H. Martin Lancaster, President
NC Community College System
Grove Park Inn, Asheville, North Carolina
June 29, 2003
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, President Richardson. I am honored to be with you this evening…who wouldn't be happy about spending time in one of the country's great hotels, in this lovely mountain city?
You have an exciting and very full agenda during your time in North Carolina. You will hear from the experts, including your hosts at Western Piedmont Community College, about how global education is at work on our campuses. My task is to outline how North Carolina's community college system works and why global connections matter in everything we do. I begin with a quote from one of our system's most important figures:
"We are no longer isolated. We are set down at the doorsteps of a teeming universe of people whose problems, whether we like it or not, are our problems, whose sickness and whose health are immediately and permanently our concern. We say with Socrates, but with much more urgency than he, that we are not citizens of Athens or of Greece, but citizens of the world."
That sounds like a sentiment from somebody who knows about SARS, 9-11, NAFTA and the European Union, doesn't it? Well, he didn't when he said it, because that's from a speech made in December of 1962 by Dr. Dallas Herring, the intellectual and spiritual "father" of the North Carolina Community College System.
This year, we celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the legislation that created our comprehensive community colleges system. And now, more than ever we must be responsive to the demands and challenges of the globally competitive economy. And I can say with no hesitation -- North Carolina's community colleges welcome the opportunities of the global economy
Dr. Herring's vision, backed by progressive governors, legislators and county officials, created a community college system with an open door philosophy and an absolute commitment to workforce and economic development.
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. North Carolina's higher education community also includes more than three dozen fine colleges and universities supported by churches and other private sources.
The System I serve is the newest member of North Carolina's higher education community, and it 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 was true in many southern states, North Carolina’s economic foundation was agriculture. Textile mills and other industries moved south from New England in the late 19th and early 20th century, taking advantage of cheap labor, cheap energy and cotton, wood and tobacco from fields and forests.
New industries, focused on technology and research, began to grow in the forties and fifties around the great universities. Those universities educated the scientists and executives, but where could North Carolina's people prepare for the good jobs on the shop floors in those industries?
Governor Hodges envisioned a system of Industrial Education Centers. 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 almost 800-thousand students each year in programs that range from basic skills to high-tech training to the first two years of baccalaureate education. That's about one of every eight adults in our state.
Almost everyone is within easy driving distance (in most cases less than 30 minutes) of a community college facility.
When I am asked which of our campuses 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."
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. I like to think of helping our citizens move from farm to factory to "pharma" -- that is, pharmaceuticals, biotech and other promising sectors of the knowledge-based economy.
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!
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. 
We also have a similar program for established industries in designated critical areas. We realized early that keeping existing industries’ 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 to farmers or factory workers or single mothers who want to start a new business, manufacture a new product or provide a new service.
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 entirely on line.
In short, North Carolina's community colleges are 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.
In the global environment of today, that workforce will be trained by the most adaptive colleges, those most sensitive to the changes. To remain relevant in the 21st century the community college must go beyond simply doing differently the same things we have always done. We must truly think globally and realize the complexity of the modern world that needs our services.
We know how profoundly things have changed in our world in a few short years. "Globalization" is no longer an abstract concept with meaning for somebody else, somewhere else. It is reality right now for North Carolina's economy, and it must be reality for our educational system, if we are to reap its full benefits.
Those potential benefits of globalization are concrete, not abstract, and they are huge:
- Faster economic growth;
- Higher living standards;
- Accelerated innovation; and
- New economic opportunities for the people, businesses, institutions and nations committed to taking full advantage of them.
North Carolina is committed, and good things are happening. In just the last eight years, our state has had 6.1 billion dollars in new investment from businesses owned outside the United States. That adds up to 42,000 new jobs.
Twenty years ago, about 34,000 people in North Carolina worked for foreign-owned companies. Today, that number is 225,000, an increase of almost 600 percent.
On average, employees of these international companies earn wages 15 percent higher than do their peers in American owned businesses.
North Carolinians who work for international companies represent just one segment of the global economy now growing in our state.
All eight million of us are, indeed, now a part of the global economy.
We buy food, clothing, electronic equipment and much more produced in Mexico, Thailand, Ukraine, Morocco and hundreds of other faraway places.
We sell what we make and grow to customers in places just as remote.
We are learning to like lemon grass soup and spaetzle as well as pizza, burritos, fried rice and barbecue.
We welcome international stars to our stages, concert halls, football stadiums, basketball arenas and yes, hockey rinks. Increasingly, we spend our vacations in exotic international settings.
Our economy has "gone global" so quickly for several reasons.
One is the persistent, progressive dismantling of international trade barriers by our country and others.
Another is the greatly increased ability of financial institutions to move money---capital ---across international borders…and banking is very big business is this home state of Bank of America, Wachovia and the US offices of RBC Centura.
Fundamental changes in technology, including computers, the Internet, and transportation systems are behind many of these improvements. The continuation of globalization seems inevitable; its momentum, irresistible.
And of course, the people of the world are pouring into North Carolina at an astounding rate. Our state mostly missed the great waves of European immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century. This time around, we are definitely riding the crest.
North Carolina has witnessed a dramatic change in its demographics since the 1990 census. The number of people of Asian descent has more than doubled over the past 10 years. Our state’s Latino population has almost quadrupled…it's now pushing a half-million people. In fact, North Carolina led the country in the increase of people from Mexico… an increase that fostered the location of a Mexican consulate in Raleigh, plus a tremendous demand on our colleges for English classes for our new citizens…and Spanish for the rest of us!
The North Carolina Community College System has a strong history as a change agent, charged with helping our citizens move forward in evolving economies. Now, we must help them make the adjustments necessary to deal with the realities of being in a global economy.
If our workforce and our industries are to compete today and grow tomorrow, we must infuse every curriculum in every program with the knowledge and skills essential to the global economy.
We are working to offer entrepreneurs, especially small businesses, the training they need to sell their products overseas. E-commerce programs have opened world markets to hatmakers from Flat Rock and to antique book dealers on the southern coast.
We are helping our citizens learn to respect and work with the cultural differences of their colleagues and to master languages they will speak on the job and in dealing with customers, here and abroad.
We are providing skills training that allows workers to meet international standards and certifications, so that they may move without difficulty between jobs today in this country and jobs tomorrow in another.
North Carolina's global connection runs the other way, too, as our students and faculty explore other countries, and our educational leaders take North Carolina's community college model across the globe.
Your presence here, and the active participation of Western Piedmont in your organization, attest to vital institutional connections.
We in North Carolina are proud that leaders of business, education and government throughout the world look to North Carolina as the model for the right way to combine higher education and skills training.
Thailand, for example, is in the midst of building, from scratch, a system of institutions to provide the technical education needed to move its people into the jobs of the information age. In the spring of 2001, a Thai delegation visited the System Office, Wake Technical Community College and Johnston Community College, gathering information about skills training. Delegation members were so impressed by what they saw that they asked our system to send a group to Thailand the next year, to offer an extensive series of workshops focused on the details of effective workforce development.
North Carolina's community colleges have fans in Europe, too. Just in the past year, delegations from the United Kingdom have traveled here, studying our workforce efforts and ways in which we cooperate with universities. Paul Richards of Staffordshire University then invited me to describe our state's successes in a major address to a workforce conference in Brussels for European Union countries. The year before, I spoke on workforce education as a basic right to the European Court of Human Rights. That same year, the International Congress on Vocational Training Centers in the European Union chose North Carolina to represent the United States.
Senegal. Moldova. Russia. China. Sweden. The list of countries looking to us is long. Why is it important, that we both receive these requests and respond to them?
First, of course, the requests themselves are evidence that our community colleges in North Carolina are doing a great job, and people everywhere know about it.
Second, prompt and positive response means that we are helping build economic prosperity that will benefit North Carolinians now and in the future. Our economy is a global economy. Period. That reality carries with it some things we don't like -- lost jobs, cultural dislocations, language complications, and connections to economic troubles elsewhere. But it brings so many opportunities that we must help our people understand and take advantage of.
International attention is a great compliment. The reason it matters, however, is that it opens the door to international partnerships of direct benefit to the people of North Carolina.
On behalf of all of my colleagues and my fellow Tar Heels, I say to you that we are delighted that you have found our door open to you this week. Enjoy your time here, take back the ideas that work for you, and share your wisdom with us.
Thank you.
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