By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
No Worker Left Behind.
That's the idea behind Gov. Jennifer Granholm's fifth State of the State address proposal Tuesday night to offer displaced workers free community college tuition, following her theme of investing in Michigan's people.
"For the next three years, a one-time offer," Granholm said. "We will provide free community college tuition to unemployed workers who want to learn the skills needed to fill high-demand jobs. We have 84,000 job vacancies in Michigan. Most require some kind of training or degree. Three years. Take it or leave it. Get training and a degree now and we'll pay for it.
"There are more than 100,000 Michigan workers who will be eligible to participate in this program, and we will do it largely through retooling our existing state and federal workforce development dollars. The federal government has No Child Left Behind. Work with me in Michigan to have No Worker Left Behind.
"One area that demands our special attention," the governor noted, "is nursing. Today we have a nursing shortage in communities across our state, yet we have waiting lists of people anxious to become nurses," including at SMC. "Something's wrong with this picture and we're going to fix it. Tonight we are launching the Michigan Nursing Corps, an initiative to train new nurses. We will prepare 500 nursing educators to train 3,000 new nurses in just three years."
Southwestern Michigan College President Dr. David M. Mathews said Granholm tried in her address to put together as many positive initiatives as she could with limited resources because the economic news has been steadily negative – particularly when she was "blindsided" recently by Pfizer's cutbacks.
Against that backdrop, free tuition for displaced workers is "one of the few pieces of good news she'll be able to announce," he said.
Mathews said a senior education adviser contacted the Michigan Community Colleges Association (MCCA) a couple of weeks ago to "float" three proposals including the displaced works tuition plan to see if the administration could get support on board.
With "the end not in sight" for the bottoming-out of the auto industry, unless displaced workers are retrained, there will be a "massive exodus that will not be good for the state," he said.
Conceptually, it is an easy idea to get behind, Mathews said.
"Our (MCCA) answer was we always want to see aid to students. In principal, helping people who lose their jobs is a good investment and a good use of federal dollars," although tuition vouchers don't necessarily help the 28 individual community colleges.
Mathews said it's "a little surprising how long it's taken state government to realize community colleges are the key to retraining. It's three years overdue. In general, when they talk about tens of millions of dollars in federal workforce development funds flowing to individual students, it doesn't help SMC or LMC (Lake Michigan College in Berrien County). We don't know how many will come here. It certainly will not affect us in the positive, just as big plant closings have not affected us negatively."