HIGHER EDUCATION OR HIGH COST EDUCATION

A STCC engineering student and his father spoke to me recently about transfer to a four-year engineering program.  (I should explain that STCC teaches the first two years of a standard engineering curriculum preparing students such as this one to complete at a baccalaureate school.)  We talked about transfer choices and then the conversation turned to the cost of college.  The father explained he had four children that he wanted to send to college.  The only way that he thought he could afford to do so was by first sending them to a local community college and then have each transfer as juniors to a public or private four-year school.

This middle class family’s dilemma was highlighted by a National Public Radio story on February 21 that reported the cost to an undergraduate of attending Duke University has passed $60,000. 

Goodson Chapel, Duke University Divinity School.  Source:Wikipedia

Moreover, according to NPR, Jim Roberts, Duke’s executive vice provost, claims that the yearly cost of educating a student at Duke is $90,000.  While it is difficult to ascertain the validity of Roberts’ assertion, both of these numbers should shock the typical parent in the US where the median family income is $51,000.  

In fact, the Gallup poll on money worries for middle age Americans 30 to 49 lists paying for one's children’s college just behind not having enough money for retirement and not being able to pay for medical costs in the event of a serious illness or accident. (59% worry about cost of college, 68% retirement and 63% medical costs)

Public colleges and universities were designed to provide a less expensive alternative than the private higher education institutions.  But even here, the great recession of 2008 has forced public institutions to raise prices dramatically to make up for cuts in state funding.  For example, the flagship public university in my state, the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts, charged $23,258 in 2013-14 consisting of $13,258 in tuition and $10,439 in room and board. While these numbers are small compared with Duke’s, tuition alone is more than a quarter of median US family income.

Community colleges with relatively low tuition costs are perhaps the only alternative to many families.  At STCC cost of attendance is $5100 per year, about 40% of tuition at UMass/Amherst, and a small fraction of a private school like Duke.  As US middle class income stagnates and college costs inexorably rise, enrolling at a community college and proving oneself academically has become a much more attractive path to a college degree.

FULL TIME LEADS TO MORE GRADUATES

New evidence shows that programs that enable community college students to attend full-time dramatically increases graduation rates.  As reported recently In the Atlantic Monthly and New York Times, the Accelerated Study in Associate Program (ASAP) at NYC community colleges has doubled or tripled rates.

The key is to keep students in college full-time.  While this is the model for baccalaureate education, at community colleges, most students attend part-time and many drop out for periods of time.  This delays their completion of a degree and, in many cases, results in never finishing. 

Although students at community colleges have a number of barriers, primarily financial, that prevent full-time attendance, as the ASAP initiative shows, those impediments can be overcome.  Students who sign up for the program are given an advisor who meets with them regularly and tracks their progress.  Students must attend full-time in the fall and spring semesters.  Cost of full-time college is not a barrier: If the student cannot afford the full-time tuition, the college waives the deficit. Moreover, students are encouraged to take classes in the summer, increasing their academic progress.  According to Donna Linderman, University Associate Dean for Student Success Initiatives, City University of New York, 79% of ASP students are enrolled in the summer with costs paid by the college.

How is this different from how community college students are now treated?  At present, federal financial aid covers the fall and spring semesters.  The archetype for baccalaureate education is designed to serve the children of well-off families: go to school for 9 months, take the summer off to travel, or work possibly in the family business or in a job obtained through family or college contacts. 

But the lives of the great majority of community college students who come from low social-economic status families are markedly different.  These students work yearlong either part or full-time because their parent or parents cannot afford to support them.  Going to college year round is more consistent with their circumstances and allows them to complete more credits in a shorter period of time.  This extra time is especially important because most community college students have to take additional academic work, remedial or so-called developmental courses – to make up for academic deficiencies.  ASAP solves that problem by funding summer attendance even if governmental financial aid is not available.

Not unexpectedly, ASAP comes with a cost, $3900 per student per year according to both the Atlantic and New York Times articles. In the community college world this is a big number considering this is on top of the $9800 cost of attending a community college in New York City, half coming from student tuition and half from state and city support.   

However, that investment pays huge dividends in the ability of students to complete their degrees.

THREE ISSUES FOR MCDAM

Robo crane. Source Wikipedia Commons

Unlike Germany, the international leader in high value manufacturing, the United States does not have a national manufacturing policy.  Nor does the Commonwealth of Massachusetts have a well-defined manufacturing policy and direction.  However, in western Massachusetts, a strategy to support precision manufacturing has been developed through a partnership of the Hampden County Regional Employment Board (REB), Springfield Technical Community College and Holyoke Community College, vocational and comprehensive high schools, the University of Massachusetts/Amherst and, most importantly, area precision manufacturers organized via the Western Massachusetts Machining and Tooling Association.  This partnership has garnered state support to:

1) Bring together key constituents to assess the needs of area manufacturers and plan joint actions.

2) Quantify the need and skill level for new employees;

3) Employ, through a pilot project, a shared engineer to assist small manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) to develop new products;

4) Expand education and training of both incumbent and new employees.

Based on these experiences and drawing on research and the work of others,  new group the  Massachusetts Center for Advanced Design and Manufacturing (MCADM) has been established to advance manufacturing throughout the state by analyzing roadblocks, developing plans and implementing solutions.  MCADM’s goal will help the Commonwealth develop statewide policies to support the expansion of manufacturing, much as is being done nationally in Germany.   To assist manufacturing, MCADM is using an inside out model, that is, starting with the experiences in western Massachusetts and other regions of the state, a statewide approach will be developed.  If successful, this statewide initiative may stimulate other states to make similar efforts, leading eventually, one would hope, to a national manufacturing policy, leadership and advocacy.

Following the Preview of the MIT Production in the Innovative Economy (PIE) report, three challenges must be overcome to sustain and expand manufacturing in Massachusetts:

1) Training: expanding the number of trained employees including entry production workers, technicians and engineers.  While not in the MIT study, Alan Robinson, Professor at the Eisenberg School of Business, argues that training for manufacturing managers in lean and other modern techniques is also needed.  As a first step, MCADM should obtain data to determine the manufacturing employment and training needs in the Commonwealth.  

2) Technology transfer: Creating better linkages to diffuse new technology to new or existing companies.  In past decades, large manufacturing companies (OEMs) maintained their own research laboratories, developing new products that were then manufactured.  In the US, these companies have shed much of this capacity that now resides in university and specialized research laboratories.  The challenge is to facilitate the movement of this research into new products especially within small manufacturing enterprises (SMEs).  A local industrialist cites the related issue of preparing for the next wave of manufacturing change, the smart factory or factory 4.0 that will be highly automated and flexible, able to make efficiently make small batches of sophisticated products.

3) Financing: The MIT study identified this as the third critical issue: “Today, when innovation is more likely to emerge in small spinoffs or out of university or government labs, where do the scale-up resources come from? How available is the funding needed at each of the critical stages of scale-up: prototyping, pilot production, demonstration and test, early manufacturing, full-scale commercialization?” 

WHEN IT COMES TO INCOME INEQUALITY, WHITHER HIGHER ED?

The following is a statement that I made today, December 10, 2013, at the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education meeting held at Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill, Massachusetts:

“The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe,” stated President Obama in a speech onDecember 4.  Obama’s comments highlighted trends that the US, among developed countries, is at the forefront of income inequality and reduced upward mobility.

While we in public higher education have always prided ourselves in providing a pathway to the middle class for our students, the question is: Whether, in the present circumstances, are we fulfilling that mission?  Or is public higher education, nationally and in Massachusetts, contributing to the growing economic schism in this country?

Let me give you some disturbing facts:

American higher education is becoming increasingly racially segregated. According to a recent study of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, between 1995 and 2009, white higher education freshman enrollment grew by 15%, black enrollment by 73% and Hispanic enrollment by 107%. However, virtually all -82%- of the increased white enrollment was captured by the 468 selective four year colleges and very little of the new black and Hispanic enrollment went there: 9% and 13% respectively.  By the way, the undergraduate campuses of UMass and the nine state universities are among the 468 selective colleges. The great majority of those black and Hispanic students went, as you can guess, to open access, under-resourced community colleges.  Thus higher education system is becoming more racially segregated, with greater numbers of black and Hispanic students at the community colleges and greater numbers of white students at the selective four-year colleges and universities.  This trend is evident at my own college: white enrollment has been stagnant for years while black and especially Hispanic enrollment has skyrocketed.

Mirroring racial segregation there is increasing segregation by income between four-year and community colleges.  According to an April, 2013 study by the Century Fund, in 2006, just 16% of community college students were from the top income quartile while the figures for competitive to highly competitive four year college categories ranged from 37% to 70%. Moreover and not surprisingly, community college students are becoming increasingly poor.  In 1982, 24% were from the top quartile, and as I just mentioned, that figure had dropped by one-third to 16% in 2006.

The level of academic preparation of our students is a challenge for community colleges.  According to the October, 2013 BHE Final Report from the Task Force on Transforming Developmental Math Education being considered today by the Board, at Massachusetts community colleges on average 60% of entering students require developmental course work. This is an enormous burden for the community college segment, one for which we receive no additional appropriation.

Finally, I want to highlight the support or lack thereof that the community colleges receive from the Commonwealth. Commissioner Freeland was clear about this when he visited our campus recently remarking that the community colleges have to educate the most challenging students in higher education with the fewest resources. In FY 2013 the community colleges received $3481 per FTE, the state universities $5634 or 62% more per FTE than the community colleges.  The average received per student from the state and student charges is similarly skewed at $8,588 per FTE at the community colleges and $13,793 at the state universities.  And by the way, Massachusetts’ community college student charges are the fourth highest in the nation.

I am not implying that the state universities are over-funded.  I am saying, however, that the state’s community colleges are woefully, shamefully underfunded.

President Obama called rising inequality “the defining problem of our time.”  Therefore, I would argue that BHE - the public policy Board for higher education - make equity its top priority.  Public higher education and by extension all of higher education must be actively part of the solution, not part of the problem, of income inequality and reduced upward mobility.

WHAT DO THE GERMANS KNOW ABOUT MANUFACTURING THAT ELUDES THE US?

German companies in America helping to set up apprentice programs in the US were highlighted recently in the New York Times and the Washington Post.   

The Times article described how Tognum, a German company that builds large diesel engines established an apprentice program mimicking their German model while the Post focused on North Carolina where the German giant Siemens is training apprentices in its Charlotte factory that manufactures large natural gas fired turbines.

Large American manufacturers once had apprentice and job training programs that produced some of the world’s highest skilled industrial workers.  But as a preview of an MIT study on manufacturing finds:

 “Vertically-integrated enterprises used to organize and pay for educating and upgrading the skills of much of the manufacturing workforce. They had the resources to do this. And long job tenure meant companies could hope to recoup their investment over the course of the employees’ careers. Many of the employees who were trained in big companies or in vocational schools they supported ended up working for smaller manufacturers and suppliers. Today, American manufacturing firms are on average smaller, and have fewer resources. They do not plan to hold on to their employees for life. They cannot afford to, or, in any event, do not, train. How do we educate the workforce we need?”

This disinvestment in the training of American workers has left a skills gap that the German companies have recognized.  Of course, this problem also affects all of American high technology manufacturing.  While some vocational high schools and community colleges have tried to fill this void, they cannot address the scale and scope of this need.  We have yet to address the important question posed in the MIT study: “How do we educate the workforce we need?”

Furthermore,  I would add a companion question: How do we give more Americans the skills to take decent paying jobs in a revitalized American manufacturing sector?

Students at the STCC precision machining laboratory making a part on a CNC machine