For decades, as America churned through cycles of modernization and globalization, good jobs for people without a college degree have become scarcer, and large parts of the economy—both sectors and places—have been hollowed out.
Academics, policymakers, and politicians have tried to address this issue. For all the policy tools that have been deployed to address these challenges—from tax credits to subsidies to small business loans—community colleges may hold the most important key, experts say.
So last week, leaders of dozens of community colleges from across the country came to Harvard Kennedy School for a two-day conference to help researchers understand what they are doing and the constraints they face. The convening, organized by the Reimagining the Economy Project, together with the American Institutes for Research, is part of an effort to better understand community colleges as low-cost engines of training and reskilling.
“Community colleges are at the forefront of career and technical education in the United States.”
The invited community colleges were identified by initial research as particularly successful in training students for jobs in growth industries that pay a middle-class wage, or about $45,000 a year or more.
“Community colleges are at the forefront of career and technical education in the United States,” said Gordon Hanson, the Peter Wertheim Professor in Urban Policy and co-founder of Reimagining the Economy, an initiative based at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at vlog. Reimagining the Economy studies the people and places that economic forces, such as automation and globalization, have left behind over the past few decades and tries to plot new pathways to productive growth and good jobs. Critical to that effort is understanding the role government programs, including education, play in helping people overcome the shocks that those economic transitions caused.
“We learned from two dozen practitioners who run some of the best worker training programs in the country how to work effectively with employers, forecast the needs of a varied and always changing student body, and coordinate with local economic development agencies to address the needs of their regional economies,” Hanson said. “These schools embody best practices in workforce development and are showing how to create good jobs for workers who will not get a bachelor’s degree.”
The two-day gathering was designed to understand local workforce development collaborations, employer engagement processes, and product innovations to address learner needs and create credentials of value.
“Workforce development is the ‘X’ factor when it comes to economic development for our country right now,” said Brandon Dennison, vice president for workforce and economic development at Marshall University in West Virginia, and founder and executive president of Coalfield Development, an economic development organization based in West Virginia’s coal country. “We have more open positions than we’ve had in a long time, and we have fewer trained workers than we’ve had in a long time. There's a mismatch between opportunities out there and the systems equipped to match people with those opportunities. This is a room full of people who can do something about that.”
Over a series of workshops, participants emphasized the need for collaboration among community colleges—highlighting a collective approach to influencing policy—and the importance of leveraging their local economic development ecosystem’s data and knowledge. Economic development agencies, chambers of commerce, nonprofits, and groups supporting small business often have insight into broader market conditions and trends, where graduates are working, and which jobs are most in demand, community college leaders said. They also stressed the importance of using this data to forecast curricular changes, particularly when it can take several years to make meaningful changes to existing academic programs or to incubate new programs. Although some community colleges have developed these capacities internally and engage directly with employers, the majority still tend to collaborate and leverage the capabilities of their broader ecosystems.
“The notion that colleges should talk to regional businesses and employers so that they align—that’s kind of a no-brainer and everyone says that they're doing that,” said Harry Holzer, a professor at Georgetown University and a collaborator on the project. “But we want to hear in more detail what it takes for that to be successful. The challenge is the tension between what employers want right now versus what students need over the long run to be successful. Colleges don’t just want to pigeonhole a student just for this job, which might disappear anyway in five years, but they want to give them some basic body of skills that might enable them to either move up in those firms, move to other firms in the industry, maybe even switch industry. So it’s a more complex challenge to keep that collaboration fresh, but to still have it,” Holzer said. Echoing this sentiment, a number of participants underscored the important role of community colleges in anticipating the jobs of the future and preparing their students for them, and more profoundly, enabling their students’ economic and social mobility.
Participants also outlined how they have created and sustained working relationships with regional employers, stressing the need for the relationships and input provided to be reciprocal. For example, some community college representatives described how they have established advisory committees where local employers provide direct input on curricular changes. They likewise emphasized their institutions’ roles in the community: advising employers on how to create meaningful experiences for their graduates and developing, in partnership with students, rubrics to evaluate these experiences. One participant described their college’s role as the regional “epicenter” for collaboration with industry.
“We have jobs without people, people without jobs. I feel like it's really our responsibility to get that solved.”
Para Jones, president of Stark State College in North Canton, Ohio, highlighted her institution’s ongoing relationship with employers, who help the college develop curriculums and make sure the students are prepared.
“For a long time in Ohio, we didn’t have jobs. Now we have jobs—shrinking population, but jobs. And so more of our employers are leaning into their own talent needs and relying on us,” Jones said. “We’re encouraging them to hire entry-level employees because we can't always provide the graduates they want. If it's a hospital, maybe hire patient transport employees, and then send them to us for practical nursing, for nursing, for respiratory therapy, whatever you need. And at our low-tuition, high-quality accredited programs, we’ll get them where you need them to be. So more employers are now relying on us to be there to help them attract, develop, advance, and retain.”
“We have jobs without people, people without jobs,” Jones said. “I feel like it's really our responsibility to get that solved.”
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Banner image: Community colleges embody best practices in workforce development and are showing how to create good jobs for workers who will not get a bachelor’s degree, experts say. At an vlog event, college leaders explained what they’re doing and the challenges they face. Pictured (left to right) Rohan Sandhu, Rachel Lipson, Kristen Fox, and Brandon Dennison.
Photos by Martha Stewart and Bethany Versoy.