Community college administrators have been content with the knowledge that their classrooms fill when the economy tanks. Sadly, nothing is as simple as it looks. The pandemic-induced recession we had recently didn’t’ exactly put butts in seats. A growing worry is that any recession we may experience in 2023 won’t be enough to drive people back into the classroom.
So, what’s going on?
Typically, job losses, investment losses, housing valuations, and joblessness accompany a recession. While the stock and housing markets may be generating a lot of uncertainty, the labor market right now is not giving people reasons to go back into the classrooms. In fact, as the supply of labor dwindles, wages rise (along with inflation). There is no economic reason for workers to leave their positions to go back to school, unless doing so puts them in a better economic position following graduation.
In addition, divisions in the labor market are making it clear that low income earners and households are bearing the economic brunt of the pandemic. In a recent interview on Fox News, “Dirty Jobs” host Mike Rowe concluded that 7 million prime-age men are no longer working. Period. No matter what.
Rowe cautioned that it was not a case of men not having a job and having difficulty finding one. Instead, Rowe suggests that these men will never return to the workforce. For some, the writing is on the wall. Traditionally male-dominated industries are suffering. Manufacturing, for example, has lost more than one-third of its workforce since 1979. While some manufacturing jobs may be returning, they’re not the kinds of manufacturing jobs that exited the US economy in the 1980’s.
Community college administrators had a decade to get ready
More women are in the labor force today than were on the payrolls in the 1970s. Some people see working women not as expanding the economy, but rather shifting jobs away from men. And the gap in education levels among men and women gives women an advantage over their male counterparts.
Women with college degrees participate in the workforce at exactly the same rate they did prior to the pandemic. The same can’t be said for women without college degrees, however. The earning power of a college-educated woman enables her to locate increasingly scarce and expensive childcare, or better yet, work from home. Employers, who may have previously been unwilling to accommodate the needs of working parents, have softened their stances on WFH and hybrid work arrangements.
Workers without college degrees – male and female – must perform their work on-site. These positions also typically pay less, which means that these workers must depend on childcare. The cost of childcare could consume more of a low-income worker’s salary than housing or transportation does. That makes the calculation a little simpler. Without childcare, low-income women cannot work in the position’s they’ve previously filled, and they’re unlikely to score a work-from-home or hybrid work situation.
Community colleges have a role in creating economic opportunities for workers who have missed out on the economic benefits of a college education. But that assumes community colleges spent the last (very lean) decade wisely – developing new programs for high-wage occupations.
Unfortunately, many – like WCC – seemed to have diverted the financial resources meant for new program development into administrative hiring and other non-developmental expenses. That’s left the cupboard very bare for those low-income workers who – under better circumstances – might have seen community college as a way out of poverty.
The impact of the lost decade
The failure of community college administrators to invest in new technical and occupational programs has closed the door for lower-earning workers. What could have been a major advantage for the regional economy instead paid for executive compensation and an expensive, poor quality health club facility not intended for student use but built with the dollars that should have gone toward lifting them out of poverty.
And all of this has taken place under the watchful eye of a completely disconnected Board of Trustees that appears more invested in taking advantage of the complimentary meal plan than doing the work they were elected to do.
Photo Credit: Cheryl Harvey , via Flickr
