Colleges Can’t Spend Kudos
Like Hans Christian Andersen’s ugly duckling that turns into a swan, the nation’s hard-working but long-unsung community colleges are now winning abundant praise.
Lauding teaching quality at the state’s 108 community colleges, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed that they absorb freshmen next fall who would otherwise go to UC or Cal State.
Similarly, in his State of the Union speech, President Bush held up the community colleges as the place to learn the “jobs of the 21st century.”
It’s not clear, however, whether politicians are going to attach money to their praise.
The 3% budget increase the governor has proposed giving the colleges will cover only a fraction of the burden of absorbing the 7,000 freshmen. Also uncertain is whether Bush’s budget will on the whole prove more benefit than burden to the colleges.
Though the president’s fiscal year 2005 budget sets aside $250 million for community colleges to teach technologies that are “transforming the way almost every job is done,” it is unclear whether the new funding will be offset by other cuts. In his last three budgets, Bush has pushed to cut $1 billion in worker training and re-education, including a $300-million trim in vocational education in 2004.
A deeper problem is that those high-paying 21st century jobs may be more elusive than the president portrayed them to be in his speech. Ironically, the very technology the president hails is driving down the need for, and thus the wages of, workers. According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2010 nearly 70% of job openings in the United States will require only short-term work-related training. Even “knowledge industries” once thought to be safely grounded in the United States are being shipped abroad.
Clearly, Mark Drummond, the former Los Angeles Community College District chancellor who assumed the presidency of the state community college system two weeks ago, cannot guarantee “skill security” to all Californians. Still, there’s a lot Drummond can do to ensure that California gets its fair share of whatever new money Washington ultimately decides to throw this way.
California’s approach to funneling federal vocational training and “Work Force Development” dollars is currently helter-skelter: Confusion reigns among a dozen agencies that tend to feud with each other when they talk at all. As a group of business executives told state community college leaders last month, “California’s business climate rates among the worst nationwide,” in part because it fails to “utilize community college training resources to create centers of excellence in emerging technologies.”
Drummond should, of course, press the Bush and Schwarzenegger administrations to give him the resources necessary to fulfill the big new responsibilities they have asked his college districts to assume. But rather than waiting for their largess, there is much he can do to hone the tools he has now.
