Martin Landcaster President NC Community College System

Question 2:

Mitch Lewis:
Now you touched on this area a little earlier, but what is being done to help those workers who are involved in continuing education as well as some of those folks who have been displaced and they need to learn new skills?

Martin Lancaster:
Well, a very large number, in fact a larger number, I think, per capita than any other state in the Union, have been displaced by North Carolina's dramatically changing economy. Many states have a manufacturing economy and those manufacturing economies will come back as the economy rebounds. But North Carolina's manufacturing economy, unfortunately, has been focused on textiles, furniture and tobacco. Three manufacturing sectors that do not have a bright future. Textile jobs have pretty much all gone away from North Carolina except very high-end textiles. Furniture is fast following textiles. Tobacco, of course, is beginning to flounder as more and more people are choosing not to smoke. Those jobs then, no matter how good the economy gets, will never come back. We must retrain that workforce. Many of those manufacturing workers who are now out of jobs have at most a high school diploma and many of them not even that. So if we are to train them for jobs of the future, first of all, our challenge is to give them basic skills that they can use then to benefit from our higher-level programs. Many of these displaced workers are coming to us just for continuing education or non-credit programs. They want to get back into the workforce with new competencies as soon as possible and they don't want to take the time for a two-year degree or, heaven forbid, a four-year degree. So much of what we're doing is in the continuing education area. But we're pleased that many of these returning students, having worked perhaps for 10-20 years will pursue a four-year degree. And we believe that we're the institution that can make that possible for working people who have family responsibilities and can't just pick up and move 100 miles away to pursue a four-year degree at a university.

Another challenge of the North Carolina community college system is in entrepreneurial training. Our small business centers at each of our colleges do an incredible job in providing entrepreneurial training for people who want to start their own business. We start at the very beginning in determining what service or product this person might provide that will have a market in the community. We may refine a product or help them refine their thinking about a service that they would want to offer. We help them develop a business plan, a financing plan, a marketing plan and then help them through those early years with troubleshooting problems that they face. Once again, because the community college system has been so poorly funded, we have not had an increase in funding for small business centers since the mid-80's. We receive on each of our campuses only 62 thousand dollars that funds the small business center. It is not even enough to pay the salary of our small business center director. But it's that kind of entrepreneurial training that I think is so critical to North Carolina's economic future because, after all, most jobs created in this state are in small business, not in the huge companies that we may recruit from foreign countries or from other states. We are simply not doing enough in North Carolina to develop that entrepreneurial experience, that entrepreneurial interest that is out there. Until we do that, I think we're shortchanging the state and the workers of this state because I believe we can create a significant number of jobs through entrepreneurial training that will never be created without it.