Jobs drive change at community colleges

As the jobs that keep California’s economy running change at a rapid clip, the workers who fill them are expected to keep pace. That puts enormous pressure on all schools in the state, but especially on the state’s community colleges — which help prepare more than 2.1 million students across 113 campuses to enter or move up in the workforce.

In 2013, California’s com-

munity colleges began restructuring — talking to each other more, scaling up programs in high-demand fields and paring back others, working more closely with companies that want to hire new employees and creating course schedules that let students balance school and jobs. In the next five years, the system is set to spend $1 billion trying to move those changes forward.

Now, a new report from the Institute for the Future, which the system asked to evaluate its work so far, shows the schools are making good progress. But the terrain they’re navigating is moving.

“I think the biggest challenge is basically to not stand still,” said Marina Gorbis, the institute’s executive director. “Just because you did it once doesn’t mean you should sit back and enjoy the results. This is a continuous process.”

Traditionally schools have viewed their mission as preparing a set of students for the workforce and then moving on to the next set. In the last few years, the colleges have begun creating programs where students studying, say, information technology, spend a year learning the basics, work in computer retail for a bit, and then go back to school to get the skills they need to move up to a job at a help desk.

Students get to earn money to support themselves, and the schools get to develop relationships with employers, a win-win.

“It’s going back to acknowledging that throughout everyone’s life, when you get your degree, that’s not the end of it,” said Courtney Cooper, president of the Student Senate for California Community Colleges and a student at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills.

And where technology used to advance far faster than the curricula that guided what students learned because of a slow, decentralized approval processes, the system now lets any college in the system use curriculum approved at other colleges.

But the way the state measures success is still rooted in traditional ideas that make adopting such innovative approaches inherently risky — and bureaucracy is slowing them down. Not every student who goes to a community college wants a degree — some are looking to take a few classes to learn the skills to earn a promotion. But funding has long been based on the number of students who go to school full time. That’s starting to change, and a committee is looking at other ways to award funding, but there are no clear answers yet.

The other issue, Gorbis said, is figuring out which ideas are worth scaling and how to help campuses that look very different implement them. And there’s the challenge of preparing students for jobs that use technology that may not even exist yet.

Cooper is also concerned about the system, which is looking closely at data on workforce demands to decide which programs to offer, getting too wrapped up in faceless numbers. “It’s a good idea to use metrics and algorithms to work with students instead of a onesize-fits-all approach,” she said, “as long as we don’t lose that human touch.”

Gorbis understands that concern but thinks the system is working to find the right balance. Overall, she’s encouraged by the changes she sees, but wishes more people recognized what community colleges have to offer. “They’re a jewel,” she said.