WASHINGTON -- Mid-South Community College in West Memphis and three Memphis-area schools will share a $9.8 million grant to restructure community college education, the White House announced Monday.
The goal is to teach skills that local employers want and to quickly train people in eastern Arkansas for well-paying jobs that already exist in transportation, logistics, or highly skilled and technical manufacturing, Mid-South President Glen Fenter said.
"At the end of the day, these types of grants represent fantastic opportunities to reinvent particularly eastern Arkansas' future by finally having ways to connect folks who are looking for jobs with jobs that can elevate their ability to provide for themselves and their families," he said.
The West Memphis school will receive about $4.9 million. The other schools, all located in Memphis, will split the rest of the $9.8 million: William R. Moore College of Technology, $1.67 million; Southwest Tennessee Community College, $1.65 million; and Tennessee College of Applied Technology, about $1.6 million.
Fenter said the colleges will coordinate with the top 100 employers in the Memphis region -- such as Nike, Cargill and FedEx -- to create industry certification programs that can be completed in less than six months, as well as industry specific associates degrees and professional certifications.
Students will learn skills for jobs where they could earn between $30,000 and $50,000, he said.
"What this is going to mean is that in a relatively short period of time, a person can go from having a fairly small skill set to one that is very advanced that can lead directly to a very well-paying job, jobs that already exist, jobs that are truly doorways to a middle-class lifestyle," he said. "For many folks in eastern Arkansas, unfortunately, those pathways have not always been available."
At a White House event Monday morning, Vice President Joe Biden, Labor Secretary Thomas Perez and Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced that $450 million in job training grants from the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training competitive grant program would be divided among nearly 270 community colleges across the country.
The program is administered by the Labor Department and Education Department.
Biden said while the U.S. economy is recovering after being "clobbered" during the years known as the great recession, America's middle class is still struggling. Programs funded through the grant are required to team up with local employers to train people for jobs available in their communities.
"The untold secret out there is the middle class is not back," Biden said. "We've got to get this right; we've got to deal the middle class back in."
Because of the grants, community colleges are specifically training people for jobs available locally, Perez said.
"Yesterday's training program was train and pray," Perez said. "We're building the new infrastructure of adult training and education in the 21st century. People are going to have access to skills that will enable them to have jobs tomorrow."
Monday's announcement marked the fourth and final round of grants through which officials have distributed $2 billion in federal funds to community colleges in the past four years. In his 2015 budget, President Barack Obama has proposed spending an additional $6 billion over four years to help community colleges create similar programs.
In 2013, Mid-South received $2 million out of $23.8 million that went to eight colleges across the country that worked together.
That year, six southwest Arkansas community colleges shared $8.4 million to create a training program by working with regional manufacturing companies.
In 2011, a group of every community college in the state, led by Northwest Arkansas Community College in Bentonville, received about $14.8 million for the Path to Accelerated Completion and Employment, or PACE, initiative that restructured training programs lasting two years or less for manufacturing and health care jobs.
Metro on 09/30/2014