NC higher education must up its game to help career shifters

by Leslie Boney, UNC Vice President, published in Greenville Daily Reflector, March 19, 2016.

Isaac Hopkins probably doesn’t fit your image of a typical college student.

He’s 31, for starters, and he is studying for his second career, not his first. A former youth minister, Isaac says he “aged out” of his vocation, but wants to continue helping others. He’s just finished his degree in rehabilitation services at East Carolina University.

That kind of career shift is becoming a more regular feature of our working lives. N.C. State professor Mike Walden projects that up to 1 million jobs in North Carolina could become obsolete in the next 25 years, which means a whole lot of hardworking men and women are going to need new skills and new ways to make a living. In Pitt County alone, up to 24,000 jobs, paying more than $600 million in wages, could disappear.

Higher education needs to be ready for this change. A new UNC system study (http://www.northcarolina.edu/our-time-our-future/unc-engagement-reports) finds that our public universities offered more than 1.7 million classroom enrollments in continuing education courses last year, building critical capacity in medical education through the Area Health Education Centers, in local government through School of Government outreach to elected officials and civil servants, and in agriculture and community development from the state Cooperative Extension Service. Each campus has its own targeted programs: at ECU, the Talent Enhancement and Capacity Building Program has brought faculty and students into contact with government leaders in 35 towns and counties in eastern North Carolina.

As the pace of disruption in our economy accelerates, North Carolina’s public universities will have to up their game to serve more students like Isaac. And to make it work, more of our citizens will need their higher education experience to be what UNC President Margaret Spellings calls “affordable, accountable, convenient and lifelong.”

Access to our classrooms is part of the solution, but we also have to give more of our students a chance to apply their academic skills in real-world settings. No campus in the system does that better than East Carolina. Last year, ECU had 12,288 enrollments in community-based courses, the kind of academic programs that give students the chance to work with area businesses, nonprofits and government agencies.

A growing number of college students across the state are getting hands-on experience through paid summer internships. Last year, East Carolina used grant funding from the State Employees Credit Union to connect Isaac to a job at Carteret General Hospital in Morehead City, giving him valuable experience and building the resume he’ll need to launch a successful second career.

The credit union is trying to stop rural “brain drain” — the community-wide setback that comes from seeing talented men and women move away from rural regions in search of economic opportunity. By giving promising students the chance to work in small towns and build connections with employers outside the state’s major metropolitan areas, focused internship programs can help bolster long-term economic prospects in struggling regions of North Carolina.

Isaac loved his work at the hospital, and his bosses felt the same. At the end of his summer internship, Isaac emerged with a job offer that will let him give back to a state he cares about, helping people with physical disabilities recover and thrive.

It’s a new job in a new field; one that won’t go away anytime soon. One career successfully transitioned; only 23,999 to go.

Leslie Boney is the Vice President for International, Community and Economic Engagement for the University of North Carolina system.

http://www.reflector.com/Op-Ed/2016/03/19/When-the-First-Career-Goes-Away.html