Empty Promises? Community colleges in North Carolina struggle to provide retraining to displaced blue-collar workers
By JAMILAH EVELYN
Kannapolis, N.C.
Just past noon on a dreary fall day, Walter Waller sits in an oak-paneled, fluorescent-lit room that once served as a break area for workers at a now-defunct textile factory.
The former employee of the Pillowtex Corporation, laid off in July along with some 4,500 others just before the manufacturer of bed linens shut its doors, sits with his back straight up against a blue plastic chair and stares blankly into the face of Becky Hammill. A counselor at nearby Rowan-CabarrusCommunity College, Ms. Hammill is leading a workshop called "Taking the Fear Out of the GED." She asks Mr. Waller if he knows "what the G-E-D stands for?"
Without waiting for a response, Ms. Hammill explains in her soothing drawl that the general-equivalency diploma is made up of five parts -- reading, writing, science, social studies, and math. Mr. Waller, clutching tight to a lime-yellow handout, looks a little disheartened as Ms. Hammill points out that the amount of time it will take to earn the certification will depend on each student's skill level.
"I just want to get my GED and go on back home," says Mr. Waller, frustrated.
After more than three decades of service at the factory that anchored this town some 30 miles north of Charlotte for the better part of the last century, Mr. Waller is faced with a decision he never saw coming at age 62. With his limited skills, he can take his chances finding another high-wage job in a segment of the economy that is quickly disappearing. Or he can try his luck in an education system that eluded him long ago.
State officials are hoping that Mr. Waller and many of his former co-workers will choose to go back to school. North Carolina has doled out $2.5-million -- from more than $20-million in emergency federal grants secured in the wake of the Pillowtex layoffs, the largest in state history -- to Rowan-Cabarrus and two other community colleges to help retrain the former mill workers.
The colleges have their work cut out for them. Nearly half of those who were laid off lacked a high-school diploma. Rowan-Cabarrus, which serves the area where most of the former Pillowtex people live, has enrolled 1,300 of the laid-off workers since the shutdown was announced last summer. About 200 of them chose programs that will retrain them for other industries, like automotive and industrial-machine repair, or to work in health care. The rest, some 1,100 people, are taking basic-skills courses, such as preparation for the GED and English as a second language. Though statewide figures are not available, officials say that by the time many workers finish those prerequisites for community-college enrollment, some will be running low on the roughly two years they are allotted for federal unemployment benefits, leaving them unable to complete a training program for another job.
Although the 59-college system here was founded to educate the state's work force, some labor experts say that the two-year colleges have failed to provide enough short-term training programs, do not know which jobs to train dislocated workers for, and are allotted funds from the state in a way that makes it difficult for them to do more. Furthermore, few workers are equipped to deal with the mound of paperwork they must fill out before they can even enroll in a community college.
"There are just too many kinks in the system," says Graham E. Watt, a senior policy associate at the state's Commission on Workforce Development, which is part of the North Carolina Department of Commerce. "If we don't get them ironed out, we will leave a whole generation of workers behind."
North Carolina's is not the only community-college system struggling to live up to the retraining part of its mission. Throughout the South and Midwest, in particular, many white- and blue-collar jobs are vanishing. Community colleges in Georgia, Florida, Ohio, and Michigan are struggling to retrain displaced workers. While white-collar workers tend to have broader educational backgrounds, and can often readjust their skills, many blue-collar workers are left without many job options. Community colleges, with their history of success with adult students, are expected to retrain them for emerging industries.
But community colleges are finding the task daunting: How do you tell third-generation factory workers without a highschool diploma that college is worth their time and effort?
"Mill towns really have their own subculture, and it's extremely hard for higher-education to infiltrate it," says George B. Vaughan, a professor of adult and community-college education at North CarolinaStateUniversity, whose father worked in a textile mill all his life. "Had he been laid off, my father would have died or gone on to some other blue-collar work before he considered going back to school."
One-StopCenter
A musky odor hits you as soon as you walk in the door to what is still referred to as Plant Four. The state's Emergency Services Commission set up a one-stop center at the plant where former Pillowtex workers can apply for unemployment and other benefits, get computer access, check out job referrals, and learn about training programs.
Just to the left of the main entrance is the closet-size room where a handful of Rowan-Cabarrus counselors sit behind a rectangular table. Most people idle in the doorway for a few seconds, scanning the faces that smile back at them and the handwritten posters on the wall that promise "a new life through educational opportunities at RCCC" and that the institution will "take the fear out of starting college."
John D. Spears, a 57-year-old wearing a black baseball cap, dusty black sneakers, and an Army-fatigue shirt, lingers for a second with his hands in his pockets and then asks, "What's this about taking the GED?"
Lori Lambert, a Rowan-Cabarrus counselor, explains that Mr. Spears could sign up today to take a placement test in about a week. For those who pass the GED test, the college offers many training programs. For Mr. Spears, she suggests industrial-systems technology, in which the college has a certificate program where students learn to repair industrial equipment.
"Whatever," he replies, grabbing a piece of candy from the table before leaving with an appointment card that reminds him he is scheduled to take the GED program's placement test in a week.
Mr. Spears was making good money at the plant, pulling in more than $15 an hour -- or just under $30,000 a year, plus lots of overtime -- for fixing looms. He dropped out of high school in 1964 just before completing his senior year because "back then, you just went to work in the mill, that's all," he says. "I went to school on those machines I learned to operate."
He remains skeptical about the value and accessibility of an education. He came to Plant Four to check on acquiring health-insurance benefits, but says he was told that the $407 a week he was getting in unemployment made him ineligible for much assistance.
"They won't help me out with something as basic as insurance, why would they help me go to school?" he asks.
When informed that he could take general-equivalency classes -- and others at the college -- free, he pauses and takes a drag on his Winston cigarette. "I don't need no GED to change that tire right there," Mr. Spears says, pointing at his Chevy pickup truck in the parking lot.
As he sees it, "there just aren't any jobs around here where I will make the same kind of money I was making before."
He may be right. College officials say that even with retraining, it will take a few years on the job before the former workers will earn as much as they were making at the mill. And that's if they get a job. Unemployment in Rowan and CabarrusCounties was 12.2 percent and 10.9 percent, respectively, in August.
Mr. Spears's situation is typical. Some 45 percent of the Pillowtex workers who were laid off did not finish high school. Most of them worked in the mills all of their adult lives. They barely had to even fill out an application to get the job, so the amount of red tape they now go through just to get unemployment benefits is dizzying.
Few of these workers can deal with the thought of starting over. Many are consumed with securing enough money and other benefits just to make it day to day. They would rather get by on odd jobs or flip burgers, even at a fraction of their former pay, than go to college. But even Burger King now requires its employees to have a general-equivalency diploma, or at least be working on one.
While Mr. Spears admits that a retraining program at the college might get him a job at close to his previous wage, "at my age, school just isn't in the cards."
Bursting at the Seams
Rowan-Cabarrus is making some headway. Officials say that within a year, they hope to enroll nearly half, or some 2,000, of the former Pillowtex employees in either basic skills or occupational programs like machining and electronics. The college had already completed most of registration for the fall semester before the layoffs were announced, so state and college officials had little time this fall to find ways to accommodate the workers in the class schedule.
The two-year college is already bursting at the seams. Enrollment has grown some 14 percent since last year. After the layoffs, college officials had to lease new facilities, hire new instructors, and purchase new instructional equipment with some of the state aid it received to accommodate the 20- to 25-percent growth the former workers accounted for in continuing-education programs.
"We just didn't have the time or the room to act as fast as we would have liked to," says Jeanie Moore, vice president for continuing education at Rowan-Cabarrus.
The college did manage to start special 14-week sessions in some occupational programs like heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning repair, and industrial machining. For other displaced workers who aren't sure they want to actually enroll in a program, the college has offered workshops in financial management, résumé building, and interviewing skills, which helps it establish a much-needed rapport with the workers.
"Once they get in those workshops, we're finding that many of them just want to vent," says Ms. Lambert. "We're finding if we lend them an ear, give them some respect, they are much more likely to come back to inquire about our other offerings."
Rowan-Cabarrus is already ahead of the pack compared with other community colleges in the state in terms of enrolling laid-off workers. Typically, North Carolina community colleges enroll roughly 20 percent of the workers in any given layoff, according to the state's Department of Commerce. For the Pillowtex closing, Rowan-Cabarrus has already enrolled 29 percent, and is aiming to serve about 50 percent of the former workers.
The $2.1-million federal emergency grant the college received has gone a long way toward helping it reach that goal. But it is the first such grant for a community college in a state that has lost some 50,000 jobs in manufacturing alone since 1999.
"There's no doubt, when you're talking about an influx of 2,000 students, we would not have been able to serve them without that federal money," says Jerry Chandler, senior vice president of the 23,000-student college. Roughly 18,000 of those students are enrolled in the college's continuing-education programs, an indication of their heavy emphasis on worker training.
Other colleges in the state have been forced to absorb displaced workers without immediate federal assistance. The state also reimburses two-year colleges for students a year after they start taking classes, well after the colleges must accommodate the former workers. In a recent study of displaced workers done by Mr. Watt at the North Carolina Department of Commerce, state officials bemoaned the fact that the colleges must wait so long to get their state appropriations.
"It limits them," says Mr. Watt, "at a time when their budgets are already stretched." State appropriations to North Carolina's community colleges have been cut by roughly 5 percent in the last few years. Nationwide, community colleges have seen their state appropriations shrink by anywhere from 2 to 10 percent.
Mr. Watt's report goes on to note that the colleges receive fewer dollars for continuing-education programs that help displaced workers than they do for credit or transfer courses for more-traditional students. That limits their ability to provide quick retraining courses in expensive emerging technology fields. If community colleges are unable to retrain workers for such fields, it will limit the state's ability to attract new industries to replace the dying textile, manufacturing, and furniture sectors that have played a large role in the economy.
"That's a real problem across the country," says North CarolinaState's Mr. Vaughan, who himself worked overnight shifts at a Virginia textile mill to help pay his way through college. It's also "a heavy burden for community colleges to shoulder," he says. "Essentially, they need more state and federal support in order to get the job done."
Work First
Federal assistance already plays a big role in retraining workers. The Workforce Investment Act of 1998, which Congress is reviewing as part of the reauthorization process, provides the bulk of the funds that enable displaced workers to go to college after they find themselves unemployed.
One problem college leaders find with the law, known as WIA, is that it encourages officials to first try to place workers in jobs. If that is unsuccessful, only then are they referred to community-college training programs.
"There has not been an enforcement of sending the Pillowtex people back to school," says Ms. Moore. "People are encouraged to wait and assess their own personal situation." That doesn't leave college officials in the best position to determine the workers' needs and come up with programs that would best serve them.
Even then, funds for tuition are only approved if a worker comes up with a plan that he or she can complete in two years. Often, what looks manageable on paper does not always work out in reality. If students run into a roadblock -- problems with their car or with day care for their children, for instance -- they may not complete their courses according to their original plan.
Mr. Watt's study found that many dislocated workers quit their training programs when their unemployment benefits dried up, which led him to conclude that the colleges were not tailoring enough of the training programs to fit the workers' time frame.
Stephanie Deese, director of work-force initiatives for the North Carolina Community College System, disagrees with that finding, noting the programs that Rowan-Cabarrus put together after the Pillowtex layoffs.
"We offer 1,500 continuing-education programs, available at a moment's notice," she says of the state's two-year colleges. "That was a fine report for the time, but it was just a snapshot."
The bigger barrier, she says, is helping workers take the fear out of going to college after having been out of the education system for so many decades. "There are some intangibles," she says. "We try our best to reach out to these people but sure, we won't be able to convince everyone."
A No-Show
Count Mr. Waller, from the workshop, among the convinced. He is currently taking GED-preparation courses at the college. He says he hopes to pass the test before the college's spring semester starts in January and then go on to a certificate program that will enable him to work in social services.
"I want to help people," he says. "God only knows where I'd be if it wasn't for the help I've gotten throughout this whole mess. I'd like to give back."
As for Mr. Spears, repeated attempts to follow up with him were unsuccessful. College officials say they have no record of him showing up to take the GED placement examination for which he was scheduled.
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Section: Government & Politics
Volume 50, Issue 12, Page A20