Sinclair Community College announced that it will offer a $2,000 stipend to individuals who sign up to earn a short-term certificate in one of nearly 20 high-demand jobs. The certificates take less than a year to complete, and the stipend will cover the cost of the training.
Sounds good, right?
The short-term certificates on offer are:
- Business Operations Systems Support
- Chemical Dependency Counselor Assistant
- Clinical Lab Assistant
- Clinical Phlebotomy Technician
- Customer Service Specialist
- Customer Service Technician
- Electrocardiography Technician
- Emergency Medical Technician
- Food Production Specialist
- Home Health Aide
- Hospitality Reception and Service Specialist
- Human Resources Management
- Medical Coding & Billing Specialist
- Medical Scribe
- Nurse Aide
- Patient Care Technician
- Reimbursement Analyst
- Supply Chain Technician
- Surgical Instrument Technician
A quick check of the average pay for open positions in several of these fields in Dayton (where Sinclair CC is located) shows that the average starting wage falls between about $14 and $20 per hour. According to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, the living wage for a single person with no children in Montgomery County, OH is $15.26 per hour, or an annual salary of $31,750. MIT’s data is about a year behind, so that figure is not adjusted for recent inflation. The living wage for a household with one adult and one child is $34.54 or $71,850.
The State of Ohio has provided $187,000 to fund the grant program. After accounting for program overhead, the grant program will fund somewhere between 70 and 80 qualifying students.
Here’s the problem. The community college and the state are focused on the high demand aspect of these jobs. It stands to reason there is a lot of demand for these workers, but perhaps simply increasing the pay rate would address the high number of open positions in these fields.
Free short-term certificates don’t substitute for low pay
I can’t look at this from the employer’s perspective. The State of Ohio will pay for training for people to take low-wage jobs. Sometimes, the salary employers will pay does not even meet living wage standards for a single-person household.
It also raises the question of the morality of offering paid training to people to induce them to commit themselves to a near-poverty lifestyle. And is that really the role of the state? The high number of vacant positions is the free market’s way of telling these employers that they’re not paying enough money for the work they expect.
When the training for these positions costs less than $2,000, the cost of the training is not what’s keeping people out of these jobs. Community colleges need to stop volunteering to be the district-wide facilitator for low-wage jobs. States need to stop funding training for low wage work no matter how high the demand for workers is. Employers created this problem for themselves by not paying a living wage. The solution is not giving away short-term certificates; it’s paying highly competitive salaries in a highly competitive job market. If they can’t or won’t do that, let them provide their own training at their own expense.
Photo Credit: antefixus21, via Flickr
