North Carolina Workforce Development Summit

H. Martin Lancaster, President
The North Carolina Community College System

Greensboro, NC
February 28, 2002

I am pleased to be with you on this very important day, and I am honored to have a few minutes to make some remarks before the keynote from Lt. Governor Perdue, a great champion of workforce development and a very valued member of our State Board of Community Colleges.

We have been focused on problems and solutions, but we should also celebrate our successes. Given the community colleges' role in North Carolina's Workforce Development System, as the primary deliverer of workforce training, I hope you will indulge me to share with you some of the recent accomplishments of our community colleges in their of support economic and workforce development across the state during the past year.

Through our community colleges, North Carolina now produces the fifth highest number of technical and vocational graduates of any state in the nation, and our enrollments in degree programs this year are up 10%. In non-degree programs our growth is more than l9%. Recently, our State Board fast tracked the state application process for key degree areas such as Information Systems and Industrial Maintenance, and next month will vote on initiating creation of a new Associate in Engineering Degree program, the only program of its type in the nation that will allow articulation from community colleges directly into our University engineering programs.
We today sponsor the fifth largest basic skills program in the nation, giving160,000 people last year the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic that they need to succeed in our other programs. We partnered with more than 280 employers to train for basic skills at the workplace, training over 13,000 employees last year. Our English-as-a-Second Language program now reaches over 40,000 people a year and has more than doubled in enrollment since 1995.
Our customized training programs continue to be the national model, having earned the highest average annual ranking of any state in the nation the past four years by Expansion Management magazine, and earning the highest of satisfaction rankings from employers. Last year our New and Expanding Industry Training program trained 24,000 North Carolinians at 203 new and expanding companies, a 20% increase over the previous year, and at a cost per trainee that was at an all-time program low.
Last year, we enrolled over 300,000 people in short-term skills training as part of our workforce continuing education program, one of the largest lifelong learning programs in the nation, if not the world.
In 2000, we implemented a new concentrated competency-based training program called the Manufacturing Certification Program, based on industry skill standards and certification programs, to better prepare new and incumbent workers to work in North Carolina’s restructuring, increasingly high tech manufacturing environment. The program has been offered at 15 colleges and is growing, and has been a major plus in economic development and training efforts.
We continued our formal partnerships with the North Carolina’s electronics and information technology industry, and the biotechnology and pharmaceuticals industry, forming strong industry-led collaboratives to insure that we are preparing workers to compete in the new economy. Almost every one of our colleges now offers a networking academy at one or more of their campuses, and an exciting new program called BioWork, developed in partnership with the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, is proving extremely popular with our growing biotechnology industry and was recently profiled in The San Francisco Chronicle.
Our Internet courses have grown over 300% in just the last three years. Colleges throughout the state have partnered in an exciting new collaborative called the Virtual Learning Community that has produced 61 shared Internet courses with another 50 to be completed by June. Students can now earn one of several degrees, including an Information Systems degree, entirely on line.
Through our Human Resources Development Program, unemployed individuals, dislocated workers, and those making below 200% of the Federal poverty level can now receive free computer and Internet literacy training, in addition to free training in other core employability skills.
Our Small Business Centers reached 70,000 people with counseling and training to support the growth of microenterprises across the state.
As a result of the recent Higher Education Bonds, the largest in US history, community colleges are adding over a billion dollars in new and renovated training facilities throughout the state.
And finally, new legislation passed last session by the General Assembly gave us the opportunity to provide new economic development services on our campuses including small business incubators, product testing, and teleconferencing; created a pilot scholarship program to attract students into high demand/low enrollment programs like the trades; enabled us to provide free safety training to small traditional manufacturing companies that face financial barriers; and also initiated the first steps in workforce consolidation with the transfer of the Bureau of Training Initiatives from the North Carolina Department of Labor to the North Carolina Community College System. A transfer of the apprenticeship program to our System is awaiting approval from the US Department of Labor.

That’s a lot of activity in a very short period of time, and as President of the North Carolina Community College System, you can understand why I am extremely proud of the workforce development efforts of all 58 of our community colleges and the Textile Center; and I am also very proud of our partners – ESC, the Workforce Development Boards, and the public schools --, and the efforts we are undertaking jointly through JobLink and other collaborative initiatives.

But as economic and workforce development leaders, you must know that there are terribly dark clouds on the horizon, just at a time when we are most vulnerable and the need is greatest, when our layoffs across the state have doubled in just one year, and our unemployment rate has gone from the nation’s 12^th best to the fifth worst in only a two year period. Many workforce development programs, funded from Unemployment Insurance sources, are threatened by the rapid decline of the fund. Already as a result of having reached a threshold of the UI fund, community colleges will not have the benefits of a special training account through which we have received 75% of our technology and equipment funding and 50% of our New and Expanding Industry Training funds during the past three years. Within community colleges, we find that our training infrastructure is facing a real crisis. Community college faculty and professional staff rank 42^nd nationally in pay, and we have a $225 million gap in the technology and equipment we need to meet the training demands for today’s North Carolina economy. About half of this amount is for computers alone, as most of our computing equipment is equipped only to run Windows 97. In addition, our growth demands will require significant funding increases when the State can least afford it financially, but can we afford to turn away people who need retraining to get back into the economy? And if all this were not enough, President Bush is proposing cuts to the Workforce Investment Act.

There is clearly a lot to be concerned about, and even though we are still viewed by most as the leading workforce development state in the nation, this is clearly no time for complacency. That is why I am gratified to see a gathering like today’s to focus attention on these very issues. And I would like to say a personal word of thanks to Gordon Myers, who in his leadership role as Chairman of NCCBI and Chairman of the State Economic Development Board, is truly raising the workforce development challenges we all face to a Statewide priority level.

As we prepare to leave this Summit later this afternoon, we need to do so with a new determination to serve the neediest, to collaborate and partner as we have not always done before, and to approach the significant economic challenges we face with the true spirit of North Carolinians. As a former North Carolina workforce development champion, Governor Terry Sanford, said when he proposed the creation of the North Carolina Community College System to the General Assembly in 1963, "Much remains to be done, to provide better educational opportunities for the competition our children will surely face, to encourage broader economic development so everybody will have a better chance to make a better living. Now is the time to move forward. Now is no time to loaf along." This statement was true in l963; it is even more true today. Let us all move forward as a team to build the best workforce in America.

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