Community Colleges Strained by Demand

Three years ago, when John Dyer was laid off from his job as a machinist, he made a decision millions of other people around the country are making. Rather than try to get another job in his rapidly evaporating trade, he signed up at his local community college for courses in a booming field -- in his case, radiology.

Dyer doesn’t worry that his starting hourly wage as an X-ray technician will be lower than the $17 an hour he earned before.

“There is lot more opportunity for advancement than there ever will be as a machinist,” said Dyer, 33, who expects to graduate in December from Sinclair Community College in Dayton.

In the last three years, enrollment in credit courses at community colleges has grown 20% to more than 6.5 million students. People of all ages and academic backgrounds are seeking the education and training they need to enter a workplace that increasingly requires some college and skills training for all but the lowest-paying jobs.

“Our ultimate goal is the rebuilding of the American middle-class family,” said Ron Kindell, an administrator at Sinclair.

But, even as demand for community colleges has grown, their financial outlook has been darkened by state budget cuts. At Sinclair, state aid, which the school counts on for half of its $100-million budget, has declined 20% over four years while the student body has grown more than 10% to almost 23,000.

And it could get worse. Steven Lee Johnson, Sinclair’s president, has been told to prepare for a state aid cut next year as large as 25%.

The shortfall has meant tuition increases, larger class sizes and general belt tightening. Sinclair has kept its doors open to all students, but it does not necessarily provide them quick entry into the hottest fields. Students who want to be nurses or, like Dyer, radiographers, have to wait as long as two years.

Many community college systems across the country -- including those in California -- report similar pressures and budget problems. In January, President Bush proposed a $250-million aid program for community colleges to help fill the gap. In Congress, negotiators will try to work out a compromise between the Senate, which approved the $250 million, and the House, which voted for $50 million.

Johnson and other community college presidents across the country say that Bush’s proposal falls far short of what’s needed.

“I don’t think it will make a whole lot of difference,” Johnson said. Bush’s $250 million would have to be shared by the nation’s 997 public community colleges, leaving an average of $250,000 for each.

Partly because of funding shortfalls, Rich Lab expects to wait two years to get into the core courses of Sinclair’s radiology program. Lab, 53, was laid off in 2001 from a manufacturing plant where he earned $65,000 a year. While he waits for a place in the radiology program, he has been working $9-an-hour jobs installing key card locks on hotel doors and working at a pizza box factory.

“I’m blessed I don’t have a taste for lobster,” he joked.

Many students do not have the patience of Lab.

“If they hang in there with us, they get a slot in a year or two,” Johnson said. “But a lot of them just go away. They get irritated or mad. They need jobs.”

Sinclair, like most community colleges, attracts a diverse student body. Its hallways bustle with former factory workers like Lab, whose jobs have moved south or overseas; recent high school graduates who do not have the grades or the money for a four-year school; stay-at-home moms trying to get into the work force; immigrants seeking U.S. credentials, and college graduates looking for marketable skills.

Some hope their associate’s degree from Sinclair will be their ticket to a four-year college. Others hope that just a few courses will help them get a good job. Increasing numbers of students take noncredit courses to upgrade their skills

Most students work and many have families. It takes more than six years for an average Sinclair student to earn an associate’s degree, said college spokesman Gary Honnert.

Community colleges admit to a low graduation rate. Five years after entering community college in 1996, only 45% of their students nationally had earned an associate’s degree or a one-year certificate, according to Norton Grubb, an economist at UC Berkeley’s education school.

Thomas R. Bailey, director of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, says community college students owe their low graduation rates to their difficult circumstances. Nearly two-thirds of the students attend classes part-time, and more than 80% work at least part-time. Many attended substandard high schools and lack academic skills needed to succeed in college.

Community colleges are slowly shedding their second-class reputation, in large part because of the key role they play in training and retraining people for cutting-edge jobs. They produce computer-literate car mechanics and technicians who can program the latest factory-floor robots. They have programs in biotechnology and nanotechnology.

Businesses find community colleges meet their needs with courses to train potential employees or retrain existing ones.

At local hospitals’ requests, for example, Sinclair started a surgical technology program in 1981. The school canceled the program when the jobs dried up in 1994 and restarted it in 1997 when hospitals again had work for qualified technicians.

Biotechnology, one of Sinclair’s newest programs, attracted Melanee Housh, 22, who took assorted classes related to healthcare for more than two years before finding her niche. “I absolutely love it,” said Housh. “Working with all the equipment is really cool.”

On a recent day, Housh and her classmates, wearing white lab coats and safety glasses, focused intently on their assignment: purifying protein by extracting a solution from ground chicken breast, a technique their professor learned only after she had a doctorate.

Tuition for full-time students at Sinclair is $1,800 per year for students who live in Dayton’s Montgomery County and $2,943 for those who don’t. By contrast, tuition and fees for in-state students at Ohio State total $7,770.

Many of the older students attending community colleges make short-term sacrifices in living standards for what they hope will be long-term gains.

Two years ago, Yuthakorn Wermter’s wife, tired of hearing him complain about his job as a computer salesman, handed him a copy of Sinclair’s course catalog. She had graduated with an associate’s degree in respiratory therapy and was earning almost twice as much as he was.

Two years later, Wermter, 32, has a two-year degree in aviation technology and a private pilot’s license. Now he is taking classes toward a bachelor’s degree and taking flight training.

He and his wife sold a spacious house and moved into a smaller one with a mortgage half the size. They have $13,000 in loans to pay for classes and flying time, and the rest of his education and training will compound that debt. Wermter still works part time selling computers and has an internship with a cargo flight operations company, and so he has little time for his two small children.

But he says it is all worth it.

“I’ve had jobs before, but I never considered them a career,” Wermter said. “Hopefully here I’ll be getting a career.”

Dyer, the laid-off machinist studying to be a radiologist, believes he was right to trade in his jeans and T-shirts for scrubs. He is confident that he will be in great demand as a radiologist and is excited about a future in which he will be helping people. “It’s much more rewarding than working in a factory,” he said.