Students Seek Fewer Degrees And More Skills With Labor Market Demand
By Eddie Small: Hechinger Report
Kevin Floerke has been down this route before.
A student at Santa Rosa Junior College in Northern California, Floerke, 26 years old, already graduated in 2010 from UCLA, where he majored in archaeology.
This time, however, he’s not after a degree. He’s just trying to master a set of techniques and technologies that will help him verify the details he finds while doing fieldwork.
“I’m really there to learn the program itself and be able to use it in a professional setting,” he said.
Santa Rosa Junior College. (Photo: Santa Rosa Junior College)
Floerke, who leads tours for the National Geographic Society, is part of a group of students known as “skill builders” who are using conventional colleges in an unconventional way: not to get degrees but simply to learn specific kinds of expertise, without spending time or money on courses they don’t think they need.
It’s a trend being driven by the rising price of higher education and a growing emphasis on paying for training in only the most marketable skills.
“They’re looking for employment,” said Keith Bird, chancellor emeritus ofKentucky’s community college systemand a fellow for the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce, a policy group. “And that’s the bottom line.”
The popularity of seeking a higher education with no intention of graduating is a challenge for institutions that are increasingly focused on improving their graduation rates. Still, some institutions are responding by starting up programs for these students and considering creating new kinds of credentials to recognize the combinations of courses they’re taking.
People who enroll in but do not earn degrees from community colleges mainly gravitate toward courses focused on career and technical education, according to a study of students in the California Community College System, which found that these students typically enroll for no more than four semesters and take six or fewer credits per semester.
Skill builders in California are concentrated in construction, real estate, computers, law enforcement, and early childhood education, according to Kathy Booth, co-author of the study. For most of them, the college credits led to wage increases. Students who took courses in information technology, for instance, saw their pay increase by 5 percent, and skill builders at California community colleges overall saw their median salaries go up from $49,800 in 2008-09 to $54,600 in 2011-12, the system reports.
