[Lapg] Obama Proposes $12B for Community Colleges plus Can Community Colleges Save the U.S. Economy?

Wed Jul 15 09:30:18 PDT 2009

Obama Proposes $12B for Community Colleges
President Obama, meanwhile, has announced a new 
plan to increase funding for community colleges 
by $12 billion. If approved, the American 
Graduation Initiative would be the largest-ever 
federal investment in community colleges.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/07/14/Obama-wants-12B-for-community-colleges/UPI-89961247570625/

WARREN, Mich., July 14 (UPI) -- President Barack 
Obama proposed a $12 billion plan Tuesday to 
strengthen U.S. community colleges so they can 
better educate people seeking 21st-century jobs.

Speaking at Macomb Community College in Warren, 
Mich., Obama portrayed the plan as a key to job 
training and retraining at a time when the White 
House expects unemployment to hit 10 percent in 
the next few months.
"We've got to prepare our people with the skills 
they need to compete in this global economy," 
Obama said. "Time and again, when we placed our 
bet for the future on education, we have 
prospered as a result -- by tapping the 
incredible innovative and generative potential of 
a skilled American workforce."
Obama dubbed the plan the "American Graduation 
Initiative," designed to increase by 5 million 
the number of community college graduates by 2020.
"It will reform and strengthen community colleges 
like this one from coast to coast so they get the 
resources that students and schools need -- and 
the results workers and businesses demand," he 
said, drawing applause.
Community colleges, which now enroll about 6 
million students, play a vital role in keeping 
American business competitive and preparing the 
nation's workforce for technological change and 
more global competition, Obama said.
The biggest chunk of money -- $9 billion -- would 
go toward "challenge grants" designed to promote 
innovation on community college campuses. This 
might include building partnerships with 
businesses, developing workplace-education 
programs, improving remedial and adult-education 
programs, and offering students "comprehensive, 
personalized" services tailored to their goals.
Another $2.5 billion would go toward modernizing 
college facilities and $500 million to develop 
online courses.
The president said the plan would not increase 
the deficit because it would be paid for "by 
ending the wasteful subsidies we currently 
provide to banks and private lenders for student 
loans."
Obama noted Michigan has been has been hard hit 
by job losses. With the U.S. auto industry 
flailing, Michigan's jobless rate of 14.1 percent 
leads the nation, and state officials say it may 
reach nearly 17 percent next year.

Can Community Colleges Save the U.S. Economy?
By LAURA FITZPATRICK / AUSTIN
Monday, Jul. 20, 2009
http://timeinc8-sd11.websys.aol.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1909623,00.html
Community colleges are deeply unsexy. This fact 
tends to make even the biggest advocates of these 
two-year schools - which educate nearly half of 
U.S. undergraduates - sound defensive, almost a 
tad whiny. "We don't have the bands. We don't 
have the football teams that everybody wants to 
boost," says Stephen Kinslow, president of Texas' 
Austin Community College (ACC). "Most people 
don't understand community colleges very well at 
all." And by "most people," he means the 
graduates of fancy four-year schools who get 
elected and set budget priorities.
Related

Many politicians and their well-heeled 
constituents may be under the impression that a 
community college - as described in a promo for 
NBC's upcoming comedy Community - is a "loser 
college for remedial teens, 20-something 
dropouts, middle-aged divorcées and old people 
keeping their minds active as they circle the 
drain of eternity." But there's at least one Ivy 
Leaguer who is trying to help Americans get past 
the stereotypes and start thinking about 
community college not as a dumping ground but as 
one of the best tools the U.S. has to dig itself 
out of the current economic hole. His name: 
Barack Obama.

The President hasn't forgotten about the 30 or so 
community colleges he visited during the 2008 
campaign. These institutions are our nation's 
trade schools, training 59% of our new nurses as 
well as cranking out wind-farm technicians and 
video-game designers - jobs that, despite 
ballooning unemployment overall, abound for 
adequately skilled workers. Community-college 
graduates earn up to 30% more than high school 
grads, a boon that helps state and local 
governments reap a 16% return on every dollar 
they invest in community colleges. But our 
failure to improve graduation rates at these 
schools is a big part of the achievement gap 
between the U.S. and other countries. As unfilled 
jobs continue to head overseas, Obama points to 
the "national-security implication" of the 
widening gap. Closing it, according to an April 
report from McKinsey & Co., would have added as 
much as $2.3 trillion, or 16%, to our 2008 GDP.
Those lost jobs are why Education Secretary Arne 
Duncan declared in March that two-year schools 
"will play a big role in getting America back on 
its feet again." Obama tapped two former 
community-college officials for top posts in the 
Education Department and in May announced a p.r. 
campaign - headed by Jill Biden, the Vice 
President's wife and a longtime community-college 
professor - to raise awareness about the power of 
these schools to train new and laid-off workers.

But as record numbers of students clamor to 
enroll, community colleges are struggling with 
shrinking resources or, at best, trying to 
maintain the status quo. Even the school where 
Biden teaches, Northern Virginia Community 
College, has lost more than 10% of its funding in 
the past two years and has let go of dozens of 
full-time professors as it braces for more 
possible cutbacks. Elsewhere, state budget cuts 
have led to enrollment caps at some community 
colleges. And if there aren't enough seats in 
classrooms, students can't get certificates or 
degrees, and skilled jobs remain unfilled. In 
short, as the Center for American Progress 
concluded in a February report, "America's future 
economic success may well depend on how we invest 
in two-year institutions."

Getting Students Ready to Work
The 1,200 community colleges in the U.S. are 
especially suited to helping students adapt to a 
changing labor market. While four-year 
universities have the financial resources to lure 
top professors and students, they are by nature 
slow-moving. Community colleges, on the other 
hand, are smaller and able to tack quickly in 
changing winds. They often partner with local 
businesses and can gin up continuing-education 
courses midsemester in response to industry 
needs, getting students in and out and ready to 
work - fast.

For example, when Austin's semiconductor industry 
started tanking in 2000, ACC quickly stripped 
down its chip-development courses and soon 
repurposed clean rooms for emerging green 
technologies. These days, it generally takes 
about six months of weekend classes to get 
qualified to be a solar installer, a job that can 
pay up to $16 an hour. But starting in August, a 
compressed weekday program - catering to the 
recently unemployed - will allow students to cram 
the same courses into just two months. To earn an 
associate degree focusing on renewable energy - 
enough prep for a job as a 
solar-installation-team leader, which can pay up 
to $28 an hour - an ACC student has to take a 
total of 69 credit hours of courses, including 
solar photovoltaic systems, programming, physics, 
algebra, English composition and lab work. 
Average cost per credit hour for most students at 
ACC: $54.Meanwhile, the building that houses 
ACC's renewable-energy program is chockablock 
with bulletin boards touting jobs. A city 
ordinance that kicked in on June 1 requires 
presale energy audits for many commercial 
buildings, apartment complexes and single-family 
homes, creating the need for more trained 
inspectors. Also, one of the nation's largest 
solar-power plants is slated to be completed next 
year a mere 20 miles from Austin's downtown.

Of course, the future of the labor market is hard 
to predict. Hence a 2008 Labor Department study 
that found federal job-training programs may 
produce "small" benefits at best. But the outlook 
is promising so far at ACC: members of its 
Renewable Energy Students Association routinely 
field calls from prospective employers. "I'm well 
aware of how much money is going to be available 
from this education," says Duane Nembhard, 34, 
who dropped out of college but found his way to 
ACC last year.
To make that money, however, students like 
Nembhard need to get their degrees - and the 
statistics are disheartening. Only 31% of 
community-college students who set out to get a 
degree complete it within six years, whereas 58% 
of students at four-year schools graduate within 
that time frame. Students from middle-class or 
wealthy families are nearly five times more 
likely to earn a college degree as their poorer 
peers are. In 2007, 66% of white Americans ages 
25 to 29 had completed at least some college, 
compared with 50% of African Americans and 34% of 
Hispanics.

While the U.S. ranks a respectable second (after 
Norway) in producing adult workers with 
bachelor's degrees, it has slipped to ninth in 
producing working-age "sub-bachelor's" degree 
holders, which is one reason Obama is working on 
a plan to help every American get at least one 
year of college or vocational training. "If 
you're going to increase the population that has 
some college, it isn't going to be among 
upper-middle-class white people," says Thomas 
Bailey, director of Columbia University's 
Community College Research Center. "Community 
colleges will have to play a central role."
That is, if they have enough resources to handle 
all the students. Chronically cash-starved, 
two-year schools pull in an average of just 30% 
of the federal funding per student allocated to 
state universities - though they educate nearly 
the same number of undergraduates. (Even after 
you account for the academic research that goes 
on at four-year schools, experts say community 
colleges still get shafted.) Two-year schools 
have been growing faster than four-year 
institutions, with the number of students they 
educate increasing more than sevenfold since 
1963, compared with a near tripling at four-year 
schools. Yet federal funding has held virtually 
steady over the past 20 years for community 
colleges, while four-year schools' funding has 
increased.

Saving Cash, Living at Home
Community colleges are used to doing more with 
less. But this recession has led to record 
enrollment surges at many two-year schools, in 
part because of the influx of laid-off workers 
but also because more members of the middle class 
are looking to save money on the first couple of 
years of their children's higher education. Among 
them is Bruce Anderson, an Austin attorney who 
has lost nearly a third of his savings since the 
recession began and doesn't want to sideline his 
kid while waiting for the market to come back. 
His son Tyler will start at ACC this fall and, as 
long as he lives at home, will save the family 
about 90% of the annual tab at a four-year 
residential college. "He can get his basic core 
courses out of the way at ACC and then do his 
focus for his major at a four-year institution," 
Anderson says.

But as more students like Tyler enroll, classes 
are maxing out. Community colleges, which pride 
themselves on being open to all, rarely cap 
enrollment outright, as state universities in 
places like Arizona and California will do this 
fall. Miami Dade College, the country's largest 
community college, admitted on May 28 that state 
budget cuts will force it to forgo adding 
hundreds of class sections. As many as 5,000 
students will be unable to enroll, and 30,000 may 
be unable to take the classes they need in order 
to graduate. In California, where Governor Arnold 
Schwarzenegger remains a champion of community 
colleges, having studied at one, as many as 
200,000 would-be students may get squeezed out of 
higher education next year.

Taken together, skyrocketing enrollment and 
shrinking budgets could mean that just as record 
numbers of students seek out a community college, 
earning a degree from one may be harder than 
ever. Says Melissa Roderick, a professor at the 
University of Chicago who studies school 
transitions: "This group of kids will pay a high 
economic price if we don't step up as a nation."
What would stepping up look like? For starters, 
Congress needs to double the federal funding for 
these schools, according to a May report from the 
Brookings Institution. But, the report argues, to 
truly "transform our community colleges into 
engines of opportunity and prosperity," funding 
needs to be tied to performance in areas like 
degree completion - a model some states, 
including Indiana and Ohio, are already trying. 
The City University of New York has rigged up an 
experimental program that requires its 
community-college students to take intensive 
remedial courses if they aren't prepared to do 
college-level work. Begun in 2007 with the goal 
of getting at least half of the study's 1,000 
participants to graduate from college in three 
years, it's showing initial signs of success. 
Other colleges are redoubling their retention 
efforts. And last fall, the Bill & Melinda Gates 
Foundation announced up to $500 million in 
grants, aiming to double college-completion rates 
by 2025. As Sara Goldrick-Rab, an assistant 
professor at the University of Wisconsin at 
Madison and co-author of the Brookings report, 
puts it, "Money speaks louder than anything."

Ultimately, community-college administrators hope 
their schools will emerge stronger from the 
downturn as it highlights their potential for 
juicing the economy. "In some ways, the terrible 
nature of the economic recession will actually 
help people understand [community college]," says 
Kinslow. "People are going to be forced into 
looking at it more carefully."
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