Every community college we interviewed maintains at least some advisory committees with local employers providing most of the members. In theory, such committees can provide information about skill requirements, hiring standards, trends in employment, and other similar information that would help colleges change the content of their programs and adjust enrollments as demand waxes and wanes. In practice, however, we found little evidence that these committees are very active. Several community colleges meet with them only annually; in other cases, employers who were members of such committees clarified how inactive they had been. Some advisory committees are institution-wide rather than occupation-specific and cannot, therefore, provide information about the skills requirements of hiring prospects in particular occupational areas. There is nothing to guarantee that advisory committees exist in all areas of the curriculum; for example, Rosefield City College, located in a city with considerable demand for office workers on the part of both financial institutions and government, had no advisory committee for its business division. The dean for occupational education reported,
We're going less and less to the individual program advisory and more and more to the overall advisory group, technical advisory groups, strategic planning groups because we're finding out that the problems are universal.
The trend to institution-wide committees may be an excellent way to assure that current shibboleths about skill requirements--for example, the need for basic skills--are communicated to educators, but a much weaker device for maintaining contact with prospective employers in specific occupational areas.
Furthermore, there is a startling disjuncture between the colleges' perceptions of advisory committees and those of employers. While administrators and department heads referred to such committees as establishing strong links to local employers, the vast majority of employers, in all four areas we examined, were unaware of these committees. Where they were aware of the local community college--particularly in Cotooli with its co-op program and in the Palmdale area where several community colleges have high profiles because of their transfer programs--the reasons have little to do with advisory committees.
There is also some frustration among educators about these advisory committees since they do not always provide the right information. One community college dean complained about the value of "shiny pea luncheons":
Often the folks that the businesses put up to be on the advisory committees are not the decisionmakers and they aren't even that well-informed about what the needs are in the industry. These people have time to go off to the college somewhere and eat shiny peas. So there is a lot of frustration all around about the working relationship and how to reconfigure it in a very different way.
Another reinforced the problem of conflicting information within firms:
In the PIC [private industry council] groups, industry sends its personnel people, and they are not the ones who ultimately say yes or no. The people in manufacturing, research, sales, [and] administration have different criteria for hiring people than personnel does. It's hard for education to guess what is needed.
One community college researcher complained that many firms would not provide the right information:
Many of the industries won't tell you what they will be doing because they are very, very secretive about what's next or what kind of people they'll need next. PIC meetings don't even bring out this information. Business won't say what it will be needing or what they are developing. We sort of have to stick our finger in our mouth, hold it up, and see which way the wind is going. There is opportunity for biological technicians, but the demand isn't there yet; so [my college] won't prepare for it. Industry won't tell education where it will go, so it makes it difficult.
In addition, the timing of information is clearly a problem; a personnel manager of a high-tech firm in Palmdale admitted that "long range for us is probably six months" and admitted that most "planning" is concerned with a period three months in the future. Numerous employers complained about the slow place of educational institutions, as we will clarify later, but it is also possible that employers are just as much to blame because of their inability (or unwillingness) to forecast employment needs.
Community colleges make the greatest use of their advisory committees in deciding whether to establish new programs. Typically, colleges will respond to requests for a new program by convening a committee of potential employers and asking them about occupational trends and the content of a possible program. For example, the short-term training center of Frankton Community College established a general repair program after complaints from local manufacturers that they were unable to find well-rounded repairmen; that program appears to have high placement rates. However, even in these cases, the information colleges receive from their advisory committees is uncertain. Necessarily, colleges ask whether there will be employment opportunities in an occupational area, not whether local employers will hire graduates (or even noncompleters) of community college programs--a more precise but more difficult question, especially given the uncertainties of small employers and of firms operating in the sub-baccalaureate labor market. Given the overwhelming evidence (presented in the next section) that employers in the sub-baccalaureate labor market prefer to hire individuals with specific experience rather than those with formal schooling only, we suspect that advisory committees are giving colleges overly general information about employment opportunities.[43]
[43] Of course, it is also possible that employers on advisory committees misstate even general trends since it is always in their interest to have as large a pool of applicants for particular occupations as possible, both to be able to choose on the basis of behavioral traits (e.g., motivation) and to drive down wages. However, we suspect that deliberate misstatements are less a problem than the difficulty in responding to counter-factual questions of the form, "Are you likely to hire more electronics technicians within the next two years?"