Putting college degrees to work
Bob Britt goes to college every day not in a classroom building hung with ivy on a peaceful quadrangle, but behind the high-security gates of a noisy, sprawling factory studded with smokestacks that makes engines for F-18 fighter jets, helicopters, and electronic surveillance aircraft.
After seven hours working on the shop floor, Britt and his fellow students gather to discuss the math and physics of precision manufacturing - blueprint reading, shop theory, geometric tolerance - not with tenured faculty, but with union machinists who have spent their careers at this Lynn plant.
Britt, 35, who ran his own business in North Reading restoring classic motorcycles, went back to school when the recession started picking off his customers. “I was hanging in there, hoping it would turn around,” he says. “In the end, I realized I needed to get a skill doing something that was solid and that wasn’t in danger of going away.”
Britt had watched as friends and relatives went to college only because it was expected. “They were 18, and so they went,” he says. “And when they got out, there wasn’t anything for them.” So when Britt enrolled at North Shore Community College, it was for a new kind of program that is being closely watched by industry executives and policy makers alike. It’s a program connected to the real world of work that all but guarantees its students something universities and colleges are being pressed to provide in exchange for their spiraling costs, and at a time when employers complain they can’t find workers for high-tech jobs in a fast-changing economy: useful skills.
Britt’s two-year associate’s degree program in manufacturing technology is a collaboration between the college - which furnishes faculty for classroom work - and General Electric. GE needs highly trained machinists to replace the large number of employees nearing retirement at its River Works aircraft engine plant in Lynn, which has been chugging along while recovering from the 1980s recession. GE pays the students while they learn and covers the costs of their academic courses in advanced manufacturing. That’s a high-growth field, one in which Britt is virtually assured a job after graduation that pays an average of $62,400, with ample opportunity for advancement.
And yet this idea of matching college study with industry needs remains a rare innovation at a time when other people are reaching the same conclusion Britt did: that a conventional college education can actually be a dead end. In Boston last month, for example, no less an authority than US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made the stunning pronouncement that he finds more and more graduates of four-year universities going to community colleges “to get that technical training to get a real job.”