Chicago will subsidize jobs for City Colleges grads
Chicago will give $2 million to companies that hire City Colleges graduates, reports the Chicago Sun-Times. “You hire one of our community college kids, we’ll pay their stipend for the first four weeks of work,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a commencement speech for the system’s graduates. “I want the rest of the country and all the people to know we got great community colleges with great kids who are ready to go to work.”
He also told the graduates — a record number for City Colleges, which granted only half that number of associates degrees a decade ago — about the importance of battling adversity.
He recounted his own near-death experience as a teen after an accident left him with a severed finger and led to multiple infections.
And he recalled his experiences handling abrupt responsibility changes in the White House.
“The truth is what defines your success will not be this moment, this milestone, this day of recognizing all you’ve accomplished,” he said. “It’s how you handle adversity that defines who you are. It is that sense of when you are set back, when you fall, how you get yourself up that determines how you’re going to be a success in life.”
The seven City Colleges of Chicago enroll more than 120,000 students each year.
After college, what will you earn?
If college is an investment, students should have some idea what they’ll earn with a degree in nursing or marketing or whatever from College X vs. College Y, writes Daniel de Vise in College, Inc. Soon more information will be available about post-college employment.
Especially as college continues to get more expensive, students rightfully want to make sure that that their investment has value. They’re asking: What are the chances I’m going to get a job earning a decent wage? And if I’m choosing between two or three schools as a prospective student, which will give me the biggest bang for my (and my family’s) buck?
The Labor Department is working with the states to share data on earnings and employment. In addition, the Education Department will be releasing “gainful employment” reports on how for-profit and community colleges’ vocational certificate earners are doing in the workforce.
“If these reports show wide disparities among graduates from different colleges, can it be long before the same data are demanded for all bachelors’ degree programs?” asks de Vise.
The drive to raise graduation rates doesn’t address degree quality, he points out. For most students — and especially those from low-income and working-class families — it’s important to earn a credential that puts them “on a path to earning a decent living.”
If students understood college costs and potential earnings, they’d be wary of enrolling in a high-cost for-profit college, especially for a bachelor’s degree program. They’d also avoid high-cost private colleges that don’t offer a lot of financial aid and an elite degree.
In Student Loans Weighing Down a Generation With Heavy Debt, the New York Times introduces a debt-doomed borrower: Kelsey Griffith, 23, borrowed $120,000 to earn a marketing degree from Ohio Northern University. She’s working two restaurant jobs and will move in with her parents while looking for a marketing job.
Her father, a paramedic, and mother, a preschool teacher, have modest incomes, and she has four sisters. But when she visited Ohio Northern, she was won over by faculty and admissions staff members who urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess on the sticker price.
“As an 18-year-old, it sounded like a good fit to me, and the school really sold it,” said Ms. Griffith, a marketing major. “I knew a private school would cost a lot of money. But when I graduate, I’m going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that.”
Ninety-four percent of students who earn a bachelor’s degree borrow to pay for higher education — up from 45 percent in 1993, according to a Times analysis of Department of Education data. This includes federal and private loans.
“Pursue your dreams” — but don’t do the math — is a cruel hoax being played on 18-year-olds and their financially naive parents.
Mechatronics: It’s not your dad’s shop class
It’s not your father’s shop class at high schools in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley. Students now take an Engineering Explorations class that eventually could prepare them to study mechatronics engineering at Virginia Western Community College, reports the Roanoke Times.
There’s demand for trained workers who understand electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and information technology, says Dan Horine, head of mechatronics at Virginia Western.
Several Roanoke area education officials project the need for 250 jobs in mechatronics with a starting pay of about $18 an hour.
. . . Horine can recite a laundry list of area employers — including Logistics, Maple Leaf Bakery, Optical Cable and Pulsa — that he said face a shortage of highly qualified employees. “They are starving for people with these highly technical skills,” Horine said.
Roanoke County schools hope some high school students will be able to take two years of pre-engineering courses, then earn a vocational certificate or two-year degree from Virginia Western while still in high school. Community college students who complete an associate degree in engineering with a B average are guaranteed admission to engineering programs at Virginia Tech.
Job outlook brightens for graduates
Employers expect to hire 10.2 percent more new college graduates this year than they did last year, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers Job Outlook update.
Median starting salaries for the class of 2012 are up 4.5 percent to $42,569 a year, NACE reports. Engineering jobs pay the most — a median of $58,581.
Fewer women study STEM at community colleges
Fewer women are earning associate degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, despite increasing demand for workers with STEM skills, according to a new report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. In 10 years, the percentage of women earning STEM degrees at community colleges has fallen by 25 percent.
Only 28 percent of STEM degrees awarded by community colleges went to women in 2007, according to the report. That means women are missing out on high-demand, high-wage jobs, notes Community Colleges Times.
Although women comprise nearly half of the labor force, only one in four STEM jobs is held by a woman.
. . . Some of the fastest-growing jobs in the U.S. are in the STEM fields, with employment expected to increase at a faster rate than the labor market as a whole. IWPR noted that while overall employment is predicted to increase by 10 percent between 2008 and 2018, some STEM areas are expected to expand by 20 to 30 percent.
STEM graduates with associate degrees can pursue well-paid careers as environmental engineering technicians, biological technicians and computer support specialists, the report said. Overall, women in STEM jobs earn a third more than comparable women in non-STEM fields, according to a Commerce Department study.
STEM certificates also can be valuable in the job market, but the share of women earning certificates in STEM fields decreased by half between 2000–2001 and 2008–2009.
Community colleges should encourage women, especially low-income women and mothers, to pursue STEM certificates and degrees by stressing they’ll earn much more than in traditionally female jobs, such as child care and home health care, the report recommends.
Training 21st century workers isn’t fast or easy
Is Investing in Community Colleges a Good Idea? asks Charlotte Allen on Minding the Campus.
President Obama’s $8 billion program Community College to Career Fund assumes colleges can partner with employers to train 2 million workers for high-demand jobs in health care, technology and “green” industries.
Most community college students aren’t prepared for college-level courses, especially in math, Allen points out. Developmental classes don’t seem to help much.
. . . most of the anticipated job openings in the U.S. during the near future will require workers who possess exactly the sort of math and reading-comprehension skills that most community-college students these days seem unable to master. There is currently a shortage of skilled employees in high-tech industries, and some two million manufacturing jobs are expected to open up by 2018 thanks to expected retirements–but most of those jobs require workers who can operate sophisticated machinery, follow complex instructions, and demonstrate some facility at math and statistics. The training itself for 21st-century jobs can be expensive.
Successful job training programs at community colleges tend to be “small-scale, dependent on modest grants from the involved industries themselves, and centered around nationally recognized certificates,” Allen writes.
Key to many of the programs was ACT’s National Career Readiness Certificate (NCRC), which measures recipients’ math and reading abilities. . . . Shoreline Community College near Seattle . . . used a grant from the Manufacturing Institute, a nonprofit affiliate of the National Institute of Manufacturers, to integrate the NCRC and certification from the National Institute for Metalworking Skills into a three-quarter-long manufacturing program. The program’s retention rate (95 percent) and job-placement rate (100 percent) were stellar–but it was also a small, highly focused program with only 50 students per cohort.
Allen wonders whether small, focused training programs can be “replicated on a large scale with widely varying students, faculty, and educational standards — along with the potential for waste that a spigot of federal dollars always presents.”
More women choose college over a bad job
While young men will take any job they can get, young women are passing up dead-end jobs to seek more education, reports the New York Times. “The next generation of women may have a significant advantage over their male counterparts,” economists say.
“It doesn’t surprise me that in a poor economy women are ramping up their schooling,” said Heather Boushey, an economist at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning research organization. “The real question is: Why aren’t more men doing that too?”
Of course, women who leave work for college are gambling their investment will pay off. The Times‘ lead anecdote, Laura Baker, quit her Starbucks barista job to pursue a master’s degree in strategic communications at a private university. She hopes to work at a nonprofit.
Including the loans that financed her undergraduate education at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, she will complete her master’s program next year owing about $200,000 in debt.
“I have to have faith that I will eventually get a good job that pays enough to pay my living expenses and pay back my loans,” she said, “and hopefully make me happy in the process.”
Communications specialists with a master’s start at $37,500 a year, estimates PayScale. Nonprofits tend to pay less.
It’s crazy to borrow $200,000 for a communications degree, adds Cost of College. The FinAid loan calculation website estimates a debtor who spends 10 percent of gross monthly income on repaying student loans will need an income of $213, 044.40 to repay $200,000 in student loans. “If you use 15% of your gross monthly income to repay the loan, you will need an annual salary of only $142,029.60, but you may experience some financial difficulty.”
Savvier women are enrolling in community colleges. State budget cuts have pushed up tuition, but it remains a good deal.
Most new students are women at Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, one of the country’s fastest-growing community colleges. “We now have 6,000 students on a waiting list because we didn’t have the resources to offer more classes,” President Stephen Scott told the Times.
CC trains dealers for new casino
Ninety percent of students passed blackjack dealer training at Owens Community College and have gone on to craps training at the new Hollywood Casino near Toledo, Ohio. The college partnered with the casino, which is expected to create 600 jobs.
2/5 are unprepared for college or careers
Two-fifths of high school graduates are unprepared for college or the workforce, according to a study (pdf) by Johns Hopkins and University of Arizona researchers.
One-third of high school students complete a rigorous college-prep track that increasingly includes Advanced Placement courses, the study finds. One-quarter take advantage of career-prep programs. The remaining 40 percent are “a virtual underclass” with little chance of success in college or job training, the researchers write.
Workers in high-demand fields can earn more than the average four-year graduate, notes Daniel de Vise on College Inc. Career-prep students are prepared to earn a vocational certificate or associate degree at a community or career college, preparing them for a decent job.
But the structure of American high schools is trapped, the authors write, in a culture that “blindly advocate(s) bachelor’s degrees as the only valuable option and the cure for all social ills.”
“Underclass” students often take courses with college-prep labels that demand very little, the study concludes. Even AP classes may lack the rigor needed to prepare students for college. (If nobody passes the AP exam, that’s a bad sign.)
The solution, the authors write, is to abolish tracking altogether and to reimagine high school as a tool to prepare all students for both college and careers.
The ideal high school curriculum, they argue, would incorporate the best aspects of both tracks: academic rigor and cutting-edge career preparation. Students might choose one of several academic “pathways” that “include both academically rigorous, college-preparatory requirements and challenging professional and technical knowledge grounded in industry standards,” they write.
Many high schools “steer students into various career-oriented pathways that also (in theory) immerse students in rigorous college-preparatory academics,” writes de Vise. While some are rigorous enough to prepare students for college, most are not.
