WHAT IS YOUR INSTITUTION DOING TO MEET THE EDUCATIONAL NEEDS OF TODAY'S WORKFORCE?

WHAT IS YOUR INSTITUTION DOING TO MEET THE EDUCATIONAL NEEDS OF TODAY'S WORKFORCE?

Not surprisingly, the answers to this question crossed over a very broad and varied range of plans and offerings, including credit and non-credit courses and certificate programs, as well as full-blown undergraduate and graduate degree programs on the local, national and international levels. Basically, we could have filled several pages with all the interesting answers given to this question. Due to space constraints, however, we provided three responses that together cover a lot of ground. Matkin explained how the UC Irvine Extension is making headway in this area on the local state level. Heeger talked about UMUC’s relatively new education programs. And Finney conversed about the counter-cyclical nature of education, in general, during an economic downturn.

Matkin: We’re weaving ourselves into the fabric of the workforce development infrastructure of our county and forming strategic partnerships with the agencies that are specifically designed to help unemployed people. For instance, I sit on the Workforce Investment Board of Orange County, and at UCI we have developed a pilot project for the whole state. This is a partnership to help unemployed people take advantage of extension courses in order to regain employment. We are also proceeding as a pilot project with the state, trying to figure out where the obstacles and barriers are to better cooperation between university extension operations like us and the local infrastructure. It’s like a pilot program and test case. When we try to contract with the local boards, and we run into problems, we document that and provide that to the state so they understand what the problems are.

Heeger: We’re very aggressive in the creation of certificates and degree programs that are responsive to the new economic opportunities out there so our students can essentially train themselves. We started a major new teacher education initiative last fall that is focused on adults who already have degrees in other fields to help them train to become classroom teachers in the secondary schools. We have another initiative in the education field - a master’s of education technology - which is aimed at teachers who want to become more adept at using technology in the classroom. We have a national audience for that.

Finney: We have consciously tried to put together programs that allow people choices depending on their circumstances. What most people in higher education have found is that non-credit offerings tend to cycle with the economy. Degree offerings are always more stable, but perhaps counter cyclical. In an economic downturn, degree programs tend to boom because people are really going for traditional recognized credentials in hopes of getting a job when they complete [their course of study]. They really invest seriously in making themselves more marketable. Whereas when the economy is booming, they are already working, and what they do is try to gain some education quickly on the side. That’s when our non-credit offerings tend to take off. So we have tried to address economic ups and downs by having a broad range of offerings to accommodate people wherever they are [in life]. That actually seems to be working and has proven out very well over the last year or so. We expect that by September, our non-credit offerings, which have been off a little bit this year, will begin to rebound and come back up. And our degree programs, which have been absolutely booming, will very slowly, typically over a couple of years, soften just a little bit.