By Jean Floten
It’s quite a different story this time around. In the past I have told you how community college job-skills training programs have helped people build entirely new careers after a layoff.
I have written of Boeing engineers who retooled their skills at Bellevue College then found new employment in health care at even higher salaries than before, and the single father who, by learning information technology skills with us, was able to move his family off welfare and build a future of promise.
Sadly, I have far fewer such stories to relate today, although the need for skills training is more urgent than it has been for decades.
Certainly, community colleges continue to train students in the skills that employers need most, but with one tragic difference: We’re leaving people of limited means behind, even as their numbers swell with continuing layoffs.
It was to help people in precisely this bind that the Washington state legislature enacted the Workforce Employment and Training Act in 1993. Since then it has helped more than 100,000 unemployed and dislocated workers, providing tuition, advising and other assistance.
But now? Funding for the program is drying up, and the only stories I can tell you now are heartrending variations on the themes of frustration, tears and opportunities lost.
The state has been unable to expand worker retraining due to severe shortfalls in state tax revenue, while the ranks of people seeking it has approximately tripled due to the recession. By the end of fall quarter, most worker retraining opportunities in the state had been used up for this school year. Even worse, our continuing state budget crisis threatens to force further cuts in worker retraining programs next year, paired with deep cuts in traditional financial aid programs and steep hikes in tuition.
This prospect should distress us all because our futures are entwined with those of our idled neighbors. We need everyone who is unemployed to have access to retraining, because the strength of our economic recovery and future prosperity depend on it.
Washington’s economy suffers from a fundamental lack of appropriately skilled workers – a chronic problem extending back at least 10 years. Employers say the skills they most urgently need are those taught at the two-year college level.
Clearly, we need to provide greater access, not less, to community college worker retraining programs, so our state’s businesses can more effectively and swiftly bring us back to prosperity. Every time we turn a student away from training, we detract from our economic future, and we tighten the state’s financial straitjacket, instead of loosening it.
Studies show that community and technical college programs generate a 22 percent financial return for state and local governments, not just in the form of increased tax revenues, but through lower expenditures on welfare, health, social programs and corrections. Should we balance the state budget by reducing support for one of the few programs that actually returns a profit on taxpayers’ investment? Should we bar thousands from their best opportunity to rebuild their lives, especially when doing so prevents us from developing the workforce we need to drive our economic recovery?
The answer, clearly, is ‘No.’ When times are tight, we cannot afford to shut the door of opportunity and economic revival.
Jean Floten is president of Bellevue College
