Remarks for H. Martin Lancaster, President
NC Community College System
NC Association of Instructional Administrators
Sheraton-Atlantic Beach, NC
March 30, 2007
Thank you, Kay. As always, I appreciate the invitation to be with you. I will confess to some nostalgia, however. This is my first appearance before a large community college group since I announced my plans to retire in May of 2008. . I realized as I was collecting my thoughts that I am about to embark on a year of "final appearances" as President of this great community college system. I am happy that this “historic appearance” is before a group which has played such a crucial role in the success we’ve enjoyed in the past ten years
But I'm not gone YET -- and during the next year and few months, I will work very hard to make sure that North Carolina's community colleges are as ready as they can be -- as WE can be -- to answer the challenge of your conference theme -- serving the 21st century student.
My number one task for the next few months is to try to persuade North Carolina's legislators to provide the REAL MONEY to meet the REAL NEEDS of this system. Our system has made great progress in recent years -- last year's legislative session was one of the most successful in our history. Governor Easley has stepped up as a major supporter in many key areas. I am grateful. I am not, however, satisfied yet .
The priorities which are the basis of our budget request were set by a process of collaboration with all members of the community college family: presidents, trustees, faculty, administrators, students, and the State Board of Community Colleges. It is a very ambitious request, the most ambitious of any submitted during my ten years as President of the System. In years past I have spelled out our priorities, but often did not request everything we needed because I realized that resources were scarce and other needs were great. However, this year is different and I want to begin by spelling out that difference.
This is my last biennial budget. It reflects what I believe are the full needs of our System to fulfill the mission of preparing the workforce for the future and retraining the workforce of the past to meet the needs of the new global, knowledge based 21st century economy. Unless we have a workforce prepared for that future, that future will never come to North Carolina. We will stagnate in the backwaters of the past and the incredible momentum which has been growing in recent years will come to a grinding halt.
Furthermore, the only hope for broadly based economic growth in even our smallest and most rural counties depends on every county and community having a well prepared workforce; the only hope for this to occur is through our state-wide Community College System where almost every resident in the state is within an easy drive of one of our campuses or dedicated teaching site. This great access demonstrates the wisdom of those who created this system; today’s leaders have extended this access in to every living room or nearest internet access location through aggressive pursuit of distance learning using technology.
I am pleased that Governor Easley, in his budget request, has endorsed a significant number of our priorities and has proposed funding them at an appropriate level. The Governor has made as a centerpiece of his request greater connectivity of our state through the internet and the use of distance technologies in the delivery of education, at the public school, community college, and university levels. He has requested funding for our technology/distance learning priorities and I applaud him for doing so.
To keep up with demand, we must have increased bandwidth to support distance learning for students and course management for faculty. The Governor proposed $3.8 million to increase and improve the technology infrastructure which will give us the connectivity and capacity we need to take courses to every public school in the state and into every living room. This increased bandwidth will give us the connectivity required to link the community colleges with our university and public school partners. Data exchange and transfer for decision making and course development collaboration with the universities will be the outcome of this infrastructure growth. These collaboration efforts are critical for us to become a twenty first century System.
We can have all the technology infrastructure in the world, but if we do not have the courses to offer our students at all levels, that technology is wasted. We are requesting $1.2 million for our Virtual Learning Community course development initiative which expands the current course development centers from two to six to greatly increase the number of and speed with which new courses can be offered and to keep current the courses already developed.
One of the ways in which these on-line courses and traditional face-to-face courses can be enhanced for increased learning is through a digital library of web-based learning resources called a “Learning Objects Repository” (LOR). Learning objects can include graphics, video clips, movie fragments, digital pictures, sounds, and more, all available to integrate into an on-line course or used by a traditional lecturer. For the initial development of the learning objects of the LOR, we have been working with SAS Institute and our university partners. We propose to work with faculty at the universities to design these learning objects so that they can be used with online or classroom instruction by both community college and university faculty. To fund the next level of this development we need the $624,000 proposed by the Governor.
The Community College System and the University System continue to look for ways to collaborate in technology. As licenses for the current course management systems (CMS) of both the Community College and the University Systems expire in mid-2008, we need to collaborate on a new partnership, and the recommended $250,000 will accomplish that purpose.
The Virtual Computing Lab, modeled after the North Carolina State University Virtual Computing Lab, will provide a state of the art, secure computing service for students, either as a part of classroom instruction or as individualized instruction. It is estimated that the Virtual Computing Lab will serve up to 3,000 students per semester. The Virtual Computing Lab is being developed in cooperation with the university system and will require the $631,000 proposed.
Add that all up, and it's a lot of money for technology and the people who are skilled in it. I'm guessing that there are at least a handful of you out there wondering -- do we really need all this to teach? To our students really need all this to learn? Will we ever catch up and keep up? I confess that I've had those thoughts as we struggle to stay on the cutting edge -- but I am now convinced that we MUST keep up -- because our students in this 21st century demand that we do so.
In February, the State Board of Community Colleges hosted the annual meeting of the Joint Education Boards. We met at the gorgeous campus of the SAS Institute in Cary, home of the world's largest privately owned software company. Our host, SAS co-founder Dr. Jim Goodnight, welcomed us with a striking thought that has really stuck with me. He said, "Today's students live in an interactive, technology rich, communications dominated environment, with cell phones, iPods, PDAs, computers and video everywhere. They have a very sophisticated understanding of how to use them. And then we send them to school to sit in rows, listen to lectures and look at the blackboard. No wonder they're bored and eager to drop out. We can't keep doing that!" Jim was talking mostly about K-12 schools -- but I was listening, too!
If we are to fulfill our mandate to prepare tomorrow’s workforce for a new global/knowledge-based economy, we must do more in preparing our own instructional staff to meet that challenge. Last year we were appropriated $504,000 for the professional development of our entire staff system-wide or $83.65 per faculty member or even less if we also try to upgrade or keep current the skills of all other staff. A private company spending such a small portion of its budget on professional development and keeping its employees on the cutting edge would be out of business before the end of the year! The $3 million appropriation request for professional development will allow our faculty and staff to become armed with the tools they so desperately need to prepare our workers to compete in a global environment by taking graduate courses in their fields and in learning to infuse their courses with a global perspective.
Likewise, if we are to train tomorrow’s workforce, we need tomorrow’s instructional equipment to fill our shops and classrooms. We applaud the Governor’s request for $5 million dollars of expansion of our continuation budget for equipment. Of course, we need far more than that amount. We have requested and can justify equipment funding in the first year of the biennium of $16,092,511.
A challenge for first-time college goers in a family is the lack of academic success by other family members in the past on which to model behavior. Many first-time students will take five or six courses, will have car problems or daycare problems or a family illness, or he or she will need to get to work immediately to support the family. It is easy to stop-out and never return. Kentucky has pioneered a concept of modularizing their various curricula so that a student upon completing a prescribed set of courses can be awarded a certificate, for many the first academic success in the family’s history. This certificate can be taken into the workplace as a credential for hiring. As the student/worker sees the value of this certificate and the need for additional credentials to progress on the job, they may go back and get the next certificate. With that certificate they get a promotion and the taste for academic success which then leads to another certificate and before you know it they have completed the courses for a degree! In the past they might have taken enough courses for one or more certificates, but without a change in how we do business, they take nothing away except the knowledge they acquired. I hope you will agree with me and the Governor that this is a promising way to increase success and completion by funding $500,000 to begin the course/certificate development which will be required to implement this idea.
Though the State Board and I are pleased with the inclusion of many of our priorities in the Governor’s request, there are a number of high priority and much-needed requests not included in his proposed budget. With regard to our highest priority (salary increases) he proposed a 2-1/2 percent increase over other state employees, but this is not enough to accomplish our goal of bringing our salaries to the national average; with regard to our second priority (allied health funding), he proposed no funding in our budget, though he did propose an increase in scholarships for nurses seeking to obtain their masters degrees and qualify as faculty in our System.
In the Appropriation Act of 2004 the General Assembly committed itself to raising the salaries of community college faculty to the national average. Though each appropriation act since then has included an incremental increase over and above other state employees, the relative position of our faculty and staff has risen only from forty seventh to forty fourth. Not only do we have an obligation to push for the fulfillment of that commitment, but the graying of our faculty and staff (many hired in the seventies when enrollment exploded) means a disproportionate number will retire in the near future.
Let me illustrate what I mean by the "graying" of the community college workforce with a few numbers -- the average ages of key categories of employees. You are allowed to gasp!
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- Presidents: 59
- Senior Administrators: 54
- Curriculum Faculty: 48
- Continuing Education Faculty: 50
- Staff: 48
- System Office Staff: 48, with almost 40 percent over 50.
The good news in those numbers is that our leaders, teachers and staff members are mature and experienced. The bad news is that a whole lot of them are already eligible for retirement, and many more are knocking on the door.
As these dedicated people retire, we will not be able to replace them with faculty and staff of comparable quality without competitive salaries. We will continue to lose valuable people to the public schools and four-year sector where salaries are already significantly higher. Having failed in the commitment to raise the salaries to the national average thus far, the State Board has requested a new three-year commitment which will require first-year funding of $19 million and second-year funding of $38 million.
North Carolina’s greatest workforce crisis today is the entire allied health workforce, but particularly nurses. Approximately 80% of all non-doctor allied health workers are educated at a community college. An in-depth study of the cost of educating a person in the allied health fields showed that it cost l.47 times as much to educate such a student as it does to educate someone in general education. Colleges are robbing Peter (often technical and vocational programs) to pay Paul (the additional cost for allied health programs). If our colleges are to meet their obligation to our hospitals, doctor and dental offices, nursing and rest homes, and of course, the people who will work there and those who will be cared for there, we must have enhanced funding. Our greatest disappointment in the Governor’s budget proposal was that he did not include the additional resources needed to fulfill this obligation. Just to fund allied health programs at the level they are now operating and to do so without short-changing other priority programs will require an additional $31 million. However, that is not our only challenge. The North Carolina Board of Nursing is pursuing a rule which will require accreditation of all of our nursing programs by the National League of Nursing by 2015. Since our clinical teaching staff is not required now to have masters degrees, but must when NLN accreditation is required, it is incumbent on us to assist those long-term, hardworking clinical faculty to obtain their masters by returning to school. They cannot leave their work for up to two years without income to support their families. The Governor included money in the UNC budget for increased scholarships for community college faculty, but that is simply to meet the needs of growth and attrition, not accreditation. In addition to credentialing our faculty, there are costs to our colleges of going through the accreditation process. Therefore, we need over $7 million just to meet this mandate.
I’m from Eastern North Carolina and represented many small, poor, rural counties when I served in Congress. I have worked tirelessly in this job and in Congress to enhance the opportunities for development in those areas as well as in our metropolitan areas. However, as I have met with industrial prospects I am repeatedly told that one of the reasons their company will not consider a rural county is the lack of cultural opportunities which their employees (especially managers and supervisors who will be relocating to North Carolina) expect and can get in the Triangle, Triad or Charlotte Metroplex. We must do something to level the playing field. Until the early nineties community colleges provided that cultural enrichment through its Visiting Artist program. Musicians, actors and artists of all kinds spent a year or more on our campuses and filled this great need. Working in collaboration (as we did in the past) with the North Carolina Arts Council, we have developed this request and will partner with them in the execution of this program. We request that you reinstate this program for colleges operating in Tiers 1 and 2 counties at a cost of $1.7 million dollars a year.
One of the greatest challenges American society faces today is the lack of enrollment of men, especially minority males, in post secondary education. Recognizing this deficit, the North Carolina Community College System decided to strategically address some of the factors that impact the lack of enrollment and success of the minority male student. Six community colleges participated in pilot Minority Male Mentoring programs and were funded by the Governor’s Crime Commission. The mission of these programs is to increase the enrollment and success of minority males in the post secondary educational environment. As a result of the success of these programs, an additional five community colleges have begun programs on their campuses. Though different in design, the results have been intriguing and highly suggestive that a continuation of these programs is warranted and will improve the retention and graduation rates of minority students. To continue and expand this mission, we are requesting $630,000 in additional funding.
An estimated $30 million is spent each year on our campuses remediating students who come to us under-prepared to complete college level work. Forty-eight percent of all recent high schools graduates must be remediated in at least one field (math, reading or writing). It is my belief that we need to identify the short-comings of high school students early and let the high schools address these problems prior to graduation. Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College for several years has tested all high school students at the end of the tenth grade, giving them the same assessment test that all colleges give to entering students. Students are then able to identify and improve the areas of deficiency during their last two years of high school. By doing so, this will increase the student’s success during their first year of college (community college or four-year college). This saves valuable time and money as they pursue their postsecondary education goals. It also saves the colleges tremendous resources that can be redirected to meeting their higher education goals. We are proposing to begin this program on a voluntary basis at a cost of $300,000, in order to assess its broader success before going state-wide.
Students with disabilities are coming to our campuses every year in greater numbers demanding the education which they are due as citizens of our state, but accommodating their special needs is very expensive. To meet the needs of these students for counseling, assistive technologies, interpretive services, etc. we require $3 million.
I think you will agree that this is an ambitious request -- but I am SURE that you know even better than I that every piece of it is essential. Help me persuade our lawmakers, too.
Am I thinking about LEGACY? Well, certainly I am, as I look toward the completion of this very satisfying phase of my career. And leaving this community college system in better shape than when I came to it is certainly high on my list!
I leave you today with some thoughts that have often been attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson -- current scholars say they come from elsewhere, but I like them well enough to share them with you anyway. In education today, we think a lot about MEASUREMENTS -- they are important -- and they are necessary. When I measure the past decade of my life, yes, I'll be looking at budgets and enrollments and benchmarks. But I'll be looking at other things, too -- with deep gratitude that my time with all of you has helped me achieve them as well.
The measure of success --
- To raise a child,
- To leave a garden for others to enjoy,
- To bring happiness to someone else;
- To know someone has been helped in times of adversity by what you did or said,
- To leave a part of you with someone younger;
- To grow from someone older.
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Thank you for your time and attention -- I will be happy to take your questions.
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