Working Connections builds academic capacity of colleges

Dashed Hopes in Missouri

Report Touts Community Colleges As Source of Teachers

Community College Times
November 12, 2002

Working Connections builds academic capacity of colleges

When Keith W. Bird Jr. heard in Jan. 2000, that the Kentucky Community and Technical College System won a Working Connections grant, he went to his building's rooftop courtyard, gripped the railings and yelled "YES" as loud as he could.

Other grant recipients' reactions have been less boisterous, but many date the transformation of their colleges to the announcement of their Working Connections grants.

The Fashion Institute of Technology in N.Y. and Walters State Community College in Tenn., typify the colleges that used their Working Connections grants not only to help disadvantaged people gain a foothold in the economy with information technology, but also to build the capacities of their entire institutions.

"It brought us right into the 21st century," said Chris Helm, program manager of the Enterprise Center at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.

Walters State Community College's faculty "completely redid the curriculum" after developing new Information Technology courses for Working Connections.

From 1997 through 2002, the Working Connections program, funded by Microsoft Corporation and administered by the American Association of Community Colleges, awarded more than $7 million in cash grants and over $57 million in software and technical assistance to 63 community colleges across the country.

Affirmation for KCTCS

Bird, chancellor of the Kentucky Community and Technical College System, said it was more than the $9.5 million in software and $300,000 in cash from Microsoft that made him shout for joy.

The grant was the stamp of approval the newly-created system needed from an outside entity affirming that it had a strong foundation and was moving in the right direction, Bird said. KCTCS is the product of 1997 education reform legislation that combined 13 community colleges, which had been part of the University of Kentucky, with 15 technical schools.

The Working Connections grant helped the Kentucky system cultivate industry partnerships and win other grants from the National Science Foundation and Ford Foundation, among others. In a recent round of funding, another funder used Kentucky's Working Connections' method for attracting women and minorities to IT classes as a model for its grant.

In Bird's view, the psychological lift exceeds the sum of the grants' dollars. "Sometimes it's not about the money. Sometimes it's about somebody saying your worthy," he said, adding, "These things all work together."

But he pointed out that "the Working Connections grant was the first enabler that allowed us to build" the information technology program throughout commonwealth. At the time the grant was awarded, the then 28-college system's IT curriculum was disjointed with different courses and certifications at each institution.

"Not all the money we used came from Working Connections. But it was a catalyst," said Vincent A. DiNoto, a physics professor at Jefferson Community College in Ky., who leads the system's IT programs. Access to the latest software helped faculty update the curriculum five times in two and a half years.

Working Connection also generated positive media attention that convinced those controlling the system's purse strings to reallocate funds internally to support the grant's goals of attracting underrepresented populations into IT careers. Several colleges got new computer labs because Working Connections provided the newest Microsoft software for their campuses.

IT enrollments have grown 140 percent since 1999. The Working Connections grant "exponentially boosted our entire system," Bird said, adding that the grant and the initiatives it sparked have made KCTCS "a major player in growing the IT industry here."

Working Connections nudges FIT students into technology

With its Working Connections grant the Fashion Institute of Technology is not only teaching e-commerce to owners of small businesses, it is re-crafting what all its students learn. The institute in the heart of New York's garment district has non-credit, certificate, associate, bachelor's and master's degree programs.

Elaine Stone, Director of FIT's Enterprise Center, said more fashion people gained e-commerce savvy because the grant set in motion an extremely positive chain of events, including converting part of the existing open computer lab into state-of-the-art facilities that have become The Center for E-commerce and The Computer Technology Center, which now offer 14 and 23 new, non-credit courses respectively. The courses, which teach everything from Web-page design to electronic billing, are aimed at alumni and other women and minorities who own or work at small fashion businesses.

"The Liz Claibornes don't need us. The ABC Blouse Company needs us desperately," Stone said, explaining that small manufacturers make 80 percent of the clothing sold.

With the Working Connections grant in-hand, Stone convinced other administrators in the State University of New York of the needs of small fashion companies: SUNY quickly came through with two more grants.

A $25,000 grant paid for a three-day, e-commerce conference for SUNY students and faculty, and a $70,000 workforce development grant paid for e-commerce training for 35 operators of small and medium-sized businesses. FIT secured another $50,000 in special state funding with the help of Sheldon Silver, the speaker of New York's House of Representatives. Recently, two companies donated a pattern-making design system, other equipment and software licenses.

"That's all because of the grant; no doubt about it," Stone said. "This has just been a godsend."

In addition to funding and equipment, the new computer labs and courses attracted the attention of FIT's faculty. More than 25 instructors have taken the centers' non-credit courses and are working e-commerce into their classes.

Stone and Helm, the Enterprise Center's program managers, said they developed non-credit courses and weekend seminars first, because it usually takes two to three years for SUNY, the system FIT is part of, to approve new credit courses. A professor who worked with the center since it received the grant, won approval for a Merchandizing for E-commerce credit course that will e offered for the first time in Fall 2002.

While the grant was aimed at people already in business, all of FIT's students - 85 percent of whom are women - now encounter e-commerce and the new technologies used by the fashion industry while they attend FIT.

Walters State revamps curriculum

In training displaced workers, the Computer Information Sciences faculty at Walters State Community College gained knowledge and experience that have affected the entire Morristown, Tenn., campus.

The college initially used part of its $250,000 grant for new hardware in labs it modified to use the $1.6 million software obtained with the grant. These labs were then used as models for changes at other campus computer labs where smart boards and touch-screens were installed. "Working Connections helped us find all that stuff," said Michael Helmick, dean of technical education at Walters State. Recent renovations to the buildings that house the Behavioral and Social Sciences Departments incorporated other innovative equipment and software based on these previous changes.

The curriculum that Walters State created to teach displaced workers as a cohort has been used with some revisions for five different groups. The faculty who worked on the Working Connections curriculum then added networking and other courses to the AAS degree and developed four "substantial" certificates.

With the expiration of the Working Connections funding, the program has been modified to comply with the federal Workforce Improvement Act so students can qualify for financial aid.

The goal remains "to take people with absolutely no computer skills and feed them through as much of the certificate that they can stand." The Working Connections students get life skills training, and remedial reading and writing classes.

The Chronicle of Higher Education
November 29, 2002

Dashed Hopes in Missouri
A fiscal crisis derails an ambitious agenda for higher education

It was the middle of a Monday afternoon in mid-September, but the office of Missouri's commissioner of higher education was abandoned and dark, except for the sunlight that filtered through a window blind and fell upon an empty desk and bare wall. The room's former occupant, Kala M. Stroup, had packed up her belongings and left the week before, after seven years on the job. She had no idea who would replace her, but she was certain that she did not want to be commissioner anymore.

The last year had been hard on Ms. Stroup and, for that matter, on most of higher education in Missouri. After years of strong growth in state appropriations, Missouri's Department of Higher Education and public colleges had suffered deep budget cuts at the hands of lawmakers who suddenly seemed indifferent, or even hostile. Many of the department's ambitious efforts to improve higher education -- including some that had attracted national attention -- screeched to a halt.

Worse yet, there appears to be little hope that the situation will improve any time soon. Although an interim commissioner has been found, lawmakers and higher-education officials here say it may be years before Missouri's higher-education system gets back on track.

What has happened in Missouri may be a sign of things to come in other states, especially those, such as Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington, where the talk has run toward making higher education much leaner.

"A lot of states can learn, and get some insight from, Missouri," says Travis J. Reindl, director of state-policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

The key difference between Missouri and many other states, he says, may simply be a matter of timing: Missouri's economy, which relies heavily on manufacturing and agriculture, was hit a little sooner than the others by the nation's latest economic slump. Like Missouri, many other states are in the midst of a fiscal crisis caused partly by the weak economy and partly by the strains placed on their budgets by tax cuts and spending commitments lawmakers made during the boom times of the late 1990s.

Higher-education systems in other states are also vulnerable to the same political forces that reared up against Missouri's system this year. Tight state budgets tend to inspire fiscal conservatism, which prompts lawmakers to look skeptically upon higher-education expenditures. And cuts in state support for higher education often lead to regional competition over resources, which pits public colleges against one another, and tempts lawmakers to promote the interests of their local colleges at the expense of other institutions and their state as a whole.

"There is definitely a danger that, in difficult economic times, people will lose track of a long-term agenda and resort to regional politics and cannibalism, rather than moving the higher-education system ahead," says Aims C. McGuinness, a senior associate at the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, a nonprofit organization that advises states. "I think that is the potential everywhere, and it's deadly."

Drafting a Blueprint

As Ms. Stroup recalls her seven years as commissioner, she speaks of two distinct periods. She often prefaces her statements about the first, which lasted roughly six years, with the phrase "during the times when there was money in Missouri," and her face glows as she rambles on about the big plans and progress that her agency made then. When asked about her last year in office, she seems to struggle for words, sometimes out of an apparent desire to state things diplomatically, and sometimes because, she says, she is still trying to make sense of what happened and how things got so bad.

Before being appointed commissioner by the Missouri Coordinating Board for Higher Education in September of 1995, Ms. Stroup spent five years as president of Southeast Missouri State University. She says she was hesitant to take the commissioner's post, but the state's Democratic governor, the late Mel Carnahan, persuaded her to make the leap.

"His vision of what he wanted to do -- the kinds of directions that he wanted to move in higher education -- were very compatible with what I thought needed to occur," she says.

Both of them recognized that the budgets of Missouri's public colleges had been decimated by the recession of the early 1990s, and had long paled in comparison with peer institutions in other states. Both of them also had watched Missouri voters overwhelmingly reject a 1992 ballot measure that called for the state to raise taxes to support higher education. Based on those developments, Ms. Stroup says, she and the governor knew "that Missouri would never have the resources to allow our institutions to be all things to all people."

At the same time, she says, Missouri's public colleges needed to build their reputations and improve their performance. The state also needed to take steps to increase access to college, especially in technical areas, for the sake of its own economic growth.

The state's leaders had already come up with two key solutions: Changing how the state financed public colleges, to give the institutions incentives to be more focused, efficient, and effective; and using technology and collaborations between institutions to extend their reach.

The state had made some strides on those fronts even before Ms. Stroup's arrival. In 1994, the coordinating board established one of the nation's first performance-based financing systems, offering institutions cash incentives to improve. Colleges were judged by the performance of their graduates on national tests, the academic-success rates of their freshmen and low-income or minority students, and the number of degrees awarded in certain high-demand fields.

In the spring of 1995, state lawmakers directed the coordinating board to review the missions of Missouri's public colleges every five years, to discourage duplicate programs, and to encourage the institutions to become more specialized. Lawmakers also called for the higher-education board to work with the state board that oversees elementary and secondary schools to develop a comprehensive plan for providing postsecondary technical education throughout the state.

Within months of taking office, Ms. Stroup had taken those directives, combined them with plans to overhaul the state's financial-aid programs and greatly expand distance education, and packaged them in a single comprehensive reform plan titled Blueprint for Missouri Higher Education. She then set out to sell the plan to the public, by holding forums, meeting with newspaper editorial boards, and speaking to Rotary Clubs and just about anyone else who would listen.

Buying Support

One of her hardest tasks was winning acceptance of the coordinating board's plan to get colleges to adopt specialized missions and tailor their admissions standards accordingly.

As the state's deputy commissioner of higher education, John R. Wittstruck, says, "People in Missouri don't say 'I'm from Missouri,'" but, rather, identify themselves as "from St. Louis," or "from Kansas City," or from another area of the state.

Nearly every region of Missouri had long sought its own large, comprehensive university with an open-enrollment policy and an array of advanced-degree programs. Because the state allocated funds to public colleges based on their enrollments, the institutions had clear financial incentives to try to meet such demands. Asking public colleges to limit their admissions and offerings went against the grain.

It helped that Ms. Stroup could cite the example of Truman State University, which had resolved, more than a decade earlier, to transform itself from a regional university into a selective liberal-arts and science institution serving students from throughout the state. Subsequently, the college was recognized in several national rankings as one of the best public colleges in the Midwest.

Many college leaders say Ms. Stroup's charismatic personality, gift for communicating complicated ideas, and background as a state-university president also helped her win their trust.

But what most helped grease the skids for mission specialization, as well as the other elements of the coordinating board's agenda, was money. Because Governor Carnahan got along well with Ms. Stroup and endorsed her plans, he seemed willing to spend dollars wherever she felt they were needed. From 1997 through 2001, the higher-education department distributed a total of nearly $107-million to colleges to improve in their areas of focus. Its annual budget for technical education rose to $25-million, from $4.8-million, increasing the number of cities and towns served by technical-education programs to 66, from 17.

Meanwhile, state spending on higher education rose by 84 percent, to $1.15-billion, between 1993 and 2001. Appropriations to student aid more than doubled to $45-million annually during the same time period. And, by 2001, the department's performance-based program was annually handing out more than $66-million in cash awards, enough to add 3 to 5 percent annually to some college budgets.

"Our sense was that Missouri was one of those states that really had its act together," says Mr. McGuinness of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems.

But state lawmakers did not just increase spending in response to Missouri's flush economy. They also seized the opportunity to cut taxes enough to decrease annual tax revenues by about $1-billion, or 14 percent, annually, according to James R. Moody, a former Missouri state budget director who continues to consult lawmakers on fiscal issues.

"We got to where we thought we could have a free lunch, where we could cut revenues and increase spending, and there would never be a day of reckoning," Mr. Moody says.

Ms. Stroup says that her agency focused only on the state legislature's decisions related to higher-education spending, and didn't analyze, much less weigh in on, the potential ramifications of the tax cuts being adopted by state lawmakers. As a rule, state higher-education agencies "never pay attention to the full state-revenue picture," she says.

The Beginning of the End

The political fortunes of Ms. Stroup and her agency deteriorated markedly in the fall of 2000, when Governor Carnahan died in a plane crash while campaigning for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Missouri elected a new governor, Bob Holden, who, while also a Democrat, would not be nearly as supportive as his predecessor of the coordinating board's agenda.

At about the same time, Missouri's economy slowed again, and the financial outlook for higher education in the state suddenly became bleak. By June 2001, Governor Holden was faced with the need to cut state spending by $500-million, and he responded by withholding about 8 percent of the money public colleges were to receive for their operations in the remainder of the 2001 fiscal year, and about 19 percent of the money that they had been promised for fiscal 2002.

In the 2002 legislative session, with the prospect of steep budget cuts looming, some public colleges and lawmakers began turning against Ms. Stroup and her agenda, arguing that mission specialization, performance-based financing, and other initiatives should be put aside so that the state could focus its resources on public colleges' core budgets.

"Once the money stopped flowing, the infighting started," says State Rep. Ted W. Farnen, a Democrat who had been the chairman of the House of Representatives' Higher Education Committee from 1998 through 2000.

Colleges and lawmakers who supported Ms. Stroup's agenda found themselves up against those who wanted to redistribute funds to protect the budgets of certain institutions. Lawmakers on both sides expressed frustration with Ms. Stroup and her agency for their failure to find a solution that would bridge that gap. "We were held responsible for the fact that they could not arrive upon an agreement themselves," Ms. Stroup says.

In the end, several lawmakers took out their frustration by trying to cut off all state financial support for the agency. They failed, but the department's budget was slashed by nearly 30 percent, and state spending on public-college operations was cut by about 10 percent, or $97-million, in the budget that lawmakers adopted last spring.

Ms. Stroup tried to fight these cuts. But sources close to the budget negotiations say she received little support from Governor Holden, who was on the defensive against the state's Republican-led Senate and complained that the coordinating board and public-college lobbyists had failed to lend enough support to his own proposal to tap into the state's rainy-day fund. (Governor Holden's press office did not return calls for comment.)

The department was left with no money for mission specialization or the rewarding of colleges for good performance. It had to reduce or freeze spending on technical education, student aid, and other priorities.

"In these kinds of economic downturns, it is hard for higher education to talk about anything other than restoring funding levels and increasing tuition rates," Mr. Wittstruck, the department's deputy commissioner, says. "Issues of quality get put on a back burner."

Leaving the Battle

In June, Ms. Stroup announced that she planned to resign to become president of American Humanics, a Kansas City-based nonprofit organization that seeks to prepare undergraduate students for careers in youth programs and human-services agencies. The coordinating board had initially hoped to name a permanent replacement for Ms. Stroup by September 1, but its chairman, Sandra D. Kauffman, says the board has since decided it does not have the money to conduct a proper search, and would rather focus its financial resources on trying to keep programs intact. The board also has decided not to ask lawmakers to increase state support for higher education in the coming year, and instead plans to focus its energies on a concerted effort to convince the state's lawmakers and residents of the value of higher education, in hopes of securing more support for public colleges and student aid down the road.

When interviewed in her new office in September, Ms. Stroup said that she believes Missouri needs to have a debate about the future direction of its higher-education system, and that she needed to step aside to let that debate take place. Pointing to her blueprint for higher education, she said, "I have been pushing and selling this program for so long that I am associated with it."

Others who have worked closely with Ms. Stroup say that the events of the last year left her disillusioned. "I think a person can sense when they are spinning their wheels more than making progress," says Manuel T. Pacheco, the president of the University of Missouri System. "You spend more time defending what you have than trying to move forward with what you are trying to do."

Nonetheless, Mr. Pacheco believes higher education in Missouri has indeed moved forward. "It is the old adage of taking three steps forward and two steps back," he says. "You are still one step forward in the end."

Education Week
October 30, 2002

Report Touts Community Colleges As Source of Teachers

The nation's 1,100 community colleges have the potential to provide more than 25 percent of the teachers needed to staff classrooms over the next decade, but to date remain an overlooked resource, a report released last week contends.

Such institutions are already a significant pipeline, helping to train more than one in five educators, according to the study by Recruiting New Teachers, a nonprofit organization based in Belmont, Mass. Moreover, it says, community colleges produce highly qualified, desperately needed minority candidates who volunteer to work in the country's most challenging schools.

"Strengthening and expanding teacher education programs on community college campuses not only offer the best hope we have to overcome the teacher shortage in this country, it is a powerful solution to improving teacher quality at the same time," Mildred Hudson, the organization's chief executive officer, said in a statement.

The report profiles six model programs in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, New York state, Pennsylvania, and Texas and provides results from a poll of officials in all 50 states about the issue.

One hundred community colleges have teacher-preparation programs, and 20 states have policies supporting teacher training at such colleges, said Jacqueline Jordan Irvine, the lead researcher for the study and an education professor at Emory University in Atlanta.

Experts embraced the report's findings, but cautioned that teacher initiatives by community colleges must be properly financed.

"I would suggest this is a solid option" to help alleviate teacher shortages, said Kathe Rasch, the chairwoman of the board of directors of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. The Washington-based group represents some 735 institutions.

Ms. Rasch, who is also the dean of the school of education at Maryville University of St. Louis, said she worries, however, that community colleges may not have the resources necessary to run such programs or the leverage to obtain the needed aid.

Meeting a Need

Such institutions appeared to offer an opportunity, as they enroll 10 million people annually and educate a diverse population, the study says. Half of all African-American, Hispanic, and Native American students now attending college do so at community colleges.

The U.S. Department of Education estimates that 2.4 million teachers will be needed over the eight years to meet rising enrollments and make up for increasing teacher retirements.

The community college programs are designed to replace the first two years of work done at four-year institutions, the report says. While they differ significantly in content and requirements, most offer pedagogy classes and experiential learning in conjunction with courses in the liberal arts. Following the completion of those program, students are expected to attend four- year institutions.

Research by Recruiting New Teachers shows that the quality of prospective teachers who graduate from four-year schools after attending community colleges is good, the report says. In fact, teachers who participate in them are better prepared and perform better than their classmates who began at four-year colleges, the study maintains.

Such teacher- candidates may be a better investment than traditionally trained educators, the report says, because they take jobs that are considered less desirable by their colleagues and stay in them longer. Many live in the urban communities in which they teach and have a better understanding of their students' cultures and languages than do their peers. They are likewise older and able to more effectively manage discipline, the authors add.

There are challenges in working with such students, however.

Those enrolled are often balancing families, jobs, and schooling and need more intensive support than traditional students require, said Joan Gosnell, the dean of academic affairs at Miami- Dade Community College in Florida, which produces 600 prospective teachers annually and is profiled in the report.

Many students do not immediately finish their bachelor's degrees, she said, and thus do not enter the workforce as quickly as their counterparts who attend four-year colleges or they may fail to complete their studies.