While these conclusions appear to be robust, their significance and implications for policy are harder to draw precisely because the picture we paint is one of individual, ad hoc, connections. (If we had found strong, consistent linkages there would be less need to be concerned with possible policy changes.) The results are hard to interpret because we do not have any absolute basis for judging what is "connected" and what is not. Hence, while it appears to us that academic and part-time faculty have very few connections, we have no way of knowing whether this is problematic or not.
Before proceeding with policy changes to improve linkages which have uncertain outcomes (and costs associated with them), it is important to establish--both conceptually and empirically--why linkages are important. Until there is a firmer basis for making changes to improve connectivity we cannot be sure what it is about these connections that are most important. For example, we do not know whether the direct career assistance many faculty provide for their students is effective in terms of promoting positive outcomes, or whether use of business examples and case studies in the classroom improves student skills when they reach the labor market themselves.
While there is some variation in the extent of faculty connectivity across institutions, and hence by type of labor market served, geographic location, governance structure, and so on, our picture of linkages is primarily one of individual efforts by particular instructors. Although institutions may have many links to the labor market, this may not affect what happens in the classroom. Academic faculty rarely undertake connecting activities, and there are few formal incentives for vocational faculty to link. Rather, the latter are motivated by the need for enrollments and successful student placement for their programs. Advisory committees are the major linking vehicle at the vocational program level, providing updates on workplace skills and opportunities, and providing feedback on graduates and curricula input. However, in our site visits, the quality of these committees appeared uneven.
It follows from this picture that a first step in improving faculty linkages is for institutional leaders to decide if these connections are important to their institution and if so why they are important. Then they need to establish clear goals and develop plans to achieve these goals. That involves clarifying priorities and inevitably making sacrifices in other areas. Their would seem to be a range of possibilities for colleges to help provide incentives for faculty to build links, to remove some of the barriers to establishing connections, to reward and recognize success, and to develop mechanisms to carry institutional links down into departments and classrooms. For example, one difficulty with developing labor market linkages is that full-time faculty have high workloads. With many demands on their time, building connections is simply one of many responsibilities. We found that, in line with much previous research, that faculty tend to operate in isolation from the rest of their institution, and without much sense of professional identity. Overcoming these factors is a major challenge for effecting any kind of change in community colleges, not just in improving links to labor markets or the broader community.
However, a hopeful finding from our survey and case study data, from the standpoint of improving connections between employers and colleges, is that most faculty believe such links are important and that employers in their local labor market do too. There would appear to be ample scope for increasing institutional support for individual faculty in building linkages. We found that colleges do remarkably little: they do not reward connecting behavior in promotion or tenure decisions; they have very limited resources to encourage faculty to build linkages to the labor market through professional development funds or workplace placement/exchange programs; and the funds they do have do not appear to be used very innovatively. If improving linkages between community colleges and their local labor markets and communities is deemed important by policymakers, institutions need to provide more incentives that might promote such activities. Formally rewarding faculty who develop strong employer links, and greatly expanding the number and range of opportunities for faculty to utilize professional development for linking purposes, would likely have an impact. These changes, if accompanied by efforts to free up faculty time (e.g., through release time or reduced teaching loads), may boost faculty-labor market links. In the absence of new funds, these changes in resource allocation can only occur by reducing funds expended in other areas. For this to happen, administrators and faculty must be convinced of the centrality of such links in providing courses with high-level and relevant skills training for students, and of their importance for institutional mission in the new economy.