H. Martin Lancaster, President
North Carolina Community College System
The European Union
Brussels, Belgium
December 4, 2002
(Shortened version for keynote)
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I am honored to be with you to share information about North Carolina's commitment to development of the knowledge-based economy through higher education.
I am reminded of that commitment when I walk through the front doors of the headquarters of North Carolina's community college system. Above the entrance is a huge sign that reads, "The North Carolina Community College System: Preparing North Carolina's World-Class Workforce."
North Carolina’s people believe in progress. Providing good jobs for North Carolinians has always been a goal of our leaders, and a good job starts with a good education.
Our deep commitment to education dates back more than 200 years. North Carolina was the first state in the United States to provide a public university, the University of North Carolina. Today, the state university system spreads out over 16 campuses throughout North Carolina. It includes two "flagship" research universities -- UNC at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University. The System boasts two medical schools, two law schools, two schools of architecture, three colleges of engineering, 15 business management programs and strong institutions devoted to undergraduate and graduate education, the arts, regional service and teacher preparation
North Carolina's higher education community also includes more than three dozen fine colleges and universities supported by churches and other private sources. Duke University is known the world over as a center of medical research -- not to mention basketball. Wake Forest University, Davidson College and Guilford College are just a few examples of other fine private institutions.
The System I serve is the newest member of North Carolina's higher education community and is one of the most important reasons that North Carolina is recognized internationally as a pioneer in connecting education and workforce development to our economic development goals.
The roots of these efforts date back to Governor Luther Hodges in the 1950s, who later became US Secretary of Commerce. He looked at North Carolina in the years after World War II and saw need and potential for change but a huge educational gap.
As did many southern states, North Carolina built its economic foundation on agriculture -- first the wealth of the pine forests of the east, then cotton, then the tremendous rise of tobacco after the Civil War. Textile mills and other industries moved south from New England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, taking advantage of cheap labor, cheap energy and the necessary raw materials. . New industries, focused on technology and research, began to grow in the forties and fifties around the great universities, especially Chapel Hill, NC State and Duke. Those universities educated the elite, but where could North Carolina's people prepare for the good jobs in those industries? For many years, the answer was nowhere.
Governor Hodges envisioned a system of Industrial Education Centers to provide customized training to prepare our citizens for new jobs. Another great governor, Terry Sanford, built upon that structure to create in 1963 the North Carolina Community College System as we know it today, combining the best of technical education with solid academic preparation. Today, the North Carolina Community College System enrolls more than 800,000 students each year in 59 institutions, offering the most comprehensive community college program in the United States.
The system puts a community college facility within easy traveling distance (in most cases less than 30 minutes) of every citizen in the state and provides comprehensive curriculum that includes those basic skills that may have eluded a student in the public schools all the way through the first two years of baccalaureate education.
The question you have asked me to address is how the pieces of higher education fit together to benefit economic and workforce development in North Carolina.
I will begin with the system I know best -- community colleges. When I am asked which of our 59 institutions across the state are involved in economic and workforce development, I answer, "All of them." When I am asked what portion of our budget is devoted to workforce and economic development, I say, "All of it." When I am asked to define which aspects of our programs deal with workforce and economic development, I say, "All of them."
Our system's mission has always been the preparation of a world-class workforce. That was true when most of that preparation was for hands-on manufacturing jobs. It is even truer today, when workforce preparation is all about knowledge…learning how to learn, to adapt, and to keep up with high tech and high skills in the global marketplace
North Carolina was the first state to offer extensive job training to attract new industry. Our New and Expanding Industry Training Program, now widely copied in other states, continues to be the national model. It's not a stretch to say it ranks up there with basketball, barbecue and Krispy Kreme doughnuts as one of our most famous exports! It has earned top national rankings for years from site selection experts and consistently garners the highest of satisfaction rankings from employers
The New and Expanding Industry Training program served 203 companies and 24,068 trainees during the 2000-2001 program year. Companies benefit from tailor-made programs that support their specific needs for a skilled and knowledgeable workforce. Services are available to companies that create 12 or more new jobs in any one community in North Carolina during a one-year period.
Companies that have taken advantage of program services are diverse, from auto parts and electronics manufacturers to biotechnology companies and data processing centers.
We also have a similar program for established industries in designated critical areas. We realized early that keeping existing industry’s workforce well trained and the company profitable was as important as attracting new industry. Established in 1981, The Focused Industrial Training Program is primarily directed toward veteran workers in manufacturing industries who need to renew their skills and technical knowledge. In the most recent fiscal year, Focused Industrial Training reached more than 13,000 employees in 630 companies.
The state recognizes the importance of homegrown prosperity, too. Our community colleges are working hard to help create the next "hot" industry through their exciting and valuable work with the state's energetic entrepreneurs.
Our 58 Small Business Centers provide education and counseling farmers or factory workers or single mothers who want to start a new business, manufacture a new product or provide a new service.
Small Business Centers help aspiring entrepreneurs develop and refine a business plan, identify products or services that are in demand by others, find financing, develop marketing skills, and steer through the daunting bureaucratic maze of licenses, taxes, and environmental and worker safety regulation. In a given year, more than 50,000 people come to us for lessons in Entrepreneurship, and many turn those lessons into dollars. For example, a used book dealer in Brunswick County, in the far southeast corner of North Carolina, took the knowledge he gained from the Small Business Center there and became a thriving supplier of rare publications to a world wide market.
Through our community colleges, North Carolina now produces the fifth highest number of technical and vocational graduates of any state in the nation. We offer short courses, seminars and other continuing education for hundreds of thousands of people already in the workforce, to keep their skills at the cutting edge.
We continue pioneering partnerships with the North Carolina’s electronics and information technology industry, and with the biotechnology and pharmaceuticals industry, forming strong industry-led collaboratives to ensure that we are preparing workers to compete in the new economy. In biotechnology, North Carolina now has the largest concentration of these industries in the Southeast, ranking among the top five states in the nation.
Distance learning is growing fast. Our courses offered on the Internet have grown more than 300% in just the last three years with more than 73,000 students taking classes last year online or through interactive video. Colleges throughout the state have partnered in an exciting new collaborative called the Virtual Learning Community. Students can now earn several degrees, including an Information Systems degree, entirely on line.
If I had to sum up all of this information about the community college role in economic development in North Carolina, I would say -- jobs. We're about jobs. Preparing people for good jobs with great futures. Helping our state attract, grow and keep those jobs--making sure people on the job keep their skills up-to-date. We see confirmed every day the assertion that new industries locate and existing industry flourishes where our community colleges train and retrain the workforce.
What about the role of our partners in higher education, the universities? Baccalaureate colleges and universities educate the decision makers, professionals, engineers and scientists who come up with big ideas and new products. Particularly on big campuses, research is an essential part of economic development. Fine universities also create an attractive intellectual and cultural climate, an important factor in a healthy, growing economy.
However, I want to go past quick answers to the more complex web of relationships between universities, especially public ones, and public policy -- a web that strongly supports our most progressive economies.
I refer you to Innovation U, a new publication of the Southern Growth Policies Board. The board is a "think tank" set up thirty years ago by Southern governors committed to working together to solve our region's nagging economic and educational woes.
This report explores new university roles in a knowledge economy, focusing on "best practices" from 12 of the nation's top research universities.
One of those is North Carolina State University, so I am comfortable in using the information from this report to illustrate what works in North Carolina.
Innovation U spells out 10 areas research universities should address to succeed in contributing to state and local economic development:
- Inclusion of economic development in mission, vision and goals statements.
- Pursuit of industry research partnerships.
- Technology transfer.
- Industrial extension and technical assistance.
- Entrepreneurial development.
- Industry education and training partnerships.
- Career services and placement.
- Formal partnerships with economic development organizations.
- Industry/university advisory boards.
- Faculty culture and rewards for participation in economic development activities.
The report praises North Carolina State University in all these areas. Look closely, and you will find parallel successes at North Carolina's other big research universities.
Some of these suggestions will make sense for you. Some will not. However, just as we learn much from you, so I believe you can find some valuable lessons in what is working for us?
Which leads me to one of the big ideas that has worked the best. Remember Governor Luther Hodges? He had a second vision in the 1950s. And ambitious as his idea of industrial education centers was almost a half-century ago, his other idea must have seemed like science fiction.
In the decade after World War II. North Carolina ranked 47th of then 48 states in per capita income. We had lots of small towns, pretty good roads and just one fair-sized city, Charlotte. The state capital of Raleigh was a rather sleepy town, home to NC State and several other colleges, state government and almost no industry.
About twenty miles to the west was Durham, a manufacturing center with textile mills and a downtown core dominated by American Tobacco and Liggett and Myers Tobacco companies. Duke University perched on one side of town, and North Carolina Central College on the other.
Chapel Hill, just west of Raleigh and right next to Durham, was just a village, home to the University of North Carolina, populated by philosophers and professors and others regarded as a bit different from lots of their neighbors in North Carolina.
Connect the dots between the cities and the big universities, and you make a triangle. In the 1950s, the middle of the triangle held scrub pine forest, family farms, a few crossroads and a small airport.
But that's not what Governor Hodges saw. He saw North Carolina's future, in the form of the Research Triangle Park.
To address the exodus among our brightest people and lack of economic diversification, the Governor and several prominent North Carolina business and academic leaders formed the Research Triangle Foundation to develop a research park, the first of its kind.
Initially, the Park -- or RTP -- limited companies to research uses only. As time passed, the Research Triangle Park’s Foundation Board of Directors expanded the permitted uses to allow for research applications, allowing companies that developed research concepts in RTP to manufacture the products as well. With that expansion came an increased role for community college partnerships with companies in RTP, as they sought skilled workers for their manufacturing facilities.
This new provision proved to be an added incentive to luring IBM to locate a manufacturing facility to RTP in 1965. This IBM facility has come to represent IBM’s largest operation in the United States and has over 10,000 employees. Soon, two major federal agencies involved in environmental protection located their research labs in RTP, followed in a few years by the establishment of the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina and the North Carolina Biotechnology Center.
RTP has become the most successful research park in the United States and, many say, perhaps the most successful in the world.
RTP comprises 2,800 hectares, is 13 kilometers long and 3.2 kilometers wide. It is home to 136 companies and agencies. Almost half of RTP's almost 50,000 employees work for multinational companies. The total annual payroll for the Park is estimated at $2.7 billion.
The roll call of RTP companies includes GlaxoSmithKline, Bayer, Syngenta, Biogen, and Akzo Nobel in pharmaceuticals and biosciences; IBM, Nortel, and Cisco Systems in communications and information technology; and research labs of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and Battelle in environmental sciences. The research partnerships between industry and major universities generate patents at more than twice the rate of the national average, and venture financing is strong, too. This model of university and private research and manufacturing collaboration has now been replicated in the Charlotte area and in Winston-Salem.
The RTP has brought energetic, intelligent people from all over the world into North Carolina. Yes, we've had some "culture clashes," but we have seen positive change as well. Is it perfect? By no means. Just try to get in and out of the area during rush hour, and you'll see that traffic snarls have come to us with a vengeance. Is its continued success guaranteed? We have learned to our peril that even high-tech industries are vulnerable to drastic economic downturns. Our state also must face the fact that the next good idea depends upon continued investment in basic research in industry and academic research that may have no practical application for years, even decades -- and continued investment in skilled workforce preparation.
Today, technology and capital travel across the globe at rates that only a decade ago would have been unimaginable. Capital knows no boundaries. It flows to those areas of the world that have the highest skills.
Why? Because, people and the skills they possess today are the most important assets for building wealth for a city, a state or a nation.
In North Carolina, we have made the commitment to invest in our people and their future.
I commend you for embracing this same vision of investing in education of the workforce as a tool of economic development. Thank you. ###
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