Boston Fed CEO: Community Colleges Should Reflect Workforce Needs | Central Mass. school administrators push back, citing existing corporate links, lack of state funding
Photo/Matt Pilon
FINANCE PERSPECTIVE: Eric S. Rosengren, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, called on community colleges to do more to prepare the workforce for employment.
Community colleges in New England’s mid-sized cities need to do more to jumpstart what has been a consistently weak economic recovery, according to Eric S. Rosengren, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
Rosengren said during a recent appearance in Worcester that despite high unemployment in those cities, important employers like manufacturers and health care providers often face a shortage of “middle skills” workers to fill open positions.
“Community colleges in New England have played less of a role in workforce development than in some parts of the country, where there is a very close connection between employers and potential employers and the curricula developed and offered at community colleges,” Rosengren said.
He said that community colleges need to churn out the right mix of skilled workers, which would help to both retain and attract companies to their respective regions as well as improve the unemployment rate and overall economy.
In an interview a week after his appearance in Worcester, Rosengren would not say which New England cities he was talking about specifically.
But he did say that community colleges in this region struggle with dual roles. For some students, they are springboards to four-year universities. And for others, they are places to get job-specific training or certificates.
“It’s certainly possible to do both well, but I think it’s more challenging to do both well,” Rosengren said.
Training Curriculum
Quinsigamond Community College (QCC) in Worcester and Mount Wachusett Community College (MWCC) in Gardner are two schools that fit into the dual role model in Central Massachusetts. Both operate workforce development offices that sell training to companies and their existing employees and also work with faculty on developing new curriculum based on the shifting needs of industry.
Jeremiah Riordan, assistant vice president of lifelong learning and workforce development at MWCC, said that workforce development departments at Massachusetts community colleges operate with no state funding. They are self-sustaining and fund operations through training fees they charge to client companies.
“I don’t think it’s the community college that’s slacking,” Riordan said. “I feel like we could use more help.”
Gail Carberry, president of Quinsigamond Community College, also feels that the community colleges are accomplishing much given funding constraints.
“We do a lot with a little,” Carberry said. “I would appreciate the commonwealth investing more heavily in community colleges on the career side.”
Carberry noted that the state invests more than five times as much in vocational and technical education than it does in workforce development at community colleges.
The state provides approximately $13 million of Quinsigamond’s $56 million annual budget.
Both Carberry and Riordan said that their schools are regularly in touch with the region’s employers and adapt curriculum and programs according to needs they perceive.
Job-specific training programs at the two schools include auto repair, heating and ventilation, nursing, insurance and weatherization, to name a few.
Quinsigamond recently announced its auto repair program, which stems from a partnership with General Motors. The college is also launching a heating, ventilation and air conditioning program as well as a photovoltaic studies in Marlborough
A recent example of Mount Wachusett meeting a perceived workforce need was the creation of an energy efficiency program last year in response to an infusion of federal stimulus money for weatherization of low-income housing.
“It created an industry,” Riordan said. “Everybody suddenly called us and said, ‘We need weatherization technicians.’”
By Design
Massachusetts community colleges recognize the role they play in workforce needs and they talk to important employers, said Andre Mayer, senior vice president of communications and research at the Associated Industries of Massachusetts.
But Massachusetts has a weaker community college tradition than California or North Carolina, he said.
Though enrollments have been growing over time, Massachusetts should still have far more students at its community colleges, he added.
“It’s the piece of our higher ed system where we’re under-enrolled,” Mayer said.
More students in community colleges would increase the colleges’ stature, which could help with state funding.
Mayer said another challenge is that the colleges here were designed as springboards to four-year degrees, not as workforce development engines.
“It’s not that people don’t know about it or that the institutions aren’t doing it,” he said. “It’s that we are doing it with a system that, to a considerable extent, was designed to do something else.”
The fact that the state’s community colleges do not receive regular budget support for their workforce efforts, like schools in some other states do, illustrates the fact that the state places less importance on the workforce side of the schools’ mission, Mayer said.
“If you’re self-sustaining, it is more difficult to really maintain a coherent program,” he said.
Riordan, of Mount Wachusett, said that the school would be shirking a major part of its mission if it were to focus solely on workforce development or degree-track education.
“If we stop delivering services to one or the other, we’re going to leave a very big hole,” Riordan said. “I just can’t see us walking away from part of our responsibility.”
North Carolina Envy
Rosengren said his views on the roles of community colleges were colored by a trip last year to North Carolina, where he witnessed a systemic focus on workforce development.
“I think there’s something broader that happens in North Carolina,” he said.
Community college officials play a central role in attracting businesses by offering to cater training for the employees they plan to hire, he said. And education and government leaders were closely aligned on workforce priorities.
“No matter who you’d talk to, they kind of understood what the game plan was,” Rosengren said.
Rosengren isn’t the only one with North Carolina in mind when he talks about community colleges.
When asked which states have a reputation for collaboration among industry and community colleges, Carberry, of QCC, also mentioned the Tar Heel State.
“We have been trying for some time to convince the state that we should adopt the North Carolina model, in which community colleges are the preferred providers for the workforce,” she said.
A Stigma?
Riordan, of Mount Wachusett, said that he thinks community colleges struggle with a stigma when it comes to relationships with certain companies, some of which pay more to private colleges or organizations for essentially the same training offered by the community college.
“They don’t think of us as workforce organs,” he said.
David McKeehan, president of the North Central Massachusetts Chamber of Commerce, said that community colleges in New England could likely all find ways to improve their workforce efforts, but he ventured that Mount Wachusett, which serves the North Central region, is among the best in the Northeast and is on many companies’ radar screens for training opportunities.
McKeehan said that if there is a stigma that needs to be addressed, it is the perception many people have about manufacturing jobs.
Those are the increasingly high-tech positions that employers have trouble filling, despite high unemployment.
“There’s this perception out there that there’s no future in those jobs,” McKeehan said.
But in North Central Massachusetts, one in every three payroll dollars comes from manufacturing and 25 percent of the population is employed in that sector.
“We need people to understand that manufacturing is alive and well and has a future here in Massachusetts,” he said.
For his part, McKeehan thinks that community colleges are the state’s best answer to filling that need.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments