That’s a fine idea. But the Cherry Commission’s report gave essentially short shift to community colleges, and virtually ignored the need for vocational training and retraining.
That‘s a big part of the mission community colleges have in this nation and perhaps especially in Michigan, where there are nearly a quarter of a million community college students.
Yesterday, President Obama took a major step to give community colleges new respect, and shift the focus of higher education thinking in this country. He did that at Macomb County Community College, which has been a leader in this field for many years, and has gotten too little notice. If you thought this was some place that offered welding courses and taught remedial reading, you couldn’t be more wrong. This spring, Macomb presented an intellectual and cultural series examining the 1960s in America. It attracted the likes of Ted Sorensen and Andrew Young, and compared favorably to something Harvard might have done.
And it has tried hard to be on the cutting edge of trying to train workers for jobs that actually do exist and which will increase, which is, I believe, why President Obama chose it to propose what he is calling his American Graduation Initiative.
He said he doesn’t intend to just blindly throw money at the nation’s community colleges, though he is pledging $12 billion of it. The President made it clear that he is going to require, “Innovative, results-oriented strategies in exchange for federal funding.”
What he wants, plainly, is results. “We‘ll create a new research center to measure what works and what doesn‘t,” he said.
“Schools themselves don‘t have the facts to make informed choices about which programs achieve results.
“If a worker is going to spend two years training to enter a new profession,” they better know that it is actually going to lead to a job, Mr. Obama said. And businesses need to know that the graduate’s degree or certificate really means something.
That’s not the only role community colleges have. More and more, students bound for a four-year degree start at places like Macomb to get their skills up to speed, and to save money.
The President’s speech was also remarkable in that it was both visionary, and no-nonsense. He noted that we’ve lost a lot of jobs in Michigan, and told us we are going to lose more.
That means we and our institutions have to step up. President Obama did say one thing that wasn’t quite right, “My administration has a job to do, and that job is to get the economy back on its feet.
“That’s my job,“ he said.
Well, not exactly. The President’s job may be to give us the tools and maybe even a jump start. But we, by working hard and working smart, have to create the new economy ourselves.
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