​Investments in job training programs are essential to the nation’s prosperity, and community colleges must play a significant role in preparing workers for emerging jobs.

That was the key message from a forum in Washington, D.C., this week presented by the Hamilton Project, a program of the Brookings Institution aimed at advancing economic growth and ensuring there are opportunities for broad participation in that growth.

Alan Krueger, chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, called the “widespread community college network” a huge advantage in the nation’s ability to compete globally.

Investing in retraining has a rate of return that is similar to investing in education generally, Krueger said, adding there are “significant payoffs for society, as well as individuals,” when training is provided for displaced workers in areas of high demand.

“The structural problems in the jobs market preceded the economic crisis, partly because of the skills deficit,” he said, and this is why retraining is so important. Combining instruction in trades education with more abstract courses, such as math and writing, is more effective than offering just skills training by itself, he said.

Closer ties with industry

Despite high unemployment rates, the U.S. has a 10-million job shortfall because employers are having trouble finding qualified workers, noted Barry Holzer, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. That could be resolved if more students completed college.

There are “enormous non-completion rates, particularly among community colleges and non-flagship colleges" because “institutions are too disconnected from the labor market,” Holzer said.

Holzer proposed a new federal competitive grant program to distribute $2 billion a year for five years to support state job training initiatives. The funds would support such efforts as paid work experiences leading to good jobs, career guidance programs at community colleges, and incentives to help community colleges be more sensitive to the labor market and to promote education/workforce integration.

Job training programs should focus more on better-paying jobs rather than “the race to the bottom,” said Rhandi Berth, vice president of the Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership, which works with technical colleges and trade schools to help them close the skills gap and meet employers’ needs.

Crucial partners

Community colleges can do more than train people for existing jobs; they can be “game changers” by helping business and industry create new jobs, said Steven VanAusdle, president of Walla Walla Community College (WWCC) in Washington.

That’s what WWCC did when it began looking for “value-added opportunities” at a time when the rural community the college serves was seeing its population decline and losing jobs. The college decided to focus on the area’s wine industry after a local winery was lauded for producing the best Merlot in the world, VanAusdle said.

A few courses on the topic proved wildly popular, so the college went on to create a commercial winery run by students. WWCC now serves as an intermediary for the local wine industry, said VanAusdle, who calls wine “prosperity in a bottle.”

When WWCC started this effort, there were 17 wineries in the area. There are now 152, which led to the creation of hundreds of jobs, he said, and a once-depressed economy is now thriving.

Holzer said government should provide incentives “to help more community colleges operate like WWCC and be more responsive to the demand side of the labor market."

Older displaced workers

Louis Jacobson, president of New Horizons Economic Research, called for federal policies focusing on skills retraining for high-tenured displaced workers. He said about 1 million to 3 million of these workers lose their jobs every year, resulting in huge earnings losses for them, even after they find new jobs.

Under his proposal, the federal government would provide up to $5,500 every six months, depending on the size of the earnings loss, to displaced workers who attend a community college and take advantage of one-stop career centers.

Jacobson noted that colleges do not have incentives to help students find jobs and said better data would be helpful. He also noted that they don’t have incentives to offer the kind of courses that would lead to high-paying jobs. In fact there is a disincentive because most states provide the same amount of compensation for a poetry course as they would for course in nursing or the trades that requires expensive equipment, he said.

Leveraging collaborations

Daniel Marschall, legislative and policy specialist for workforce issues at the AFL-CIO,  called for a “good job creation strategy” that includes collaboration among employers, unions, community colleges and workforce intermediaries. Those kinds of partnerships “could leverage a tremendous amount of activity at the local level” with limited federal funding, he said.

Siemens President and CEO Eric Spiegel described a partnership his company has with Central Piedmont Community College in North Carolina. The company helped develop a curriculum and apprenticeship program to train workers for a new gas turbine manufacturing plant. Students are paid while they work in the plant part-time and earn credits toward an associate degree in mechatronics. When they complete their training, they will be prepared for jobs that pay about $70,000.

The low-tech, low-skill factory jobs lost during the recession won't come back, Spiegel emphasized.

“We’ve got to start investing in higher-tech manufacturing jobs,” he said.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) called for investments in the workforce that meet the needs of a rapidly changing economy that begins with preschool and integrates classroom and workplace learning.

“We need to continually identify strategies that work best and close down programs that don’t work,” she said.

All this will take a “significant investment,” said Murray, who co-chaired the bipartisan “super committee” charged with developing a plan to reduce the federal deficit. She expressed disappointment that the negotiations broke down over the issue of taxes, noting that Democrats wanted to close tax loopholes.

While the nation does need to cut spending and reduce the deficit, she said, “we can’t do it on the backs of workers."