In 1993, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall1 addressed SDCCD faculty and staff. His objective was to suggest ways to improve SDCCD's programs and services to the community. Secretary Marshall adopted a "reinventing educators" approach and noted that "Yesterday's education practice is not good enough in today's competitive world. Massive change in educational delivery is not a matter of just improving. It is a matter of self-preservation."
Marshall talked about the challenges to the United States, but his comments could be applied to industrialized nations around the world. He warned, "America's two choices are clear and simple to understand. We can continue to pursue current practice and become a low-skilled, low wage economy, or we can retool our educational institutions to educate and train to world class standards and become a high-skill, high wage society."
The U.S.-EU conference in San Diego also addressed this issue. The discussion of the training needs of SMEs was an especially timely topic.2 In the United States, more than half of the manufacturing is performed by companies with fewer than fifty employees. Among all U.S. companies, 90 percent of the firms have fewer than twenty employees. Companies with fewer than 500 workers employ 57 percent of the nation's labor force.
San Diego also mirrors the nation in a technology gap among small- and medium-sized manufacturers that National Association of Manufacturers Chairman Robert Cizak described as "wider and deeper than the Grand Canyon. The technology they need is on the shelf. The biggest obstacle to their adopting it, other than a lack of capital, is the inability of their workers to understand and use it."
In the community colleges, it is our role to embrace technology--to show small business how it benefits them. We must also demonstrate our ability to train the workers and potential employees who have the ability to understand and use the technology. The SDCCD is bridging the technology gap through its Center for Applied Competitive Technologies (CACT) located at San Diego City College.
The San Diego CACT is one of eight regional centers in California to assist area manufacturers through education, training, and technology transfer services. It is funded by local, state, and federal governments. At the regional level, the CACT is part of a well-coordinated local network, which includes the City of San Diego High-Tech Resource Center and the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce Small Business Development Center. It is designed to help companies modernize their operations and adopt leading-edge technologies. Assistance by the CACT includes training in computer-aided design and manufacturing, business systems and management procedures, and total quality management (TQM).
Manufacturing companies have turned to the San Diego CACT for help with a variety of problems. A leading manufacturer of high-performance closed circuit television cameras and security systems that was facing declining profits, dwindling sales opportunities in the defense industry, and increasing foreign competition turned to the San Diego CACT for TQM training. The company reduced its process time by three days, and reduced manufacturing costs by eight percent. A new appraisal system rewards employees for contributing to this kind of improvement.
Along with turning existing companies around, the CACT assists fledgling start-ups through the San Diego Technology Incubator. The incubator provides manufacturing and office space and technical and business development assistance for up to twenty emerging companies that are housed at San Diego City College. The City of San Diego's High-Tech Resource Center refers individuals to the incubator and helps qualifying companies obtain seed funds for working capital and machinery.
Diatek Incorporated, a San Diego manufacturer of medical equipment, contacted the SDCCD Workplace Learning Resource Center when it needed assistance in improving the communications skills of its limited English-speaking production employees. Less than a year later, 71 Diatek employees had each completed 72 classroom hours and 36 hours of structured on-site training in workplace ESL (English as a Second Language) communications.
Prior to providing the on-site classes for Diatek, Workplace Learning Resource Center staff conducted literacy audits, needs assessments, and participant surveys to determine the existing language skills of employees. They also identified what kind of training they would need to help them communicate more effectively on the job. Following the assessment process, curriculum developers worked closely with Diatek supervisors and line workers to ensure that instruction would meet the identified needs. Throughout the training process, the community college district staff solicited feedback from Diatek management to ensure that the company's objectives were being met. Diatek identified five lasting benefits from the training: (1) employees developed better problem-solving skills; (2) participants increased their self-esteem; (3) increased self-esteem made participants more comfortable communicating, with an increased level of communication as a result; (4) participants developed greater teamwork skills; and (5) the education process helped break down cultural barriers.
Rose Tomich-Litz, who was manager of manufacturing operations for Diatek and is now director of operations for a Diatek subsidiary, is adamant that more education-business alliances such as the one formed between her parent company and the SDCCD are essential for building bridges in our fragmented society. "Education can become more effective by learning some lessons from business," she said, "and we in the business world need to recognize the many resources educators can bring to us" (The Power of Partnership, 1993, p. 11).
For the college district, the big payoff in contract education is that, while we are customizing curriculum for employers, we are also learning more about what skills are needed in the work force. This knowledge allows the colleges to change the curriculum so that graduates will be better prepared for the workplace. It is this kind of mutual gain that is necessary for successful partnerships between education and business.
SDCCD has many outstanding programs, as do many other educational institutions in the area. However, all can improve their performance and become better.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that community colleges should pioneer the introduction of technology, some community college programs are not moving quickly enough to embrace and use technology in the classroom. While some of the sluggishness can be attributed to lack of funds to purchase new equipment, part of the problem is a fear or reluctance to change.
Some critics have suggested that we cannot afford technology. But truly, we cannot afford not to embrace and adapt new technologies. At the same time, some education analysts argue that more money may not always mean better schools. In our district's experience, more money used wisely can mean better schools and colleges, if they use the available funds more efficiently and effectively. For example, in California alone, there are more than 1,000 adult education and training program providers that operate in an uncoordinated manner.4 For the most part, they do not work together cooperatively to ensure that services are not duplicated.
This project is designed to establish classroom teachers as researchers to help them adjust their curriculum to the needs and learning styles of a diverse student body. It integrates social skills, basic skills, and employment skills into a total curriculum, with input from the students and the business community.
CWELL focuses on undereducated, out-of-school youth and adults. Classroom teachers in adult basic education, ESL, and adult secondary education classes are transformed into researchers who query their students, then adjust their teaching styles to meet the individual needs of students. As a partner in the CWELL project, San Diego State University has developed the first comprehensive professional preparation program in California for preparing educators to work with out-of-school youth and adults.5 CWELL received a grant in 1995 from the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund for research and development to better understand how ESL instruction can be integrated with instruction in vocational or parenting education.
School-to-work, if successfully implemented, will also address the 75 percent of high school graduates who do not go on to get a four-year college degree. Germany and France have demonstrated a long-term commitment to preparing the noncollege bound for the work force, and the United States can learn a great deal from them.
In San Diego, a handful of school-to-work occupational programs have been developed, and more are planned, which connect the high school programs to community colleges and entry-level jobs with industry. A major challenge is to convince more enterprises that significant involvement in the education programs is in their best interests and will prove to be profitable for them and our community.
For school-to-work to be successful, we must find ways to gain substantial involvement of business and industry in our training programs. Advisory council meetings once or twice a year is not enough. In fact, economic development and training expert Anne Heald has found that those institutions relying solely on advisory councils as the backbone of their relationships with business and industry do not develop effective school-to-work programs.6
For school-to-work to be successful, industry must take on the responsibility to provide work-site learning opportunities, contribute to the development of standards and curriculum, and assist students in high schools and community colleges in finding career pathways.
For school-to-work to be successful, educators cannot be complacent. Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard University, once said, "Left entirely to their own devices, academic communities are no less prone than other professional organizations to slip unconsciously into complacent habits, inward-looking standards of quality, and self-serving canons of behavior."
We must resist that complacency, the inward-looking standards of quality, and the self-serving behavior. Our curriculum ought to be consistent with our mission and be demand-driven.
If we do not work with business and industry in a substantive way, then our programs will never see the "New Visions" theme of the U.S.-EU conference.
In the United States, we can no longer accept the excuses that we have reached out to business but all they want to do is complain and not get involved. And we cannot accept the flip side of that, which is that business should not be involved in the development of curriculum and standards in the classroom. Partnerships, real partnerships, and not symbolic or mandated committees, need to be fostered.
Educational institutions are facing increasing demands for services while resources are decreasing. In this environment, community colleges are going to have to be inventive--and partnerships can help. In the San Diego Community College District we have developed a number of successful partnerships with public and private sector organizations.
At the U.S.-EU Conference, participants came together as partners to share experiences and insights that are of mutual benefit to our countries and our organizations. Yet our nations are also competitors in the global marketplace. The lesson learned from this competitive-partner relationship is that you should love your competitor. He or she is the only one who makes you as good as you can be. In the same respect, educators in partnership with industry should learn to love their partners--and sometime critics--from business because they are the ones who can help us be our best.
1 Ray Marshall, professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin, co-author of Thinking for a Living and a former Secretary of Labor, presented "Planning for the 21st Century" keynote address at a San Diego Community College District conference, March 12, 1993 at the Hyatt Regency, San Diego, California.
2 Robert Cizak, chairman and CEO of Cooper Industries, Inc., and Chairman, National Association of Manufacturers, reported that small businesses and small manufacturers account for 90 percent of the new jobs in the United States, at a Town Hall of California meeting, Los Angeles, California, June 30, 1993.
3 All statistics are from the U.S. Census Bureau and Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce Economic Research Bureau.
4 Information provided by the California Department of Education and California Community Colleges office in Sacramento.
5 In 1990, the California Workforce Literacy Task Force found no comprehensive professional preparation programs in the California State University or University of California systems, or elsewhere in the state, for preparing educators to work with undereducated, out-of-school youth and adults. In 1991, faculty in the Departments of Educational Technology and Administration, Rehabilitation, and Postsecondary Education (ARPE) in the College of Education at San Diego State University joined the team that later became the San Diego Consortium for Workforce Education and Lifelong Learning (CWELL). Dr. Bill Piland of ARPE coined the term "WELL," Workforce Education and Lifelong Learning, as the name of a new specialization in the Department of Educational Technology. The new graduate-level professional obtains a master's degree in education, with a concentration in educational technology, and a specialization in work force education and lifelong learning.
6 Anne Heald is the executive director of the Center for Learning and Competitiveness at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland.
