The community college   and the American dream

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Alexandra Gonzalez of Elgin studies for an anatomy exam Friday in the new Health and Life Sciences Building at Elgin Community College.| Dave Shields~For Sun-Times Media

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Updated: March 24, 2012 8:23AM

On a quiet Friday morning at Elgin Community College, Jerry Sanders of Carpentersville was practicing starting an IV.

Sanders, a nursing student, tied a blue band around the rubber arm on a table in one of the nursing classrooms in the community college’s new Health and Life Sciences Building. He poked the needle into its latex veins, and red-colored water began to flow from a plastic bag hanging nearby.

“I’m trying to figure out how to get it in there effortlessly. That’s what we want — no pain,” he said.

That classroom is one of ECC’s state-of-the-art new labs; its equipment, one of the advantages of the Health and Life Sciences Building, said Wendy Miller, dean of health professions.

The building opened this semester, as the college’s programs for health professions consistently have seen more students apply than it has been able to enroll, Miller said. And it comes just as President Barack Obama announced a new fund that will help train 2 million workers for jobs in high-growth and high-demand industries, such as health care.

The president announced the $8 billion Community College to Career Fund last week at Northern Virginia Community College.

Obama told students there that “the skills and training you get here will be the best tools you have to achieve the American promise.” That’s the promise, he said, that “if you work hard, you can do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college and put a little away for retirement.”

“And the defining issue of our time is how to keep this promise alive today — for everybody.”

Career Fund

The Community College to Career Fund will provide funding for community colleges and states to partner with businesses to train workers in a number of those industries, including health care, transportation and advanced manufacturing. That’s because those growing industries have twice as many job openings as there are workers in the U.S. qualified to fill them, the president said.

“There are millions of jobs open right now, and there are millions of people who are unemployed. And the question is: How do we match up those workers to those jobs? What about the companies that are looking to hire right now?” Obama said.

Funding will include “pay for performance” strategies, providing incentives for community colleges, training providers and local workforce organizations to ensure that trainees find permanent jobs, according to the White House. States will be eligible for funding for training programs whose graduates earn a credential and find jobs shortly after finishing the program.

“We will have to wait for the details,” said David Sam, president of Elgin Community College.

“But we believe, as a college, we are well-positioned to be able to present what we’ve done to date.”

New building

Surrounded by hospital beds full of rubber mannequins in hospital gowns in Elgin Community College’s Health and Life Sciences Building, Sanders said he decided to go into nursing because “I can’t sit behind a desk too long.”

“I like being able to get up and move around and actually help people,” he said.

For every position in ECC’s career and technical programs for health professions, Miller said, five candidates had applied. And for as much interest as there is in the program, there also is a need: Health care and social assistance industries are projected to create more than 4 million new jobs between 2008 and 2018, according to the latest numbers from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Those career and technical programs at ECC include physical therapist assistant, massage therapy, dental assistant, radiography and surgical technology, all of which take up the first floor of the new building. Clinical laboratory technology, histotechnology and phlebotomy programs are on the second floor. Nursing is on the third.

The college is hoping to expand that programming to include additional radiography credentials in CT, MR and mammography, among other programs in which “you’re ready to roll as soon as you pass your exam,” she said.

The new building is twice the size of the programs’ previous facilities, according to Miller. And from “high-fidelity” mannequins that can speak and can simulate giving birth — expected to arrive this summer at the school — to physical therapy classrooms that include treadmills and trampolines, she said, the building helps students “really feel like you’re out in the field.”

“When you see students walking around the hallways wearing scrubs, they really take on that professionalism,” she said.

The students also get experience in the field, through the community college’s partnerships with Sherman and Provena Saint Joseph hospitals in Elgin, Delnor Hospital in Geneva, Edward Hospital in Naperville, Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield, and the Centegra and Alexian Brothers health systems, Miller said.

Those aren’t the only programs partnered with the community. ECC recently earned kudos in Illinois Lt. Gov. Sheila Simon’s report on the state of the state’s community colleges for its Integrated Career and Academic Prep System, which puts a professor alongside English as a Second Language students in welding courses. Simon also mentioned its Alliance for College Readiness, a partnership between the college and its feeder school districts.

The lieutenant governor presented that report last month after touring every community college in Illinois.

Similarly, Jill Biden — Vice President Joe Biden’s wife, who has been a community college instructor for the last 18 years — and Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis plan to take a bus tour through several states with the launch of the Community College to Career Fund, Obama announced last week. The two will highlight businesses and community colleges that are working together to train workers for careers that are in demand, he said.

Sam called that fund “a recognition of what community colleges are doing.”

“We have been doing college readiness and career readiness, and we’ve been working with partners on career readiness. These have been on a limited scale because resources are on a limited scale. This will give us a boost.”

2012 Budget

Obama first had announced a “national commitment” to train 2 million Americans with skills that will lead directly to a job during his State of the Union address last month.

The president spoke about the Community College to Career Fund last Monday as part of his proposed budget for the coming year. The “main idea” of that budget, he said, is this: “At a time when our economy is growing and creating jobs at a faster clip, we’ve got to do everything in our power to keep this recovery on track.”

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn also discussed higher-education funding in his budget address Wednesday. In an address that otherwise called for “hard but necessary” closures and consolidations of state facilities and cuts to state employees, Quinn proposed an additional $50 million for the state’s Monetary Assistance Program to help students afford college.

In both of the president’s speeches, Obama has called on Congress to stop the interest rates on student loans from doubling in July. He has asked Congress to make permanent the tuition tax credit his administration has put into the budget in the last few years.

And he has put colleges and universities on notice that tuition can’t continue to go up, or funding from taxpayers will go down.

“Because higher education cannot be a luxury; it is an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford,” Obama said.

“That’s part of the American promise in the 21st century.”