ENCORE COLLEGES: Community Colleges Launch Encore Programs
Posted 08/13/2007 - 4:00am
by David Bank
Photo by Michael Newell for the U.S. Census Bureau.
The phrase “encore career” is going to start showing up in community college course catalogs this fall.
Ten community colleges are set to launch programs to help boomers make their encore careers in education, health care and other kinds of public and community service. They are each recipients of $25,000 grants from the Community College Encore Career Project, to be announced Monday by Civic Ventures and the MetLife Foundation. There’s complete coverage and links for the project on Encore.org’s Find Your Encore page.
In putting together a white paper on the emergence of such “encore colleges,” I was particularly struck by colleges that were applying the encore idea to power a new approach to solving long-standing challenges.
For example, Collin County Community College, along the telecommunications corridor north of Dallas, is recruiting bought out, laid off or otherwise downsized engineers from companies like Nortel, MCI and Texas Instruments as math teachers and putting them through a fast-track certification program that will have them in front of classes next year.
Owensboro Community and Technical College in Kentucky is taking an encore approach to the biggest reason for the national nursing shortage — a lack of nursing instructors available to train them. The college has teamed with the biggest hospital around to recruit some of the dozens of retiring nurses to become adjunct nursing professors.
What’s exciting about these, and the other, efforts is the way community colleges are brokering individual assets and emploment opportunities, and using the encore idea to deliver concrete, practical solutions to community needs.
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Encore 4 Year Universities
Why just community colleges? Universities are seeing their student profile change as well. What about grant opportunities to fund model ENCORE projects in 4 year Universities.
Four-year encore colleges
There’s starting to be encore activity in all parts of higher ed, including four-year colleges and graduate programs, as well as for-profit schools. Community colleges are particularly well-positioned, because of their affordable fees, open access, and strong focus on workforce development. But they’re obviously not the only pathway — just the only sector for which Civic Ventures (so far) has raised money to seed such encore innovation. Would love to hear about encore developments in other areas as well.
Transformation of Adult Students - 40+ Second Careers
We at National-Louis University in the Chicago metro area, Wisconsin, DC, and Florida have been re-engaging 40+ workers for about 30 years. There is an entire discipline dedicated to working with the adult student. Higher Ed has been tracking this for years, too. Some colleges have been slow to embrace the adult student and reorganize their operations to meet the needs of the “career changer” NLU has 3 bachelor degree completion programs in an adult accelerated model and we have about 8 different community college feeder schools. Faculty of NLU have teamed up with CC’s to develop adult fast track programs for the associates degree that meet 1 or 2 nights per week to fit in the lifestyle of a busy older student. This year we implemented a complete advising center and virtual career center for our adult students. We also changed our campuses to fit the needs of evening adult students with wireless campuses, lots of parking, easy access, high technology, weekend offerings and services. We are partnering with workforce boards, professional associations, and volunteer groups to educate the community about the values of the older worker and embrace their transformation. It’s a pretty neat world of work. My study on retirement is available through iUniverse called Boomers: Visions of the New Retirement. It is the framework for our Center for Positive Aging http://nl.edu/positiveaging/
Great coverage in Dallas Morning News
The Dallas Morning News covered Collin County Community College’s program that prepares downsized telecom workers for careers as public school math and science teachers.