Washington Monthly - September/October 2020 - 42

target demographic of the program, Parker said. "They have
no context or life experience," he told me. The program also
drills students in public speaking. In FAME instructor Chris
Lagemann's classroom, for instance, at the State Technical
College of Missouri, each class begins with a student delivering a presentation on shop floor safety, which the class critiques based on the checklists of do's and don'ts spelled out
on the pocket cards that define expectations for presentations. "They get evaluated on their posture and appearance,"
Lagemann said. "Did they stand up straight, and were their
hands in front? Were they fidgeting or standing still? Did they
introduce themselves?" Lagemann keeps track of how many
"um"s, "you know"s, and "like"s the presenter uses. Students
run through this exercise twice a day, every day. "It's a lot of
repetition," Lagemann said, but its purpose is to inculcate the
skills laid out on the cards to a point of automaticity.
Unlike many other training programs, where students
spend several weeks or even months in the classroom before
an internship, FAME students spend three days each week on

Companies have reduced
investment in worker
training over the past 20
years, forcing employees
to seek more training
themselves at community
and for-profit colleges, often
going into debt to pay for it.
the shop floor immediately applying what they learned. Lagemann says he sends a weekly report to the employers sponsoring his students alerting them to that week's lessons. "If
there's something in the plant that coincides or matches that
discussion, they'll try to have a job or assignment to practice
those skills," he said. "Likewise, if there's something going on
at the plant-if there's a new installation or a shutdown of
a particular piece of equipment-the manufacturers let us
know that so we can cover that topic or have a 20-minute discussion of what's going on."
This close partnership between employers and FAME is
a big reason why the program's placement rates are so high.
The sponsoring employers "match" with students at the start
of the program and pay them a minimum of $14 an hour-
enough to pay for tuition and living expenses. Instructors like
Lagemann do their best to tailor the curriculum to employers' specific needs, while a liaison at the company often serves
as the student's mentor, assigning work and communicating
with instructors. "They're taking on quite a bit of responsibil42  September/October 2020

ity from an employer standpoint," Lagemann said. "They've
agreed to pay this kid 14-plus dollars an hour for two years;
they're going to train them, keep an eye on them, and assess
them and hold them to the standards we expect." But, he continued, employers "do get a two-year look to decide whether
to give them a full-time job." So far, the employers partnering
with the program have decided that this level of investment is
worth it-as have the students.

B

efore entering FAME, Glenn Dodge had attended one
semester of college, with the goal of getting a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. "I learned very
quickly that it wasn't the right fit," he said. "I overburdened
myself." At age 19, he dropped out, bringing home thousands
of dollars in school debt-but not the degree he'd been after.
His stepmother, a guidance counselor at a local high school,
pointed him toward FAME. In 2017, he enrolled in the program's Missouri chapter.
Among other things, Dodge credits the program with
transforming him from a "slightly shy" person into a confident public speaker serious about his work. "I stuttered a
lot," said Dodge, now 21. "I would throw in 'uh's and 'um's.
I wouldn't give a professional greeting. I would just start talking." The program drastically improved his public speaking.
"I learned to make eye contact rather than just read off a slide.
I made sure people could hear me," he said. Dodge's sponsoring employer was a plastics manufacturer, where he had a
mentor named Jason Cartwright. "He would bring me up into
his office every now and then and just draw with Expo marker
on his window to explain something," Dodge said. "He made
sure I understood what I was learning and could apply it."
By the end of the program, Dodge was an excellent prospect for employers. After graduating in May 2019, he fielded four interview requests in one week, two of which turned
into offers on the spot. He accepted a job working the third
shift as a maintenance technician at Toyota Bodine, where his
starting salary was $50,000 a year. He says he'll have the loans
from his aborted college career paid off in under five years.
"I don't understand why people still believe that they need a
four-year degree to be a success," he said. "AMT and the manufacturing field is where the lucrative money is at."
One testament to FAME's success is its ability to propel the careers of workers who, in other circumstances, might
have far more trouble climbing the ranks. Camryn Vrbka, who
enrolled in Missouri FAME's inaugural cohort in 2015, is the
rare woman in a relatively male-dominated field. "I liked engineering, and I liked solving problems, but I also found out
I don't do calculus for fun," she said, by way of explaining why
she didn't enroll in a traditional college. She credits the FAME
program with not only opening the door to a well-paid career
but also boosting her up the ladder more quickly than she otherwise could have gone. She, like Dodge, has a job at Toyota
Bodine, where she maintains and repairs machines that inject
thousands of pounds of molten aluminum at high pressures
into molds for engine parts. These machines, Vrbka said, are



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