In my decades as a community college president, I have learned several languages by necessity: academic parlance about credit and noncredit; industry dialects around apprenticeships; and workforce vernacular around experiential learning and career laddering. Unfortunately, none of these languages captures the most critical stories about community colleges’ impact on our national workforce. Those tales are better shown.
When wildfire fighters were needed urgently in California, Pasadena City College stood up a Wildland Fire Academy, creating a direct pipeline to firefighting in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service. In Michigan, a distinctly different problem—water maintenance and filtration—inspired two colleges, Grand Rapids Community College and Bay College to create a “Water to Work” program to fill an anticipated wave of retirements among current water system employees.
A dearth of air traffic controllers in New Jersey led Atlantic Cape Community College to create a degree program to prepare students for positions as entry-level air traffic controllers. The need for laboratory workers in Maryland’s specialized bioscience industry is supported by Montgomery College, where biotechnology credentials create pathways to jobs in research, testing, and pharmaceuticals.
While rapid response strategies are commonplace, these colleges also serve long-standing industries like defense, transportation, and healthcare, which rely heavily on pipelines of skilled workers. Macomb Community College in Michigan prepares machinists and welders for the maritime industry. Wake Tech Community College in North Carolina prepares students to install and repair electric vehicle charging stations. Hudson Valley Community College in New York trains students to repair electric, hybrid, and autonomous vehicles. Northwest Mississippi Community College is helping to stem a severe nursing shortfall in a state where half of rural hospitals are at risk of closing due to COVID attrition and the pressures of healthcare costs. Hundreds of thousands of students are awarded health sciences credentials each year by community colleges.
The agility of community colleges means that they pivot quickly to serve local workforce needs. In Appalachia, where the decline of coal mining displaced thousands of workers, cybersecurity has become a workforce option through several community colleges. As the wine industry has expanded in Oregon, Umpqua Community College supports that workforce through a program in winemaking and viticulture.
These programs make up the engines of workforce production, supplying local businesses and larger industries with the robust talent pipeline they need to grow and innovate.
The U.S. Department of Education seems to be recognizing our stories, as shown by a snapshot of the recent Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) awards. California’s West Valley College, for example, was awarded a $3.85M grant to develop a new semiconductor certificate program to meet local workforce demands. The College of DuPage in Illinois received a $4M award to fund short-term programs that prepare students for jobs in aviation operations, including dispatch, airport management, and flight instruction. Central Georgia Technical College will use a $4M grant to strengthen technical education programs through artificial intelligence, while South Seattle College will use its award to train students in electric vehicle and hybrid technician skills.
These programs are a small fraction of the ones at more than 1K community colleges in the U.S., enrolling more than 10M students each year. If people don’t know about the value of community colleges, maybe we need to use the language of jobs, talent pipelines, career development, hiring, and business growth. We can also educate audiences about our students’ lives. Working while in college, raising a child, or studying in a non-native language are features not common in the traditional four-year landscape. But they are standard in community college worlds where the average age of a student is 27 and most students work while they study—66% part time and 34% full time. More than a third of our students nationally are first-generation college students, many of them leading an entire family into the middle class.
Transformation—personal, professional, and economic—is the story of community college students’ lives. If our nation hasn’t heard these tales loudly enough, let’s show them our students—many already working in critical fields like advanced manufacturing, healthcare, bioscience, cybersecurity, information technology, and more. Translating our students’ talent and ambition into the languages of corporate innovation and our nation’s fundamental workforce needs has the potential to truly amplify our voice.
DeRionne Pollard, Ph.D., is the president and CEO of the American Association of Community Colleges.