In an economy that depends on a highly educated workforce, job applicants with marketable skills are always at a premium. Even during a downturn employers still need to hire plumbers and pipe-fitters, medical assistants and practical nurses, chefs and food service workers. None of those occupations requires a four-year college degree, but they do pay a living wage and give workers a leg up on the career ladder. More importantly, they are just the kinds of jobs that are becoming more plentiful in the Baltimore area for those qualified to perform them. So why aren't more Baltimore City graduates taking advantage of the opportunity they represent?
That's the question researchers at the Abell Foundation set out to answer in a new report released last week. Surprisingly, what they found was that the main reason city young people don't enter those fields in greater numbers is that most don't know such opportunities exist or how to pursue them. The report suggests that local community colleges need to focus more on training students to work in Baltimore's emerging job sectors, such as health care, information technology, transportation logistics and bioscience. The skilled jobs in those fields pay much better than minimum-wage work in the service industry, and in many cases students can qualify to fill them in less than two years.
Only about half of Baltimore City high school graduates go on to continue their education at the post-secondary level, and three out of five of those who do start at a community college. Unfortunately, that's often as far as they get. Though the majority of city students entering community college do so with the intent of eventually transferring to a four-year institution, only a tiny percentage actually manage to make it all the way through to the baccalaureate degree. Many fail to achieve any degree or certificate at all and instead, according to the Abell report, "leave with no credentials but with significant debt."
One reason that happens is that community colleges historically have been oriented primarily toward preparing students to meet the academic requirements of four-year colleges and universities rather than the kind of vocational training that would qualify them for a job. The idea that "everyone should go to college" is embedded in their institutional mission, but at the price of leaving few alternatives for students who for whatever reason leave school before earning a B.A. or associate's degree. The Abell study argues that many of those students could still be successful in the workplace if community colleges focused more on imparting the skills employers in Baltimore's emerging jobs sector are looking for.
The researchers' findings dovetail with President Obama's proposal in January to make community college free, in effect transforming the first two years of college into an extension of the traditional K-12 public school model with the goal of making college attendance as affordable and as widespread as high school is today. That would give community colleges a huge impetus to rethink their missions, because it would encourage many more students who never seriously considered higher education as an option to take a second look, especially if high school and college guidance departments could show them exactly what kinds of jobs were waiting to be filled in their area and how many of them there were.
The Abell study suggest that kind of active recruitment, based on hard data about local employment patterns, would lead many more city students to decide to earn credentials that allow them to find work and get ahead in life. As a practical matter, even if the president's proposal isn't adopted by Congress most students in Baltimore would still qualify for federal Pell grants and other scholarship aid granted to low-income applicants. But the colleges themselves — in this case Baltimore City Community College and the Community College of Baltimore County — must take the lead. They should be compiling the data on which fields of employment are currently hot, how many jobs are available, what certificate programs they are offering and how many students who earned credentials found jobs as a result.
The Baltimore area's community colleges are a tremendous educational and economic resource, and we want to see them to live up to their full potential. Strengthening their vocational mission is part of that. They should be telling every student they encounter that a four-year college education is a great ticket to a well paying job and career, but it's not the only one.