Former Marine Cory May and his young wife faced a grim future in depressed Zanesville, Ohio. He was young, intelligent, energetic, and willing to relocate but nothing seemed in his grasp beyond a lifetime of minimum wage jobs. At age 23 he had served in both Iraq and Afghanistan but those jobs skills weren't in demand in eastern Ohio. Then the gas drilling boom changed that. He enrolled in a two-week, 80-hour shale exploration certification course developed by the private company Retrain America at Zane State. When he graduated he interviewed for three jobs before accepting a position with Halliburton, to cement wells at an annual wage from $60,000 to $70,000.
Across the the developing oil and gas fields the focus on education in small local and community colleges is energy and it has them scrambling to add faculty, courses, majors and job training programs. Far from being confined to Zane State this educational trend is being felt in dozens of small colleges in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and West Virginia. While some federal money has been made available it pales in comparison to some of the "green jobs" boondoggles where home insulation training attempts to turn menial and dirty work into a high paid profession.
State educational institutions have long been sensitive to the needs of the economies in which they exit. For instance Texas A&M has produced thousands of petroleum engineers, geologists, and petroleum executives. Every major agriculture state aside from the traditional agriculture and animal husbandry schools have huge food science schools to better market all the products they produce. It's not provincial pride but rather a plain fact that Ohio State and Purdue University have the best food science departments in the country.
There are many who look down their long academic noses at the notion of teaching anything practical and there is an aversion among many of learning anything practical but while Cory May is earning a good living the Occupy Wall Street crowd with their $200,000 student loan debts may want to reconsider that class prejudice.
You forgot to mention that that $200,000 education was for an undergraduate and master's in fine arts. Ah, in such high demand these days.
ReplyDeleteI know someone who keeps pushing his kid into training for a "green" job. The kid is a junior in high school and the dad thinks he's being really smart by pushing more for a skill rather than a 4 year plan. I mentioned the problem with the green jobs is that 1) the jobs are too expensive to sustain for very long 2) most of them are funded by the feds.
And that was that.
Push into a training program at Zane State. The boom will last at least 20 years.
ReplyDelete