President, North Carolina Community College System
North Carolina General Assembly
February 24, 1999
Co-Chairs and members of the Joint Education Appropriations
SubCommittee. Thank you for the opportunity to present the Continuation
Budget for the North Carolina Community College System.
First, as you are of course aware, the Continuation,
or Base Budget, is the heart and soul for funding the 58 community colleges
and the North Carolina Center for Applied Textile Technology. As
the term implies, it's what keeps us going. The funds appropriated
by the General Assembly, which are in excess of $580 million for 1998-99,
provide for the faculty, staff and equipment which are used to educate
the adult population and work force in North Carolina. Because of
the many years of continuing support provided by the General Assembly,
the Community College System is able to deliver quality educational programming
to people from all walks and stations of life. We thank you for that past
support.
We are the first stop, the intermediate step, and
the last resort for hundreds of thousands of your constituents. The
General Assembly has charged the Community College System with a responsibility
which we live out on our campuses each and every day. We are:
- First, a system of educational institutions throughout
the State offering:
--technical and vocational education, today and into the next century our primary purpose;
--two-year college parallel programs which enable students who seek a four-year degree to obtain their first two years in an affordable, supportive institution.
--adult basic education which helps lead our illiterate and under-skilled population out of despair and into productivity. - Second, a system whose major purpose is to offer education, training and opportunity to those who seek to return to the classroom, shop or lab to improve the quality of their lives.
Before I do that however, I believe it is important to tell you what we have successfully done with the resources with which you have entrusted us. This will give you a sense of what we do and how we are doing it, within our limited resources.
In a few days, our staff will present to you in some great detail the range of educational programs and services which we deliver to the citizens of this state with your support. Let me highlight briefly a few of them and some successes which they represent.
Your community colleges are educating tomorrow's work force. Everything we do at the state level and everything the community colleges do in your district is about jobs, one way or another. Community colleges equip North Carolinians for real jobs with real futures. Community colleges provide North Carolina's industries with quality workers. Community colleges help the economy move forward by growing new jobs with the promise of great futures.
Many of you know George Autry, the head of MDC, Inc., a Chapel Hill consulting firm specializing in workforce development. In MDC's report ‘The State of the South," George wrote: "Education beyond high school is no longer a privilege. It's an obligation that the individual and society owe each other. We must give massive attention to our systems for educating adults. We've got to compete first on the basis of smart workers, as well as the availability of technology and capital. Those are the new elements, the new critical factors of economic development. The most flexible tool we in the South have in our arsenal is our systems of community colleges."
In North Carolina, we don't have to look far to find smart workers who have turned technical education at a community college into spectacular success.
There's Rachel Selisker, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Quintiles Transnational, one of North Carolina's fastest-growing companies. She's a graduate of Wake Technical Community College, and she supervises 500 people handling billions of dollars around the world.
There's Bob Moss, who grew up in Charlotte and lost his dad during his teen years. Bob worked hard and earned his degree in building and construction at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte. Today he runs Centex-Rooney, a $750 million dollar business which is the second largest construction company in Florida doing huge construction projects in 20 states, including North Carolina, his home state.
Behind these individual success stories are hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians who have found satisfying careers, thanks to their technical education at community colleges. Community colleges educate almost two-thirds of North Carolina's registered nurses and a huge number of technicians, hygienists, certified assistants and other essential personnel on whom the health care industry depends. They train 95 percent of our firefighters and four out of five law enforcement officers.
Our community colleges are working hard to spread the message that technical and vocational education pays off for young people and for their families. Guilford County is just one area where the message is getting through, thanks to imaginative partnerships with Guilford Technical Community College, area high schools, business leaders in targeted industries and area universities on rigorous Tech Prep programs.
Throughout the Community College System, partnerships with business represent a large part of our success with technical training. For example, Miller Brewing Company selected North Carolina as the site for its first statewide TOOLS FOR SUCCESS program, which awards highly-skilled technical graduates with scholarships in the form of giving them the tools of their trades upon graduation. According to Michael Brophy, Miller's Director of Corporate Relations, North Carolina was chosen for two reasons. First, our state has an outstanding reputation for excellence in community college education. Second, the System is a proven leader in business/education partnerships. Seven colleges were chosen to participate, including Rockingham Community College and Forsyth Technical Community College.
Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute is one of seven community colleges working with Cisco Systems' Internetworking Academy Program to train individuals for positions in the internetworking field.
Wake Technical Community College has a creative partnership with Nortel which gives them full access to 71 of Nortel's labs for instructional use when they are not in use by Nortel.
At Durham Technical Community College, The Novell Education Academic Partnership has trained certified Novell network engineers and instructors and has 300 students enrolled in the program just this year. Graduates are able to move into high-paying jobs, and those already employed are able to be promoted.
Community colleges help North Carolina attract, grow and keep industries. One of the programs most closely identified with North Carolina's Community Colleges is the New and Expanding Industries Training Program, and justifiably so. This fall, Expansion Management magazine listed North Carolina as the state with the best program in the entire country for educating new workers. The ranking was based on a survey of top site-selection consultants around the country. Workforce Development and education are the key to economic success.
Jim Nichols, Director of Electronics and Information Technology Development for the North Carolina Department of Commerce, says, "When it comes to recruiting new companies to North Carolina or helping our existing companies expand, the North Carolina Community College System is our strongest ally in making that happen."
As vital as this pioneering program is, it is only one part of the work of community colleges in economic development at every level. Established industries benefit from Focused Industrial Training Programs and from Specialized Technical Centers. The North Carolina Center for Applied Textile Technology pioneered the concept of focusing sharply on a single industry. We now have the Hosiery Center's programs at Catawba Valley and Randolph Community Colleges and a growing effort in telecommunications at Central Carolina Community College in Sanford.
Equally important in workforce education are the occupational extension or continuing education programs offered through all of our community colleges. These are the programs that help our employees and our industries upgrade, retrain and adapt to the fast pace of change in the technological environment. In fact, our community colleges enroll many more students in occupational extension and other continuing education than they do in our "degree" programs, and that's an important message. Lifelong learning is what our colleges are about; in the future, it is what all educational institutions must be about, if our state is to continue to prosper.
The key to maintaining our leadership is always working hand-in-hand with industry on the next idea, the future improvement, the cutting edge that ensures that North Carolinians have the advantage in the jobs of the future as well as today.
I am pleased, for example, that the North Carolina Community System and the North Carolina Biotechnology Center are partners in an initiative which will prepare workers for the growing number of high-paying manufacturing jobs in the state's biotechnology, pharmaceutical and chemical industries. Job growth in biotechnology manufacturing has averaged about 10 percent annually over the last several years and will accelerate as more products move out of research into commercial development. Alamance Community College, Cape Fear Community College and Vance-Granville Community College are examples of colleges already actively involved.
A program with tremendous potential is the Geographic Information Systems/Geographic Positioning Systems program at Johnston Community College. GIS is one of the most dramatic breakthroughs in engineering technology in this century. Johnston has one of only two programs for GIS technicians in the country.
Community colleges also play an active role in creating the businesses that provide the jobs. Our 58 Small Business Centers are in fact centers for training and assisting entrepreneurs. Almost 78,000 small businesses benefitted from these centers just during the past fiscal year.
Community colleges teach basic language, math and job skills. Almost seventeen thousand adult high school diplomas and GEDs were awarded last year. That's about one out of five of all high school diplomas awarded in North Carolina. Our role in providing basic literacy is important also, especially in light of the recent surge in demand for English as a Second Language for Spanish-speaking immigrants, Southeast Asians, and others who are our newest North Carolinians. We have been a key partner in moving thousands of welfare dependent persons off welfare and into the work force.
From Catawba Valley Community College comes the story of a young woman of the Hmong tribe of Laos who settled in Hickory after years in refugee camps. She turned to Catawba Valley Community College for literacy lessons, GED and job training at the Hosiery Technology Center, which is pioneering a new way of using job-centered language to teach English. She has a good job and interprets for other students. She says: "Catawba Valley Community College was my mother and my father. It taught me to read and write and to hold a job. It helped me to be able to buy a house, to support my family, to be a part of the community."
Community colleges are opening doors to four-year degrees and more. It is sometimes tempting to talk about the college transfer programs of the community colleges as different and apart from our workforce education efforts or even a frill or distraction from our technical and vocational mission. It may be tempting, but it is also a mistake, because four-year academic and professional degrees are workforce education for many people, including most of us. Our college transfer program is vital for those who need convenient, caring, affordable, flexible options for starting baccalaureate education. It will become even more important as the echo boomers reach college age and you and the University System are challenged to come up with the money for facilities and faculty growth at the four-year institutions.
Thanks to the foresight and persistence of members of the General Assembly, the Community College System now has a comprehensive transfer agreement with the University System and with fourteen of our private colleges and universities. Working together, we have solved many of the nightmares of lost credits and repeated courses.Community college students who finish their associate degrees enter the University as full-fledged juniors; those who transfer earlier have the benefit of a much smoother process.
Ask Reathal Geary about the importance of a good start in college. He started out at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, where he learned a lot about biology...and even more about dreams. A year ago, he transferred to NC State University to study botany. Last fall, he watched while NASA launched an experiment he designed into orbit on the space shuttle. For Geary, not even the sky is the limit -- thanks, he says, to the foundation built in a community college.
Despite this record of success, there are places in the Continuation Budget which need attention. First, the 1998 Session of the General Assembly appropriated more equipment funding than the Community College System has ever received in any one year (approximately $40 million) . As you may recall, you appropriated $21 million to a non-reverting Equipment Reserve and an additional $7 million for allocation based upon a new equipment formula. This funding however was non-recurring. We need your help in providing additional equipment funding just to reach the 1998-99 level. To more effectively plan for the future, this should be continuation funding. The same is true for books; we need the restoration of approximately $2 million in library book funds and allow those funds to be used for information resources of all kinds, including electronic.
Second, we find our base budget support for the New and Expanding Industry program to be insufficient to meet the increasing demands for plant locations and expansions. We hope you can improve our Continuation Budget in this area. For all practical purposes, we have already spent this year's money and committed almost all of next year's Continuation Budget allocation.
Third, we operate with a faculty-to-student ratio, support staff, and operating cost budget far out of alignment with the demands of our students and how we actually use our dollars today. Last year, for example, you were able to improve our Continuing Budget in the area of technology with much needed positions, for which we are most appreciative. But of the $10 million which we received, $1,000,000 was non-recurring. To our colleges, this means that they will not have other cost dollars on a continuing basis, making the sustaining of technology improvements more difficult. While I readily acknowledge these are Expansion Budget items, they serve to illustrate how far we must stretch our critical base budget dollars to serve the citizenry. Were it not for the budget flexibility which this body has given us, this could not be accomplished.
Let me thank you for the flexibility you have given us and beg you to continue allowing that flexibility into the next biennium. While the General Assembly has not always been able to appropriate the funds which we need, you have with great wisdom allowed us to use the funds we have flexibly to address the unique challenges at each of our 58 colleges and the Textile Center. Each of our colleges, while sharing a common mission, accomplishes that mission in ways which are important to their local community and which cover critical needs you have been unable to fully fund. Thus, the flexibility to respond to local demands and meet critical needs is vital, unless each line in our budget is fully funded. Please keep our budget flexibility intact.
Thank you again for today's opportunity and for the opportunity in the coming days to provide you further details on our Continuation Budget and later in the session to present our expansion needs. Both are crucial to our future as the state's primary workforce development agency and to the economic boom North Carolina has enjoyed thanks to the world-class
work force we have educated.
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