Techniques Nov-Dec 2012 - 17

Business and Industry Partnerships

with SchoolS, community to create

ALtErnAtIvE CArEEr PAthwAys
says Jeff Corbett, a senior vice president of Progress Energy and co-chairman of the leadership team in North Carolina. In North Carolina’s case, that means starting with the northeast and southeast regions that have lost jobs in the textile and furniture industries. Corbett says the program will help young people train for jobs in the bio-sciences, technology and energy. “Eventually we’ll use those [two regions] as ways to get started to think through the model and system” that can work around the state, he says. Of the approximately 91,000 North Carolina high school students who received diplomas this past spring, more than three-fourths said they planned to move on to a two- or four-year college or university. But by the time they reach their mid-20s, only half of them will have earned a college degree if past trends continue, according to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. The state has a successful program with community colleges known as Early College High Schools, a five-year program that allows students to earn a high school diploma plus a two-year degree or college credits. “The first classes have made their way through and the graduation rate is fanwww.acteonline.org

tastic. That gives us a nice ground floor for Pathways to Prosperity,” according to Corbett. Business needs to play a role in improving opportunities for all students because “we harvest the output of the educational system. This is where we get our workforce…It’s critical, from a business standpoint, to have young people coming out of school who can be productive in the workforce.” At Progress Energy, which recently merged with Duke Energy, “we hire people from right out of high school to people with Ph.D.s” to fill jobs providing electricity and natural gas services in the Southeast and Midwest. The network’s objective is to take a more “hands on” approach to shepherding students into areas of study that will translate into good jobs, he says. “We need to start thinking of this not in pieces and parts but in a systemic way, to connect kids to the workforce early.”

Learning Exchanges
In Illinois, the network will initially focus on the cities of Chicago and Aurora. “We’ve got a lot of partnerships” already, says Jeff Mays, president of the Illinois Business Roundtable. “We’ve been working on this since two years before the report came out. The question is how

do we leverage our current investment to have a broader impact, a systemic impact on education?” A 2011 report by Complete College America found that only about 37 percent of Illinois students graduate with a bachelor’s degree within four years, while 61 percent of full-time students and 23 percent of part-time students in Illinois earned a college degree within six years, or by their mid-20s. Part of the plan, according to May, is to create nine STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) learning exchanges that are of particular importance to Illinois’ economy: agriculture, food and natural resources; architecture and construction; energy; manufacturing; information technology; transportation, distribution and logistics; research and development; health sciences; and finance. These learning exchanges are voluntary public-private partnerships that support local implementation of STEM programs from grade school through college. The exchanges coordinate statewide networks of business and education partners, identifying within each cluster all the resources currently invested. “These exchanges can focus resources. Unlike the old models where you put out a little money and hoped somebody was
November/December 2012

Techniques

Techniques Nov-Dec 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Techniques Nov-Dec 2012