. Bumphus, AACC’s president and CEO.

The dream is at risk, the report warns.

What we find today are student success rates that are unacceptably low, employment preparation that is inadequately connected to job market needs, and disconnects in transitions between high schools, community colleges, and baccalaureate institutions. Community colleges, historically underfunded, also have been financed in ways that encourage enrollment growth, though frequently without adequately  supporting that growth, and largely without incentives for promoting student success.

Community colleges must make “hard choices” about priorities and the most effective use of limited resources, the report concludes. While community colleges should remain open to all, the mission must be expanded to include success as well as access.

Access without support for student success is an empty promise. If the door is to remain open, virtually everything else must change.

“Community colleges are not funded at a level permitting them to perform the monumental tasks expected of them,” the report finds. However, it’s not likely that will change, so colleges must “make better use of the resources they have.”  Funding must be linked to measures of success in addition to enrollment.

The report calls for increasing completion rates by 50 percent by 2020, working with high schools to reduce by half the number of unprepared student, doubling success rates for developmental students and focusing career and technical education on the 21st-century workplace. In addition, it urges community colleges to redefine their mission, mobilize private and public support and “implement policies and practices that promote rigor, transparency, and accountability for results.”

AACC will establish the 21^stCentury Center to help colleges with strategic planning, leadership development and research to reach the goals.

When low tuition isn’t a bargain

Low tuition isn’t always a bargain for community college students, argues Nate Johnson in an Inside Higher Ed commentary that defends Santa Monica College‘s abandoned two-tier pricing plan. If low-cost community colleges don’t have the revenue to offer enough classes, students will turn to high-cost for-profit colleges, which expand quickly to meet demand.

From  2001-2 to 2009-10, the proportion of Pell grant recipients attending for-profit colleges rose from 15 to 25 percent, while declining from 35 percent to 32 percent at community colleges. Given the much higher prices at for profit institutions, this has meant a huge — but hidden — tuition increase for low-income students.

After earning a bachelor’s degree and working as a pilot, Joe was downsized. He considered nursing programs at Florida State, Florida A&M, and Tallahassee Community College (TCC), but all had long wait lists. Instead of waiting a year and a half to start at TCC, Joe turned to a private career college, Keiser University, which let him start in three months.

The shorter wait, he figured, would make up for the cost, which Joe pegged at about three times that of TCC.

Joe was not alone.  Between 2005 and 2011, the number of registered nurses graduating from for-profit colleges in Florida rose from 114 to 1,034 — an increase of 800 percent.  Average published tuition and fees at these institutions was over $15,000 a year in 2010-11.

Community college nursing programs, which charged about one-fifth of the for-profit tuition, graduated 36 percent more students.

Florida community colleges raised tuition by about $800 on average from 2005 to 2011, Johnson writes. But tuition and fees for all nursing students — public and private — ose by about $3,700 because so many students chose the high-cost private sector.

If community colleges had raised tuition by another $2,000 for nursing programs, paying for enough spots to meet demand, students could pay $5,000 a year without a long wait, he points out. Now, many pay $15,000 a year to skip the waist list.

Skipping the BA was ‘smartest choice’

An excellent student from a blue-collar family in Canada, Kathy Shaidle didn’t go to university and doesn’t regret it, she writes on PJ Media. With a two-year media degree from a community college, she launched a successful career.

In an era of double-digit unemployment and interest rates, I got my first “real” job at a Toronto communications firm pretty easily, and paid off my relatively puny student loans in short order (unlike some of my friends, who got BAs — then declared bankruptcy).

Shaidle was the first in her family to finish high school. “Filling out applications, applying for grants, moving into a dorm — you might as well have been talking about a voyage to the moon.”  But, though her reasons for not going to university “sound pretty stupid,” she considers it “one of the smartest decisions of my life.”

Shaidle recommends Worthless: The Young Person’s Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major by Aaron Clarey, aka Captain Capitalism.

Like me, Clarey’s been saying for years that BAs are today what high school diplomas used to be: that is, so commonplace that not having one makes no difference if you’re a genius, an energetic entrepreneur, or both.

Like me, he believes too many people are being pushed into getting a degree (i.e., brainwashed in junk science and political correctness at their own expense) when they should be learning a trade or just plain left alone.

And like me, Clarey thinks lots of would-be students should use the money they’re wasting on tuition as start-up capital instead.

For those who insist on seeking a bachelor’s degree, Clarey offers common-sense advice on which majors lead to a paying job and which will lead back to Mom and Dad’s house.

‘You didn’t graduate from high school? Start college today!’

A high-poverty, nearly all-minority district near the Texas-Mexico border, Pharr-San Juan-Alamo had a high dropout rate. Now dropouts and high-risk students are finishing high school while they start career training. All students can take rigorous “early college” courses and the college-going rate doubled in three years, according to a new report from Jobs for the Future.

Superintendent Daniel King came to PSJA from nearby Hidalgo, where he’d pioneered early college and career pathways for all students.  “The dropout rate was horrendous,” King said.  In partnership with South Texas College,  the district created the College, Career, and Technology Academy to help former dropouts complete high school and “seamlessly transition into college courses” when ready. The dropout recovery campaign’s slogan: “You didn’t graduate from high school? Start college today!” Now students who lack the credits to graduate on time can go to CCTA the summer or fall after their four-year graduation rate, instead of returning to high school for a fifth year or dropping out.

PSJA then opened an early college high school with a STEM focus, again partnering with South Texas College. PSJA will become an  Early College High School District, writes King on the JFF blog. Eventually, the college-going culture will start at the elementary level.

We have increased expectations for all students. Our goal is not just to hand out high school diplomas, but to see that our students have the skills they need to move onto college, obtain a college degree and have a prosperous life and career.

Through Early College coursework, students can graduate from high school with at least 12 college hours, a technical certificate, or even an Associate’s degree that prepares them for high-wage employment.

Virtually all PSJA students are Hispanic and 90 percent come from low-income families. Most parents are not well-educated.

‘Ability to benefit’ students lose federal aid

College doors will shut for the neediest students on July 1, when federal aid is cut to would-be students who lack a high school diploma or GED. Currently, these students can take a basic skills test to prove their “ability to benefit” from college classes or successfully complete six credits. The new federal budget cuts off aid to these students to save Pell Grant money, notes Inside Higher Ed.

College administrators say they worry the new policy will shut out older students seeking training to find a new job, immigrants, and students in states where money for basic adult education has been cut in budget crises.

Either those students will turn to riskier private loans, they say, or — more likely — they’ll just give up on pursuing higher education.

Community colleges and for-profit colleges enroll the most “ability to benefit” students, though the total amounts to only 1 percent of the community college population. The new policy “runs counter to the missions of many of our colleges,” said David Baime, vice president for government relations at the American Association of Community Colleges.

Only a third of high school dropouts without a GED earned a college credential in six years, according to a study by the National Center for Education Statistics. That’s no worse than students who’d completed a GED.

“Ability to benefit” students are more likely to default on student loans. As a result two major for-profit educators, Kaplan and Corinthian Colleges, no longer enroll “ability to benefit” students.

What about liberal arts?

“President Obama and many governors are pushing the idea of community colleges becoming workforce training centers,” writes Community College Dean. Funding is being shifted from general budgets to favored programs in “STEM fields or fields with presumed local employability.” It’s all about jobs,  jobs, jobs. But, what about liberal arts? What about higher education?

If community colleges fail at their academic mission, it will increase social and economic segregation, argues Diverse Issues in Higher Education.

Literature, philosophy, art history, political science, and economics shouldn’t be the privilege of those who have money.  They’re the shared (if contested) heritage of a culture, and they bespeak possibilities beyond the present.  . . .

Community colleges’ vocational mission is important, he writes, but so is educating students who will transfer to complete a bachelor’s degree or more. Starting at a community college and transferring after two years is the best way to earn a four-year degree without crushing debt.

Politicians aren’t scheming to keep the poor barefoot and ignorant, whatever faculty members may suspect, the dean writes. To “keep the liberal arts available for students of limited means,” academics should frame their arguments around “cross-class contact, transfer and student debt.”