SOURCE Scholars

The Need for Better Educated and Higher Skilled Supply Chain Technicians

by George Lorenzo

One of the newer National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Advanced Technological Education (ATE) Centers is The National Center for Supply Chain Technology Education (SCTE), established in August 2011 under a four-year $3.5 million NSF grant.  SCTE is being led by Norco College of the Riverside Community College District in California, in partnership with four other community colleges located along major national supply chain routes:  Jefferson Community and Technical College in Louisville, Kentucky; Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois; Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio; and Tacoma Community College in Tacoma, Washington.

New Courses and Programs on the Horizon

SCTE ‘s overall goal is to increase the number of our nation’s “skilled” supply chain technicians. Its plans are  to accomplish that by developing and disseminating new courses and programs that are currently being created through the collaborative efforts of its five community college partners, along with the input of a good number of business and industry partners that have a strong need and desire to enhance their supply chain employees’ skills well into the future.  

Defining Modern Supply Chain Technician Skills Coupled with Positive Growth Projections for Jobs

The modern supply chain technician, according to SCTE, is someone who can install, operate, support, upgrade and/or maintain the software, hardware or material handling of equipment which supports a supply chain.  Jobs in the field are expected to grow by 5% nationally through 2018 with the largest projected growth estimates located in California, Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois. The supply chain workforce in the California Inland Empire of Riverside and San Bernardino counties is projected to increase by 23%.

The 21^st Century Warehouse

Norco College is located within a vital geographical region in which 40% percent of all goods begin their distribution journeys - between the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles -  to destinations across the U.S.  Consequently, there is large concentration of twenty-first century warehouses located in this Southern California  area, says Fleming.  The twenty-first century warehouse is defined  as “a technological marvel” with integrative technologies such as programmable shelving, unmanned robotic forklifts, web-based warehouse management systems, Bluetooth connectivity, geospatial systems and more.

The 21^st Century Technician

“These types of companies are no longer hiring as many minimum-wage jobs (as traditional warehouses have in the past),” Fleming explains. “There are not as many $9-an-hour jobs unloading trucks, but there are $40,000- to $50,000-a-year technician jobs for maintaining sophisticated equipment.  We are getting rid of the rote, manual labor jobs. We now have higher white-collar/gray-collar types of occupations that require technician skills.” SCTE Project Director George Walters adds that there is a definite need for supply chain technicians who have an interdisciplinary understanding in the areas of industrial maintenance, logistics management, information technology and total quality management.  

In particular, companies that utilize e-commerce to take orders and ship individual packages – “the Target’s, Amazon’s and Kohl’s are using high technology,” says Walters. “This is where all the robotics, conveyor systems and tilt trays come into play. And there are other areas, such as in food distribution, where their margins are so tight that they have to use as much technology as possible. They have shelf-life issues; they have pricing issues; they have storage issues that are driving the technology.” 

In short, the new technologies that support the nation’s supply chain are becoming more advanced and are being implemented to increase production and improve accuracy. As noted in SCTE’s literature, “the days of shipping full pallets of product to retail outlets are being replaced with single items shipped directly to the customer’s door. This business model is creating new challenges for companies. High-tech inventory control systems and material handling equipment are needed.

“Ample workforce to maintain these new technologies does not currently exist. Academically STEM-prepared students with an interest in using technology are needed to address the growing demand for skilled supply chain technicians.”

Supply Chain Education and Training of the Future

SCTE is addressing this growing demand by creating the next generation of education and training curricula for supply chain technicians. Through its community college partners and the support it is getting from an Industry Leadership Team, comprised of training and operations professionals representing such companies as Target, UPS, Converse/Nike, Toyota, the Port of Long Beach, Kroger and many others in the field of supply chain management, SCTE has been busy working on three major objectives:

1. Conducting a gap analysis of existing technician training, identifying the technologies being used and developing training modules.
2. Developing and delivering professional development training related to these technologies.
3. Disseminating information to students, educators and industry.

“Our first training modules will probably be available for dissemination by the beginning of next year,” says Walters. “We are pretty much on a fast track and have identified a lot the areas in the gap analysis. There are things that change rapidly within this industry.”

The training under development by SCTE is being created for both large and relatively small businesses, adds Fleming. “It is also about up-and-coming e-commerce retailers that are expanding. We are seeing local companies that are looking at duplicating their operations (in other geographic regions across the country). This is an emerging need that is timely. NSF has had good foresight in planning this new ATE Center. It is starting to solve a need for today, and we are also training a new workforce for 2016 and 2018. That is when the companies are saying that more of their facilities will be upgraded. So this is really training for tomorrow’s workforce, not just today’s workforce.”

Making it Clear about the Need for STEM Technicians

By George Lorenzo

Dan Hull, executive director of the National Center for Optics and Photonics Education and writer/compiler of  “Career Pathways for STEM Technicians,” is very passionate about getting more people interested in careers as STEM technicians.  Last year, in September, I had the pleasure of talking with him about this subject for an article I wrote that was published in Training Industry, Inc.

My first question for Dan was: What’s the definition of a STEM technician? “They are geniuses of the labs and the masters of the equipment,” he replied. “They are not the gopher that makes coffee, runs errands and does manual labor.  In R & D labs they work alongside the engineers who design and build stuff. But we (engineers) cannot make everything work all the time. We put everything together with coat hangers and bailing wires, and they (the technicians) know how to put it all together and make it reliable and make it work.”

According to Dan, there’s a dire need going unfulfilled today for more STEM technicians. As noted in the book, which consists of 15 chapters written by 22 contributors in addition to Dan, “we don’t have enough technicians to support continued technological innovation or to staff the organizations that could improve our country’s economic position in the world.” In addition, “we don’t have adequate educational opportunities for capable, struggling high school students who need – and deserve – an opportunity to enter a rewarding career.”

Moreover, Dan explained that the greatest source for these new technicians is what many people consider to be low-academic-achieving high school students who typically don’t get enough attention or support from high school teachers and administrators.  “The high school leadership, the parents and the counselors all have great admiration for the A students, but the students making Bs and Cs, or the ones who are struggling with math, get put aside,” he says. “But these kids are smart. They are applied learners who learn better in context. They ask questions like ‘how is this going to be used?’  And ‘why do I have to learn this?’  If the only answer they get is that it’s going to be on the test, they are not going to learn it.”

Placing Part of the Blame on High Schools

In addition, Dan said that the typical high school STEM curriculums actually discourage the potential for more technicians by teaching, in the 11^th and 12^th grades, for instance, abstract courses  that ultimately weed out the B and C students, such as pre-calculus and calculus “which, quite frankly, only about five percent of us need.”

Dan also clearly explained how our nation’s high schools pretty much neglect to provide information to students about STEM technician career opportunities, in general, as well as over-emphasize that students must enter four-year programs as opposed to two-year applied associate of science degree programs offered by community colleges that can result in fairly exceptional, decently paid  entry-level technician jobs.  In his refreshing plain English, he said “if you are a school board member, you get re-elected based on how many kids are going on to the big universities. If you are a superintendant, you get hired and patted on the head if your kids go on to the big universities. If you are a principal, the superintendant pats you on the head if you get the kids to go on to the universities. And if you are teacher or a counselor, the principal rewards you in the same way.”

Yes, I thought, why is it that all we ever hear about at high school commencements is how Johnny got accepted into that big-name private college with a full scholarship, but we never hear about that very bright and ambitious kid who has decided to take on a challenging applied associate of science degree in electronics engineering technology at his local community college that can ultimately earn him a decent, interesting and challenging job for a fraction of the tuition cost?

Getting the Word Out

As Dan said, “parents need to know that a technician job is a valuable job. It is a rewarding job. It is a career and not a dead end. They don’t understand this.”

In the end, in addition to educating parents about the benefits of career opportunities (Dan said people with an AAS in laser optics, for instance, can start at a $45,000 to $64,000 annual salary) and paying closer to attention to supporting those talented B and C students, leaders in high schools, leaders in higher education, and leaders from the companies that are seeking more educated employees all need to play an elevated role in advancing career pathways for STEM technicians.

COMMENTS WELCOME

 

Academic Advising: The Key to Student Success

by George Lorenzo

My summer reading list started early this year with “Academic Advising: The Key to Student Success,”  published by the American Association of Community Colleges, edited by Terry O’Banion, a SOURCE editorial board member.  In addition to a chapter by O’Banion, president emeritus of the League for Innovation, and a chapter by Angela Oriano, associate director for college relations at the Center for Community College Student Engagement, the book features five programs that have been judged by a national panel as among the most outstanding or exemplary in the country for their academic advising programs: Valencia College, West Kentucky Community and Technical College, William Rainey Harper College, Indian River State College, and Community College of Baltimore County.

One of the things that immediately struck me about this book was that O’Banion’s chapter was an updated version of an article he wrote back in 1972. I say this because lately I have been reading about a good number of recurring themes that bring to mind the old cliché that “the more things change, the more they stay the same” in higher education. Coincidentally, I had conducted an interview with George Boggs the day before I received O’Banion’s book. I was talking to Boggs about an article he wrote in the late 1990s that we both agreed could have easily been republished today exactly as it had appeared in the late 90s and still be highly relevant, even timely.

I was also very interested in this book for personal reasons. I have someone very close to me who is one year out of high school that I have been trying to advise about his educational pursuits. I say “trying” because I have had no success. This student, like many others his age (19), is dropping out, hopefully temporarily.  Despite my disappointment, I can relate because I did the same thing when I was 19, dropping out from my second semester at the local community college without even withdrawing from any of the classes I was taking.  I just walked away and hit the road, sowing wild oats traveling around the country and even abroad.

I wound up with a 1-point-something GPA that I had to carry with me until I returned to a four-year institution as a non-matriculated student. It took a semester or two before I was able to prove to the admissions department that I was worthy of being accepted as a bona-fide full-time student who could qualify for financial aid.  The good news is that it all worked out.  The bad news is that it took eight years of roaming aimlessly around the planet before I realized that without the minimum of a bachelor’s degree I would not have much chance of escaping a minimum-wage job.

I could not help thinking in hindsight that maybe if I had received some strong advisement services from the community college before making a hasty decision to drop out that perhaps that eight-year delay would have been shortened.  As O’Banion notes, “a college education should ensure that every student has an opportunity to examine the questions, ‘Who am I ? Where am I going? What difference does it make?’ ” What’s disheartening, however, is that most institutions do not provide effective programs and professional and knowledgeable student advisors that really address such questions.  I saw this with the 19-year old I had attempted to dissuade from dropping out. The college he attended did not provide him with anything worth noting as far as advising services were concerned. In fact, the little amount of advisement he did actually receive seemed wrong-headed in my opinion.

Like most of the recurring issues we see in higher education, this one, too, remains far off from a resolution.  It’s good that educators like O’Banion are bringing this topic up again. It’s obvious that if our higher education system is serious about meeting the so-called “completion agenda,” being more proactive about providing sound student advisement services is a logical step in the right direction.

How Important is a Liberal Arts Education?

by George Lorenzo

In the many years (over a decade and more than 1,000 interviews) I have been writing about higher education, there are a good number of issues that come up repeatedly and seem to never really get resolved. One is in the workforce development arena where the emphasis is on identifying the challenges and issues community colleges and corporations face to effectively communicate
with each other to collaboratively produce cost-effective training programs that have meaningful learning outcomes. 

Some of the discussions around this issue go like this:  Community college faculty members are not fully aware of what they must teach in order to meet the needs of companies. Or, companies are too focused on having their employees learn only technical skills, and they are not fully cognizant of, or willing to pay for, the importance of having their employees take non-technical liberal arts or general education courses .

In a conversation I had with a veteran workforce development professional in the community college sector, it was explained to me that, generally speaking, providing employees with support for liberal arts courses is often only given a kind of lip-service by companies. In other words, companies won’t come out and say liberal arts courses are unimportant, but they also won’t provide adequate tuition reimbursement for such courses.

An opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, that made a convincing anti-funding-of-  liberal-arts-education argument and generated a good deal of intelligent comments, emphasized that education spending should be much more focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and European-style apprenticeship programs and less on liberal arts (see “Tuning In to Dropping Out,” by Alex Tabarrok at http://chronicle.com/article/Tuning-In-to-Dropping-Out/130967/).   In what can be considered a controversial statement that rankled some of the commentators, the author wrote that “graduates in the arts, psychology, and journalism are less likely to create the kinds of innovations that drive economic growth.”  

In another related piece – this one a short broadcast by National Public Radio in January of this year – Clay Masters from Harvest Public Media talks with the CIO of ConAgra who says that their IT department “is recruiting more employees off the beaten path,” e.g., students with liberal arts degrees.  A representative from the Association of American Colleges and Universities named Siemens and Hewlett Packard as companies with similar recruitment practices. I have to say that as
a journalist myself, I found this refreshing to hear (see “Liberal Arts Degrees: An Asset At Some Companies,” at  http://www.npr.org/2012/01/16/145309326/liberal-arts-degrees-an-asset-at-some-companies).

So what do you think? Do companies place a high enough value on liberal arts education? Do you think it is beneficial for companies to reimburse tuition for a Psychology, Philosophy, Art, History and/or English Composition 101 course, for example? I know many companies support employees in their pursuit of full associate and bachelor degree programs that include general ed/liberal arts-required courses, but how much worth and/or innovation do you think these courses bring to a company’s bottom line?

SNHU and College for America: Serving Those Who May Not Be Well Served

By George Lorenzo

Innovative educators like to make thought-provoking or debate-provoking statements. Consider the following:

“Too many people with college degrees can’t write or do quantitative problem solving, and they can’t get in front of a room and present.”

 “When we talk about adult learners, we are encumbered by a system that was not designed well for what we need to do. In some ways a lot of higher education has indifference toward adult learners.”

“It is easier to get a mortgage for $400,000 than it is to get a student loan for $5,000.”

“The credit hour is an arbitrary measure that is embedded in the way we think about knowledge and resource allocations, but it makes no sense. It is fiercely backwards. It has locked us into this notion of we can tell you how long someone sat in a seat, but we can’t say how well they learned.”

These comments came from President of Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU – often phonetically referred to as “Snew”) Paul LeBlanc at the opening keynote speech at the recent CAEL International Conference held in Washington, D.C.  

The folks at SNHU and LeBlanc are well known for their innovative, some say “game-changing” and “disruptive” practices in the field of higher education online teaching and learning and service to the adult learner. SNHU is an 80-year-old traditional, private, non-profit, residential college in Manchester, New Hampshire, with 2,500 undergraduates and about 1,000 graduate students. But beyond its traditional roots, it has built a strong online teaching and learning presence (started in 1995), currently offering more than 180 fully online undergraduate and graduate level programs to a student body approaching 22,000, the largest in New England.   

In February, Fast Company named SNHU the 12th most innovative organization in the world in its World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies, touting SNHU (the only university to make the list), "for relentlessly reinventing higher education online and off." Most recently, Forbes Magazine named LeBlanc to its Impact 15 list of “Classroom Revolutionaries,” noting that he “has put his sights on exploding the three-credit class system with a new program, College for America” (CFA).

Employer Partnerships Driving Beta Version in January

CFA is a unique A.A. in General Studies competency-based program. It is geared specifically toward “serving those who are not being well served,” LeBlanc said, “those for whom the next best education option is nothing at all.” After having a successful pilot this past summer, CFA is set for a strong beta test in January 2013, starting with about 200 students enrolled through partnerships with a variety of employers who are providing tuition assistance to “a level of worker they have traditionally neglected.”

ConAgra, for instance, is rolling out the CFA program with line workers from their food processing plant in Ohio. FedEx is rolling out CFA with its graveyard-shift employees in its Memphis package-handling facility. Blue Cross and Blue Shield is enrolling students into CFA who are their home-based customer-service employees. Most of these students have no college credit and earn in the range of $24,000 annually. Most have always felt that higher education was beyond their reach financially and perhaps even intellectually. CFA, however, is going to provide easy access and enable these students to learn and earn an A.A. degree that will ultimately emphasize and prove levels of meaningful learning outcomes and knowledge and skills achievement unlike any traditional, credit-hour-based associate degree program. And they are going to accomplish this without faculty or courses. That’s their basic claim. Here’s how - in a nutshell - they are going to do it:

Curricular and Delivery Innovation and More

They are basically starting with curricular and delivery innovation. The curriculum is organized around 120 work-at-your-own-pace competencies in the form of “tasks” (also called can-do statements) that are based primarily on Lumina’s Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP), but also on Department of Labor competencies, as well as a wide variety of other postsecondary education expectations and standards, such as a learning outcome that deals with information literacy and another on speaking and listening. “These are not arbitrary,” LeBlanc claimed. “They (the competencies) are all tethered to well-researched professionals within their disciplines.”

The competencies, each of which is typically comprised of three levels of tasks that grow in complexity, have been created around a framework that builds on the DQP, beginning with a “mastery triad of foundational skills, personal and social skills and content knowledge,” said Cathrael Kazin, former Executive Director of Strategic Initiatives, Educational Testing Service (ETS), and now CFA’s Chief Academic Officer.

Kazin gave an in-depth presentation all about CFA to a fully-packed room at the recent CAEL International Conference.  She explained how there are clusters within the triad. Under foundational skills, for example, are communication skills, critical and creative thinking, quantitative skills, digital fluency and information literacy. “These foundational skills are necessary no matter what you are doing,” Kazin said.  “We also thought that personal and social skills (personal effectiveness, ethics and social responsibility, teamwork and collaboration) were really critical for students to have because employers constantly say ‘well, their technical knowledge is okay but they can’t work in a team or they have expectations that are not reasonable.’ ” Under content knowledge are business essentials, which is an industry-specific elective, and science, society and culture, “which is the broad, integrative knowledge – the general education kind of exposures,” Kazin said.

All the tasks are archived inside an electronic portfolio under multiple criteria that are ultimately evaluated and commented on by a reviewer who uses a very simple rubric of “Yes” or “Not Yet” mastered. “Task completion is the primary form of assessment,” Kazin explained. “Students do not actually complete a competency; they complete a task which allows them to demonstrate mastery of a competency. And students can keep submitting until they get it. We don’t care about how long it takes them to get it. We just care about them getting it.”

There are 365 start dates annually, and students can begin their studies at any level they choose. Tuition is $2,500 annually – all inclusive. “We are less than the national average for the cost of a community college degree, and we want to get it down to $1,500 – that’s our target, and we are driving in that direction,” LeBlanc said.  “No one should be denied because of finances.”  

Another feature of the entire program that contributes to cost savings is related to course materials and content. “We are using content that is already out there, meaning no textbooks that students have to pay for,” Kazin said. “To every extent possible, we use whatever is free or low cost. Obviously it has to be curated, because there is a lot out there. We had to make sure that students did not get trapped in an endless round of Wikipedia.”

Student-at-the-Center Model

Students have multiple sources of support, including an SNHU-assigned coach, an “accountability partner” (selected by the student), a mentor (from the workplace), the aforementioned reviewer/task evaluator, and other students from the CFA community who volunteer to be part of a peer-to-peer support environment.

“We shifted from the idea of the teacher as expert, to providing other ways to get information and learn,” Kazin explained. “For example, one part of a course is called Mentors in the Workplace because now we have access to workers,” allowing students to “harness the knowledge of their peers by embedding them in a network of support. ”

So far, the new model has worked well, at least at the pilot phase from this past summer. Kazin points to some of the highly positive comments collected from the students who took part in the pilot. “These were students who thought education was not an option for them, and their feeling of transformation and possibility was extraordinary,” Kazin said. “It was transformative for them.”

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Internships: To Pay or Not to Pay?

by George Lorenzo

Way back when I was a self-supporting college student trying to make ends meet as best as I could, I experienced two fortuitous events.  First, I was awarded a journalism scholarship because I had worked very hard on the student newspaper and had accumulated a lot of the so-called “clips” that can get your foot in the door for a job after graduation. Secondly, I was also awarded a summer internship as a feature writer with a major metropolitan newspaper – also partially due to the large number of clips I had in tow.

Fortunately, the internship program was a paid one, enabling me to keep financially afloat during a very challenging time in which I had to pay tuition costs out of my own pocket.

Highly Valuable Work Experience

The internship not only paid in dollars. It more importantly paid off in the best learning experience of my entire life to date. I think I learned more during that summer internship than I did over the entire course of my four years as an undergraduate student. Working day-to-day with professional journalists, attending editorial meetings and meeting the rigors of one deadline after the next, was a value that cannot be measured in dollars. In hindsight, I would have completed that summer internship without pay, and I would have still come out way ahead on the job-skills/career-advancement pathway. 

This kind of experience is highly effective workforce development on an individual basis, which brings me to my question: Should all internships be paid?

Typical Providers of Unpaid Student Internships

Thinking about this question brought me back to an impressionable interview I had about one year ago with Phil Gardner, Director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University. Since 1985, Gardner has conducted a lot of research about internship programs. He explained to me that one of the worse “offenders” in the world of unpaid internships is the federal government where highly coveted and competitive summer Congressional internships go unpaid. Other so-called offenders include hospitals where nursing clinicals are not paid, small non-profit organizations, small businesses with under several hundred employees, and business startups. Gardner also pointed out that oftentimes even big companies will not pay communications and public relations interns while at the same time they typically pay interning engineers and other business-related positions. 

Winter Break Internships a Growing Trend

In “Resume Builder or Rip-Off?”,  published by Inside Higher Ed about one year ago, it was pointed out that internship programs were becoming a growing trend, with shorter-term winter break internships increasing in numbers. It was also pointed out that Internships.com , a web portal all about student internships, had data showing a 46 percent increase in winter internship postings from the 2010-11 to 2011-12 academic years. However, less than half of winter internships were noted as being paid.

What are the Legalities?

A big concern with all this growth of internships, especially during tough economic times, is whether or not too many employers are illegally taking advantage of unpaid internships to obtain free labor. Basically, all internships must comply with six criteria that fall under the Fair Labor Standards Act, but many do not comply. 

In a New York Times article from April 2010, headlined “The Unpaid Intern, Legal or Not,”  it was explained that “violations are widespread,” with the Labor Department “cracking down on firms that fail to pay interns properly and expanding efforts to educate companies, colleges and students on the law regarding internships.”

Note from the White House

The White House has also addressed this issue, albeit briefly in one sentence of its February 2012 announcement of the Community College to Career Fund proposal: “The Fund will also support paid internships for low-income community college students that will allow them to simultaneously earn credit for work-based learning and gain relevant employment experience in a high-wage, high-skill field.”

What are Your Thoughts?

Note the word “paid” in the White House statement. Should all internships be paid? In my summer internship from many years ago I brought previous writing experience from working on the college newspaper and an extremely energetic work ethic to prove my metal, so to speak. I was also very open to, and sought out, constructive criticism from my much more experienced colleagues on the job. The end result was that I brought some decent value to the feature writing department at a pay scale that was minimum wage and hence much less than my cohorts. In other words, the paper benefitted too.

As I already mentioned, I would have worked that summer for free because of the sheer volume of benefits that it brought to my career-advancement aspirations. I’m sure the Congressional interns would also agree that going the free route is more than okay in the grand scheme of things.

But there are many students who can’t afford to go the free route, so they are forced out of even considering the possibility of applying for an internship program. So, should not all student internships be paid internships? In fact, I would argue that they should be paid at a rate that is higher than minimum wage. After all, how many students are out there who can bring good and energetic value to your company during an internship but are not applying because either the pay is too low or non-existent? 

COMMENTS WELCOME

Does Labor Market Intelligence Software along with Spidering and Data Mining of Online Job Advertisements Bring Solid Labor Market Data?

by George Lorenzo

If you are in the business of workforce development, you have probably heard about relatively new technologies available today that mine and “spider” projected job openings that are listed online and then analyze and aggregate such mined data to determine where job demands are located in any given geographic area. In a Jobs for the Future report, titled “Aligning Community Colleges to Their Local Labor Markets: The Role of Online Job Ads for Providing Real-time Intelligence about Occupations and Skills in Demand,” author David Altstadt outlines some of the possibilities and pitfalls of this technology.

Alstadt notes that “jobs advertised online now reflect at least 70 percent of all openings.” The trick is to gather actionable, real-time data from these ads by collecting them, making sure you are not collecting duplicate ads (which is a common problem) and then extracting data from job descriptions that can be analyzed to gain insight on job requirements and trends. “The quality and range of services available to analyze the real-time market are undergoing constant change, as new entrants, tools and systems are introduced,” Alstadt writes and then lists all the major players with notes on their capabilities.

Best Practices and Limitations

Burning Glass Technologies is one of the players that has gotten a lot of ink in the literature on this topic, but other solutions suggest that utilizing a combination of players, such as data and analysis from the Conference Board, and Wanted Technologies, for instance, allows users to compare and contrast results and come with a clear picture of the their local labor market.

Still, there are limitations to all this.  As noted in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, titled “Real-Time Jobs Data Show Community Colleges What Employers Need Now,” by Jennifer Gonzalez, “not all job openings are listed online,” and “those that are (listed online) sometimes provide incomplete information about the qualifications required.” Plus, data producers have not consistently been able to not count duplicate job postings, meaning that overall the real-time labor market picture being painted is not accurate. In addition, licensing fees for the data producing software is not exactly inexpensive – and often cost-prohibitive for community colleges – costing in the range of $5,000 to $10,000 for a single-user, one-year license.

A Consumer’s Guide

In April last year, Jobs for the Future published a very helpful “Vendor Product Review: A Consumer’s Guide to Real-Time Labor Market Information,” by John Dorrer and Myriam Milfort. This report was based on a 42-question survey to six vendors of what they call Labor Market Intelliegence (LMI) systems. As noted in the report “Burning Glass Technologies and Geographic Solutions responded to the JFF survey. Wanted Technologies chose not to participate, citing confidentiality.  For Conference Board/Help Wanted Online, JFF gathered most of the requisite information from published technical notes provided on the web. Career Builder did not complete the survey” (but did respond to several questions via a conference call).

Based on the current research, choosing an LMI system is not any easy decision. The authors of the Vendor Market Review encourage adopters of this new technology “to maintain a healthy degree of skepticism,” but at the same time they say that vendors “have made significant improvements in their spidering and parsing processes.”

COMMENTS WELCOME

Keith Bird On Credit, Noncredit, & Competency-Based Learning

by George Lorenzo

This post is based on a conversation I had several months ago with Keith Bird, Senior Policy Fellow for Workforce and Postsecondary Education at the Corporation for A Skilled Workforce located in Ann Arbor, MI. Keith served as chancellor of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System for ten years and has been president of two community colleges during his illustrious career to date. He serves on a variety of advisory boards and councils and is a frequent speaker at conferences on the involvement of community colleges in economic and workforce development.

Devising a Competency-based Framework

Keith and I talked about the creation of what he calls a set of “rigorous” methodologies that can guarantee that both credit and non-credit community college courses and programs be more closely aligned to the labor market.  In addition, and more importantly, these methodologies could form the basis of a new postsecondary system that awards students valid credentials that employers can trust. Such credentials would be based on a student’s demonstration of competencies that have been established by industry, as opposed to awarding only degrees and certificates based solely on the historic credit hour.

To further elaborate and clarify this topic, Keith pointed me to a highly informative and eye-opening report he coauthored titled “Giving Credit Where Credit is Due: Creating a Competency-Based Qualifications Framework for Postsecondary Education and Training.”  To put it succinctly, the premise of this paper is that  the U.S. needs to “devise a competency-based framework within which states and institutions can award educational credit for academic-equivalent competencies mastered through formal and informal occupational education and training. Educational credit based on competence, rather than on time (i.e., the credit hour), would result in a postsecondary credential that is portable, accepted by postsecondary institutions, and recognized across industry sectors.”

There are a good number of organizations with substantial efforts and policies that address this issue, such as the American National Standards Institute, which accredits educational certificate programs, among many additional efforts; the American Council on Education, which evaluates and validates noncredit instruction to assist students with the prospect of obtaining credit for workplace learning; the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, which awards credits for prior learning assessment; and many others. However, as noted in the Giving Credit report, even combined “they are insufficient compared to the scale of need.” Plus, they “vary widely in methodology and cost.”

The Great Disconnect Between Credit and Noncredit

It was also cited in the Giving Credit paper that our nation’s two-year colleges, in 2009, served more than 6.5 million students in credit-bearing programs and about 5 million students in noncredit education and training. The noncredit offerings included customized employee training courses and programs, incumbent worker programs for employee advancement in their existing jobs, English as a Second language instruction, and courses in a variety of employability skills and personal enrichment. Historically, however, such noncredit offerings have typically been given a low status at community colleges, resulting in less funding and less attention overall by institutional curriculum approval administrators. In short, “the disconnect between the credit and noncredit sides of community colleges hinders the sharing of best practices and takes pressure off the credit side to be responsive to diverse employer and student needs.”

Solving the Challenge

In the end, Keith had a good number of recommendations – too long to completely list here – for solving his call for a set of methodologies that would ultimately get credit and non-credit community college courses and programs more closely aligned to the labor market, as well as for the creation of a postsecondary education system with a stronger emphasis on a competency-based framework.  Some of the recommendations that stuck out more prominently with me than others include:

• Raise the bar for business engagement by promoting the joint establishment of rigorous competency/standards/curricula/credentials and quality assurance mechanisms between businesses and community colleges.
• Create a national competency-based framework for postsecondary education modeled on Lumina Foundation’s Degree Qualifications Profile to establish learning outcomes for multiple levels of academic credentials, including one- year certificates. It should be constructed with input from multiple participants, including education, workforce, and employer stakeholders.
• Develop a national clearinghouse for credentials with standard terminology and methodologies to document the development and documentation of standards for competency- based qualifications and curricula. Include a central database to count numbers and ensure proper categorization of programs. Get recognized by federal and state governments and industry,   accredited by a third party and based on national/international standards and regulatory standards.

Finally, today’s college-aged 21st century learners are highly mobile and increasingly gaining the knowledge and skills they need from the availability of a growing number and wider variety of informal learning experiences (that are frequently less expensive than the tuition rates at public institutions), including more options for noncredit courses and programs that are based around employee-desired competencies that have increasingly sophisticated assessments (through advanced technologies) that clearly demonstrate proficiencies.  

As stated in the Giving Credit report:  “With the ability to earn postsecondary educational credit by demonstrating competencies, it becomes irrelevant whether a student obtains competence through a noncredit or credit-bearing path.”  As that line of thinking becomes more prevalent, it becomes easy to see that the facilitation of truly granting valid credit where valid credit is truly due is changing the entire landscape of community colleges, corporate training and workforce development in ways we have yet to truly see. 

COMMENTS WELCOME

Accelerating Opportunity Initiative Focused on Helping Lower-Skilled Adults Get Educated and Find Decent Jobs

by George Lorenzo, Senior Writer, Editor and
Publisher of The SOURCE on Community College Issues, Trends & Strategies

This is the start of a series of in-depth feature articles on the topic of philanthropic foundations and their relationship to postsecondary education reform.  

The series begins with a piece on a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Postsecondary Success Strategy, grantee, Jobs for the Future.  The Foundation’s Postsecondary Success Strategy “aims to dramatically increase the number of young adults who complete their postsecondary education, setting them up for success in the workplace and in life.” In particular, the Foundation’s support
of community colleges is what I am most keenly interested in, for obvious reasons. In addition, part of my goal for the articles related to the Gates Foundation is to focus only on the largest recipients of the Postsecondary Success Strategy grants related to community colleges, those who received a minimum of $2 million dollars in funds during recent years.  

I think there are not enough big stories about the role of such philanthropic investments in the growth and renovation of community colleges. What do these dollars actually go towards? How do they affect reform and education policies at the local, state and federal levels? How can I, as a community college, get their attention and perhaps some funding? How are decisions made about how much goes to whom?  This series will attempt to answer such questions. Plus, the articles
will describe what the grantees have thus far accomplished and what their plans
are for the future.

In June of this year, I interviewed 25 professionals from 13 of the larger Postsecondary Success Strategy grantees. Iam now wading through all this information, trying to figure out how to report on all this in a meaningful way, what kind of follow ups I need to do, and who else I should contact.  

Meaningful Work but No Definitive Numbers Yet

One of my most important overriding questions about the millions upon millions of dollars that have been dispersed is how many young adults have actually been assisted with ramping up onto successful pathways “in the workplace and in life” through the Postsecondary Success Strategy? Getting a clear answer to that kind of specific quantitative question, however, has thus far proven to be elusive, but it does not mean that a great deal of good and meaningful work is not happening or that we shall not be seeing some solid results in the not-too-distant future. According to one of several deputy directors for the Postsecondary Success Strategy, Josh Jarrett, seeking the quantitative “is a great question and one we are still wrestling with. We got a lot of individual evaluations ongoing where they are collecting information, and we are doing some of that work internally, but we haven’t yet pulled all that together and said here is the magic number.”

An $18.5 Million Support Network

Henceforth I begin with one of the larger grantees, the “Accelerating Opportunity: A Breaking Through Initiative,” managed by Jobs for the Future (JFF), which the Gates Foundation awarded $10,583,499 in November 2010 for a term of 4-years and 11-months. Its purpose: “to create effective pathways to college and careers for adult learners using evidenced-based instructional and
organizational models.” Overall, Accelerating Opportunity is an $18.5 million initiative with funding also coming from the Joyce Foundation, the W.K. Kellog Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, and the University of Phoenix Foundation.  According to Maria Flynn, vice president of JFF's Building Economic Opportunity Group, the Gates grant “made it easier to get other funders on board; we were able to raise eight million dollars on top of that . . . Gates really helps support the core infrastructure of the network.”

Information about all of the Foundation’s many worthy philanthropic efforts, is listed here: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/grants/Pages/search.aspx. Recently, for instance, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was awarded $2.5 million in September 2012 for a term of 1 year and 10 months “to support funding for Quantway/Statway, Productive Persistence, and Network Improvement Community,” and the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education was awarded $4,822, 265 in August 2012 for a term of 2 years and 5 months “to develop EdReady, a direct-to-student, free, online college readiness diagnostic and customized remediation tool utilizing NROC developmental math, and research, planning, design, and creation of two online developmental English courses.”  

Targeting People in Five States Who are Not Prepared for Today’s Available Jobs

Accelerating Opportunity has been built from baseline evidence produced by an earlier JFF and National Council for Workforce Education collaboration, called Breaking Through, along with baseline evidence produced by the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges’ Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training Program (I-BEST). The National College Transition Network is also a partner. The Accelerating Opportunity mandate targets lower-skilled workers who are not yet prepared for today’s job market by providing support for them to complete adult basic education programs and ultimately earn their GEDs (if they have not yet earned a high school diploma) as well as an associate degree or some other credential.

Accelerating Opportunity has ramped up its efforts by creating the framework for what it refers to as “effective pathways to credentials and careers.” These pathways are currently being created and implemented in five states that were initially part of a competition between 11 states – Illinois Kansas Kentucky, Louisiana, and North Carolina. Each of these five states was recently awarded $1.6 million  over three years by Accelerating Opportunity “to help workers earn valuable credentials needed for today’s good jobs through innovative adult education programs.”  

Program Models and Strategies Encourage Scalability

As noted on the Accelerating Opportunity website, program models are geared toward “improving outcomes for large numbers of low-skilled adult learners,” and they require “changes to both policy and practice, particularly to encourage the development of scalable program models. A critical component of Accelerating Opportunity is the implementation of evidence-based instructional and programmatic models that promote transition to and completion of credentialing programs in
high-demand fields.” In particular, as outlined on the Accelerating Opportunities Breaking Through Model section of the website, the initiative promotes four high-leverage strategies to develop college and career pathways for students to advance their studies or enter family-supporting careers:

Accelerated Learning. Change delivery methods and content through
the innovative use of assessment tools, restructured curricula, targeted
instruction, contextualization, and other strategies so that students can meet
their goals faster.

Comprehensive Support Services. Make academic, economic, and social
support services easily accessible to students whose life challenges put them
at risk of not completing their education.

Labor Market Payoffs. Restructure both precollege and college-level
instruction to connect course content with the workplace and to connect
students with actual employers and workplaces.

Aligning Programs for Low-Skilled Adults. Reorganize college
programs and link them with external programs to provide students with a better
understanding of how they can move into and through college, and to provide
clear pathways that enable them to do so.

According to a recent press release, “each of the five states is led by a team that represents a unique collaboration between higher education agencies, the governor’s office, state workforce development agencies, state data agencies, community colleges, and employers or employer associations in industry sectors with strong labor demand and career advancement potential.” In Kentucky, for instance, currently eight community colleges in partnership with the Kentucky Education and Workforce Development Cabinet, are developing Accelerating Opportunity pathways in everything from air conditioning technology, allied health, and automotive technology, to mechatronics, office systems technology and welding technology. In North Carolina, plans are to build on and continue growing its Basic Skills Plus program to be fully aligned with Accelerating Opportunity and extended to all of the state’s 58 community colleges by 2014. In Illinois, eight Accelerated Opportunity community colleges are developing pathways  in healthcare, advanced manufacturing, and transportation and logistics. In Kansas, nine Accelerated Opportunity community colleges are developing pathways in healthcare (nursing and allied health), computer information technology, advanced manufacturing, construction technology, and industrial technology. In Louisiana, the Louisiana Community and Technical College System is coordinating with the New Orleans National Fund for Workforce Solutions site to develop pathways leading to employment in the New Orleans area BioDistrict.

“Students in these programs can start on a pathway without a high school diploma and start accumulating college credit as they move along,” said Flynn. “So far across the states the colleges have enrolled more than 1,000 students.” It is estimated that at least 40,000 students will progress through Accelerating Opportunity pathways during the term of its grant through 2014, and at least 18,000 students will have earned at least one marketable, stackable, credit-bearing credential and at least one term’s worth of college credit.

Some interesting student testimonials posted on YouTube are available at the Kentucky website, showing how enrolling in an Accelerating Opportunity program has helped jump-start their careers.  

In addition, interested parties can check out a valuable virtual resource library that is a compendium of tools and resources selected specifically for the Accelerating Opportunity initiative, located at http://www.acceleratingopportunity.org/virtualacademy/resources.

Lastly, Accelerating Opportunity includes a robust independent evaluation program, led by the Urban Institute, which claims to ensure that the overall initiative document best practices and encourage growth through the addition of other state community college systems.

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On John Roueche, Community College Leadership Programs and the Real World of Retirement

by George Lorenzo

Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of my close friends and colleagues talk about their upcoming retirement years, and my response has always been the same: I tell them how much I dislike the word “retire” because, to me, it has a word-defining connotation that emphasizes a next phase of life in which one gets ready to lie down and go to sleep or something to that effect. 

Recently, I had a very nice conversation about retirement with SOURCE Editorial Board member John Roueche. John, among numerous accomplishments in the field, has served as director of the Community College Leadership Program (CCLP) at the University of Texas at Austin for more than 40 years.  

A long list of well-known community college leaders have studied and learned from John and other distinguished faculty members at the University of Texas at Austin CCLP. Some of its graduates include current American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) President, Walter Bumphus; AACC President  Emeritus,  George Boggs; President of the Commission on Colleges, Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, Belle Wheelan;  President of the Cuyahoga Community College District, Jerry Sue Thornton; Director of CCCSE, Kay McClenney; Chancellor of Western Governors University, Texas, Mark Milliron; and too many more to list here.

John is leaving the University of Texas at Austin in September. Consequently his colleagues have been bestowing  John with lots of special tributes, thanks  and awards, the most recent being a very special acknowledgment and award ceremony at last month’s AACC convention luncheon, featuring an impressive video of community college leaders reflecting on John’s great body of work.

CC Leaders Typically Don’t Retire  

Getting back to the recent conversation about retirement I had with John, I started out by saying, “you don’t strike me as someone who will actually retire, and so would you mind explaining what your plans are for the future?” John replied with “I don’t have one friend who has successfully retired,” and he added that he frequently gets calls from former community college presidents who are seeking to return, or who have already returned, to some form of work with community colleges after a brief respite.  “So many have retired and did not realize how much they enjoyed what they were doing for so many years, and so wonderfully well, that they missed it.” John mentioned Terry O’Banion [also a SOURCE Editorial Board member], who, for example, went into retirement in 1999 and came out of it within six months. “I think he has been working harder in the last 13 years than he did before [his so-called retirement],” John said.

A New Path Related to another CCLP

So, John may be retiring from the University of Texas at Austin, but he certainly is not pulling himself out of the game. He will be swinging the bat for a good many more years.  John is no different than the many community college leaders he has taught and/or worked closely with who had left their once long-held positions and then shortly thereafter moved on to something new. In John’s case, he has already put his plans in motion by taking on the role of Chair of the National American University (NAU) Community College Advisory Board.

Last year, the NAU Advisory Board started to plan out what John said there is a great need for:  the development of more graduate-level programs with a specialization in community college leadership, including a cohort, hybrid Ed.D program that NAU is planning to roll out next year provided that it obtains approval under its regional accreditation through the Higher Learning Commission and its membership with the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. Other members of the Advisory Board include Boggs;  Donald  Cameron, President Emeritus of Guilford Technical Community College;  Gerardo de los Santos, President and Chief Executive Officer League for Innovation in the Community College; Terry O’Banion, President Emeritus and Senior League Fellow, League for Innovation in the Community College and Senior Advisor, Higher Education Programs, Walden University; Thornton;  and Margaretta Brédé Mathis; NAU Provost Samuel D. Kerr, and the President of Online Learning Robert Paxton, will serve as ex-officio members and as internal resources for the board.

In case you haven’t noticed, in addition to John, there are three community college working retirees on the NAU Advisory Board: Boggs, O’Banion and Cameron.

Looming Shortage

“NAU has been tracking the withdrawal of support from some of the major universities to continue strong preparation programs for community college leaders,” John said. “If you look at universities around the country that 20 to 30 years ago were turning out some of the best leaders for our community colleges, many of their community college leadership programs are now defunct.”  If you also look at the current growth of community colleges, in general, coupled with research showing a large number of baby-boomer-aged community college presidents getting ready to retire, along with a growing number of community college CIOs of the same age bracket, who often fill presidential vacancies, also retiring, the notion of a critical shortage of well-trained and educated community college leaders looks like a distinct trend on the very near horizon. ^{1, 2}     

NAU, known over its 70-year history to date as a successful proprietary institution focused mostly on offering business and allied health programs, has obviously added this new focus on developing an Ed. D program to meet what’s being recognized as a looming shortage of future community college leaders.  

“It was not until a year ago when we put this Advisory Board together that it became very clear to us that there was a need for community college leadership programs, and that this need was growing substantially,” said Ronald Shape, CEO of NAU. Regarding the makeup of the Advisory Board, Shape added that “you could not ask for a more knowledgeable group of individuals. As an institution, we are unbelievably excited about this great opportunity.”

Some Final Thoughts and a New Word

So, it certainly looks like NAU has started down an intelligent and much-needed pathway with the help of some solid community college professionals.   

And now, to conclude this SOURCE Scholars blog post, it is my opinion that retirement boils down to this: If you love what you do, you will keep doing it in some meaningful capacity until the end. Now that’s living, not retiring. And finally, it is in that spirit that I’d like to suggest a new word and definition to our lexicon that replaces the word retirement : “Shiftupment”:  (Verb) The art of shifting into a new gear of life in which you continue to share your knowledge as much as possible after leaving the job(s) you had held for many years.  

Endnotes:

1. Christopher Shults. (2001).  The Critical Impact of Impending Retirements on Community College Leadership. American Association of Community Colleges. http://www.aacc.nche.edu/Publications/Briefs/Documents/11062001leadership.pdf
2. Jim Riggs. (2009). Leadership, Change and the Future of Community Colleges. Academic Leadership, The Online Journal, Volume 7, Issue 1. http://www.academicleadership.org/298/leadership-change-and-the-future-of-community-colleges/

Recent articles about John Roueche:

David Pluviose. (April 24, 2012). Retiring CCLP Director John Roueche Celebrated at AACC Conference. Diverse Education. http://diverseeducation.com/article/17022/

Ellen Ullman. (April 2, 2012). Community Reflects on Leadership Guru Roueche as He Retires. Community College Times.  http://www.communitycollegetimes.com/Pages/Academic-Programs/College-community-reflects-on-leadership-guru-Roueche-as-he-retires.aspx