SECTION IV
COORDINATING AGENCIES
Experience and data agree: successful lifelong learning initiatives benefit from an intermediate organization that focuses on linking learning with practice. In this section, we feature both public and private agencies that coordinate lifelong learning programs. First, we share a conversation with the president of a community college system that coordinates and fosters the role of community colleges in economic development. Although we feature different types of organizations, this conversation raises the following issues that are common to coordinating agencies:
• The variety of services offered to serve different populations.
• The need to work closely with employers and education providers in order to remain relevant in a changing economy.
• The creativity in leveraging limited resources to sustain these programs.
Executive Perspective
North Carolina Community College System: Coordinating the Development of a Highly Skilled Workforce
Scott Ralls
Increasingly, community colleges serve as the bridge to more stable employment by offering industry certification programs and introductory college courses. They have the potential to play a powerful role in expanding access to high-skilled work in the knowledge economy. The North Carolina Community College system has been a cornerstone of state economic development policy since its creation over 60 years ago.
In the 1950s, with an economy dependent on farming, tobacco, and agriculture, state leaders actively planned to diversify the economy and realized they would have to provide training so that North Carolinians could work in these the new industries.
In 2014, North Carolina’s economy focuses on banking, skilled manufacturing, and research. The community college system has grown to an annual enrollment of 830,000 students.
Over the past 10 years, over 40% of North Carolina’s wage-earning workforce have been students at one of the 58 community colleges. The community colleges have tremendous impact on workforce development in North Carolina.
In November of 2014, we spoke with Scott Ralls, the president of the North Carolina Community College system, to discuss how the state has leveraged the community college system to strengthen the state economy through improving the education and skills of North Carolinians.
The North Carolina Community College system has been touted as a major player in the state’s economic development plan. Can you describe that role? Can you provide a brief overview of how the community college system fits into North Carolina’s education policies? Into workforce development policies?
North Carolina provides a guarantee for companies that are creating jobs in our state; training will be provided at state expense. (The threshold is 12 new jobs for a training class.) Training is customized to the company’s needs for those new jobs. We are state and locally funded to do job-skills training. In other states, community colleges that do non-degree activities have contract relationships with employers. Here, we provide training for a subsidized registration fee.
In addition to the customized training, we offer basic adults skills, college courses that lead to degrees, and programs to learn technical and professional skills. In the last 5 years we have put a real emphasis on industry certification. We have tried to structure both our degree and non-degree programs to lead to industry credentials.
The community college system has adapted as the economy of North Carolina has shifted. Can you talk about how the system remains adaptable?
In a state system the real role is to make sure there is fertile ground so that a program can be created quickly or ended quickly. There’s not a lot of bureaucracy, particularly in non-degree areas and customized training. It’s almost immediate. While there are approval processes, it’s all electronic and moves without formal committees. One of the things that works for us is that in North Carolina we have common curriculum standards but the determination of what is offered is a local decision. Each college has industry advisors in terms of program areas. They are very responsive to their local communities.
The state has rolled programs together to provide increased flexibility in customized programs for employers. In addition to the New and Expanding Industries Training program, we have added programs to fund training for companies making a significant investment in new technology or productivity. These programs helped us get through the recession. We could help companies with a series of plants across the United States, which was beneficial when making decisions about keeping facilities in North Carolina open or expanding after the recession.
How does the system work with organizational partners, particularly employers, to further the mission? How is that work coordinated?
It’s not a state community college system but a state-coordinated system. We deliberately put the colleges front-and-center. The relationships are local, and the stronger the connection between the company and the college, the more both of them jointly benefit. The colleges and the programs grow around these companies. The partnership is more than initial startup training, but other programs grow out of the partnership. A symbiotic relationship forms. The colleges experience program growth, and gain increased resources and technology. The companies are set up to be the sources of future decisions about program development.
While we don’t gain revenue from companies in terms of fees that they pay, we gain from connections and investment in our programs.
How do you measure success? What were the barriers to successfully meeting the system’s mission and goals?
When we look at the degree programs, we’ve adopted performance-based funding for student success program metrics, primarily program completion. For job training programs, we have a significant effort with the state Department of Commerce to develop employment-based metrics. The challenge is that students who are participating in our programs are already employed, so knowing if they have a job afterward doesn’t mean much. We are working toward connecting wage data to programs and determining data challenges, particularly with regard to self-employment, military employment, and data in other states. We need better occupations data. We can determine if students are employed and in what industry, but cannot determine their occupation. That has been a challenge.
What other factors did you need to address?
Community colleges have been particularly challenged. We had huge enrollment growth during the recession and simultaneous budget cuts. We had to step back and prioritize our funding structure. It used to be that everything was funded at the same amount. Could be a sociology class or a radiology class: but the costs are very different. [Radiology classes] have much smaller class sizes, more sophisticated technology. You have to spend more for instructors. You have to spend more for equipment. So we change our funding structure to prioritize science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and applied STEM programs, and programs that lead to third-party industry certification.
We did have a payoff from the redesign of our developmental education. We made it more accelerated and more modular. We flipped the classroom environment in many cases. We were able to get about $16 million in savings. We call it the developmental dividend, and we moved that into the highest cost technician and health care programs. We were about to increase their funding by about 15%. Over a 3-year period, we have seen an 8% shift in enrollment toward the STEM programs.
What are the next steps?
In the past, we have done training and education through the community college and had apprenticeship, employment services, and Workforce Investment Act programs within the state Department of Commerce. Recently, the secretary of commerce and I signed a memorandum of understanding. We are working toward a combined workforce effort to bring together the federally funded workforce centers with job training programs and will have a joint emphasis on apprenticeship and workforce learning. For example, in order to integrate our organizations, the community college vice president for workforce development and the assistant secretary of commerce for workforce development will now be one individual. North Carolina is working to integrate workforce development policy.