Community colleges are concerned about the burdensome reporting requirements in the gainful employment rules, which are aimed at preventing institutions, particularly for-profit colleges, from saddling students with large debt while failing to prepare them for an occupation.

 

According to Ajita Talwalker, special assistant to U.S. Department of Education Under Secretary Martha Kanter, community colleges shouldn’t be overly worried because their graduates tend to do very well in the job market without incurring too much debt. Talwalker was among several government officials who addressed the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) board of directors at its annual retreat last week in Washington, D.C.

 

Frank Chong, deputy assistant secretary for community colleges at the Department of Education, added that having data on gainful employment will help colleges identify which programs to support and will help to justify paring programs that are outdated.

 

Chong noted that a department committee is working on measures of student success and will soon issue new recommendations for IPEDS (the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System). For the first time, part-time students will be included in the measures of student enrollment and completion.

 

 

On another regulatory issue, several AACC board members said the new "state authorization" rules, which they said will make it more difficult for them to manage distance-learning programs.

 

Pamela Quinn, provost of the LeCroy Center at the Dallas County Community College District in Texas, told department officials that each state has a different set of requirements, and colleges don’t know which states their students are from until they register. Jonathan Gueverra, CEO of the Community College of the District of Columbia, warned that the new rules could have a disproportionate impact on military students.

 

“Students come to us. We don’t go to them,” added Betty Young, president of Coleman College for Health Sciences at Houston Community College (Texas). The regulations seem to be designed for the pre-Internet age, she added.

 

Alex Johnson, president of the Community College of Allegheny County (Pennsylvania), urged the department to focus on the value, not the cost, of the programs. He said that the rules might encourage community colleges to drop their most expensive programs.

 

 

Gerri Fiala, deputy assistant secretary for the Employment and Training Administration (ETA) at the U.S. Department of Labor​, told board members that legislation authorizing the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) program is expected to be introduced in September. ETA has received about 250 to 270 applications requesting nearly $3 billion for the $500 million available in current TAACCCT funding. Ninety percent of the applications are from community colleges, and nearly two-thirds address online and technology-enabled education, which was one of the priorities in the grant solicitation.

 

When Fiala asked for feedback on the application process, AACC Board Chair Myrtle Dorsey, chancellor of St. Louis Community College (Missouri), said some colleges were reluctant to submit individual applications because they were pressured by their state to apply as part of a consortium. Other board members raised concerns about the difficulty of forming regional or multistate consortia.

 

Ray Lazaro, of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ education office, discussed the regulations issued in early 2011 on the post-9/11 GI bill, which was enacted in 2008. He noted the regulations offer the most generous benefits since the original GI bill was passed in 1944. For the first time, there is no cap on the tuition and fees for public colleges that the program will pay for, he said. Veterans with at least three years of active duty receive 100 percent of the cost of tuition, books, and fees, plus a housing allowance based on zip code.

 

Also for the first time, veterans in online education programs will receive a housing allowance, which will be 50 percent of the national average. In addition, veterans can now be reimbursed for an unlimited number of licensing and certification programs, at the rate of $2,000 per program.

 

 

Celeste Carter, program director of the National Science Foundation’s Division of Undergraduate Education, briefed the board about the agency's $64 million Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program, which supports workforce-related education in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. The program is very competitive, with just 34 percent of grant proposals funded, Carter said. But the success rate for small ATE grants ($200,000 over three years) for colleges that haven’t been funded in at least 10 years, is 70 to 80 percent.

 

Carter encouraged community colleges to take advantage of other NSF grant programs, including the STEM Talent Expansion Program (STEP), Transforming Undergraduate Education in STEM, and Noyce Teacher Scholarship program.

 

 

Travis Reindl, program director in the Education Division at the National Governors Association, gave an overview of the state perspective on community colleges. He noted that governors’ interest in college completion is driven by the pressure to create more jobs.

 

Last year, 29 new governors were elected, and there will be “significant churn” in state legislatures this year, he said. That means college leaders will have to educate state leaders on the value of higher education and its relationship to job creation and economic development.

 

In the current budget-cutting climate, “prioritization is going to be critical,” Reindl said. And that’s going to require some discussion along the lines of: “If we are looking at a need for more engineers, how many psychologists are we going to have to give up?” 

 

While the unemployment rate will probably hover around 9 percent for the foreseeable future, the nation will still have 3 million avaliable jobs, he said. That’s because there’s a mismatch between skill levels and the jobs being created. And that means “we need to break down the walls” between what we know about education and workforce needs, Reindle said.