Congress may have its hands full overhauling the health care system over the next several weeks, but President Obama is about to set the stage for another priority: overhauling job training programs and the community college system.
In a speech to the Democratic Leadership Council this morning, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said Obama will propose a new initiative “in the next couple of weeks” that will call for “the rewriting of all legislation related to job training and vocational ed in the country” — with a special emphasis on giving more funding and other support to the community college system.
Obama has already said he wants all Americans to have at least one year of post-high-school education. But Emanuel’s comments — which drew heavily on his own work with community colleges when he was in the House — suggested that Obama will try to elevate the importance of community colleges so they’re not constantly overshadowed in the political dialogue by four-year colleges and universities.
“What has been forgotten is how important the community college system is to our economy, our ability to compete in a global economy. It is literally the conveyor belt to allow people to upgrade their skills when they’re going from X job to Y profession,” Emanuel said. “As a former member of Congress who had a community college, two of them, in his district, I cannot tell you how important this is. It has not gotten the attention of the four-year institutions, but as a competitive advantage for the United States, the community college system is essential.”
One of the goals of the initiative, Emanuel said, will be to streamline the job training system into a service that can retrain workers in a more integrated fashion — thereby overhauling the current scattershot collection of programs.
“In the past, our job training system and vocational ed has basically been a program per problem. We’ve not had a comprehensive view of it,” Emanuel said. “If you were a veteran or X, you had a program for it. If you were a displaced worker because of competition, we had a program.”
“But we really need to think not as a program per problem, but a comprehensive view of what do you want out of job training, what is it supposed to accomplish, and then setting up a system that does that, rather than coming up with a program per problem that you face in the country,” Emanuel said. “And the nexus of this will be around the community college system in the country.”
Obama himself has suggested a revamping of community colleges will be one of the keys to his goals for modernizing the economy. Here’s what he told the New York Times magazine last month:
“I think it would be too rigid to say everybody needs a four-year-college degree. I think everybody needs enough post-high-school training that they are competent in fields that require technical expertise, because it’s very hard to imagine getting a job that pays a living wage without that — or it’s very hard at least to envision a steady job in the absence of that.
“And so to the extent that we can upgrade not only our high schools but also our community colleges to provide a sound technical basis for being able to perform complicated tasks in a 21st-century economy, then I think that not only is that good for the individuals, but that’s going to be critical for the economy as a whole.”
Now, all they have to do is find a way to pay for it — and shake the money out of a Congress that’s still trying to figure out to pay for the health care overhaul.
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