Overcoming the Challenges of Globalization: Community Colleges and the South's Economic Future

It is a great pleasure for me to follow in the footsteps of the late George Autry, MDC's founding president, and William Winter, our current board chairman, to address this gathering of presidents and officers of SACTJC member colleges. MDC's institutional mission has intersected with the work of community and technical colleges throughout our 30-year history. George Autry was long convinced that the South's community colleges are uniquely positioned to transform the life chances of people put most at risk by economic change. Through the Ford Foundation's Rural Community College Initiative, which MDC manages and in which several of the colleges represented here participate, MDC continues to explore and support the leadership role that community colleges can play in connecting people with jobs through education and training.

In the fall of 2000, MDC will publish the third edition of our biennial report to the region, the State of the South (SOS). My talk today will focus on two issues that our research for SOS is illuminating:

• The continuing trend toward bimodal economic opportunity in the region, with the benefits sharply divided based on geography and skill levels.
• The impact of unprecedented foreign immigration on the region's institutions and communities.

Economic Change: Are We Done Yet?

According to data assembled by the Southern Rural Development Center at Mississippi State University, rapid job growth will continue in the region over the next decade as it has in the past 20 years, but with important distinctions. In terms of absolute numbers, the most new jobs will be created in occupations with low educational requirements and correspondingly low wages, such as basic retail and housekeeping. Of the 10 occupations that will provide the largest number of new jobs by 2005, only two—general management and registered nursing—will require even an associate's or bachelor's degree. At the high end of the wage spectrum, the region will experience a rapid rate of job growth, but the numbers of jobs will be comparatively small.

We are already seeing the impact of these trends in North Carolina, where we have recently begun to shed large numbers of jobs in routine manufacturing, many of them the economic mainstays of our rural areas, while we simultaneously add smaller numbers of high-paying manufacturing jobs, mostly in metropolitan areas. The fact that states like North Carolina, South Carolina, and Alabama can capture increased numbers of sought-after, high-skill manufacturing jobs testifies to our region's continuing competitiveness in fierce global competition.

Yet not all people and places will benefit equally as our economy reinvents itself. Rural communities, particularly those heavily dependent on traditional manufacturing and agriculture or lacking the scenic amenities to become tourist or retirement destinations, will face the likely loss of their economic vitality and the out-migration of their young people. And undereducated people, urban and rural, will find an ever-widening gap between themselves and family-sustaining, higher-wage employment.

Diversified Demography

• New Latino immigrants tend increasingly to be less well educated than past immigrants to the region. While high school graduates predominated among all immigrants to the South from 1990-1998, less well-educated immigrants, the vast majority from Latin America, will be in the majority going forward. This presents a huge challenge for public schools and postsecondary institutions working to connect new immigrants to further education and better jobs.
• Latino immigration is changing the demographic complexion of parts of the South that have been biracial in culture and identity for two centuries. This is raising major adaptive challenges for community institutions of all types, as Latinos move from being migrants to permanent residents and neighbors. How do we manage a new round of cultural and ethnic immigration when we have still not finished the work of black/white coexistence?
• Latino immigrants are disproportionately employed in sectors of the economy with low educational barriers to entry. These very sectors are the most vulnerable to economic change and to the destruction of jobs by the introduction of technology. In communities where jobs are scarce, competition for employment with lower-skilled African-Americans and whites is already sparking ethnic tensions. How do we create opportunities for upward mobility for both new immigrants and undereducated natives in an economy that is likely to have more jobs at the low end of the wage spectrum than at the high end?

The Adaptive Challenge

• We will need new programs, especially intensified ESL and Spanish language instruction, to make learning welcoming and relevant for new immigrants. Latino activists report that placing translators in classrooms for Latino students is a useful interim solution, but that bilingual instruction should be a long-term priority for educational institutions. Colleges in communities that have been traditionally mono- or biracial will struggle with this challenge. Some colleges have addressed the deficit of bilingual instructors by turning to community members to teach ESL, thereby drawing on a community resource and building trust with immigrant communities by fielding instructors who look more like them.
• We will need new partnerships between colleges and community organizations that have the trust and respect of immigrant communities and that are located where immigrants live. "What good is the claim that you're an 'open door' institution," said one Latino community worker, "if immigrants are afraid to walk through your door" because the fear of deportation is so deeply associated with mainstream organizations.
• We will need new arrangements with employers, particularly in the realm of workplace-based instruction. "Men and women in the Latino community are working two and three jobs. Sunday afternoon is the only time many have free, and they won't use it to go to a community college. The instruction has to come to them on the job." Employers ranging from Marriott hotels to hosiery mills in Randolph County, North Carolina, have found creative ways to deliver work-relevant instruction on the job through technology that downplays the need for mastery of English.
• We will need aggressive efforts to rebuild the traditional culture of the Southern workplace to accommodate new immigrants. Language instruction and cultural training for supervisors are urgent priorities to maximize workplace productivity and diffuse potential cross-cultural tensions.
• Beyond the issue of immigration itself, we will need fresh thinking about economic priorities at the community and regional level. Given the creative destruction at work in the Southern economy and our rapidly diversifying population, how do we create local and regional economies that will offer a full measure of opportunity to all workers and citizens? Where should a region invest its education and economic development resources to produce the highest return? These are hard questions to answer in a period of economic volatility, but community colleges should be part of the dialogue and the response. The Ford Foundation's Rural Community College Initiative is demonstrating how community colleges can contribute to economic leadership in the rural South and beyond.

Number of Immigrants to the South, Age 25+, by Educational Attainment:

Number of Migrants by Educational Attainment, Age 25+, 1990-95

Number of Migrants by Educational Attainment, Age 25+, 1995-98

Educational Attainment for the South, 1990

Biography of David L. Dodson

Dodson is co-author of The Rural Futures Program: A Guide for Trainers and Building Communities of Conscience and Conviction: Lessons from MDC's Recent Experience. He has been visiting lecturer at the Hart Leadership Program, Terry Sanford Institute for Public Policy at Duke University, and trustee/director of the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, the Center for Community Self-Help, and the Center for Law and Social Policy.

Dodson studied at Yale College, Yale Divinity School, and Yale School of Organization and Management in the areas of architecture and planning, ethics and theology, and public and private management. Previously he served as executive director of the Cummins Engine Foundation and director of Corporate Responsibility for the Cummins Engine Company.