Panelists focus on the issues at Employers & Education Summit

AT THE PBN Summit on Employers and Education, held Wednesday, panelists agreed on the problems in the Ocean State but not the potential solutions facing the Rhode Island community.
AT THE PBN Summit on Employers and Education, held Wednesday, panelists agreed on the problems in the Ocean State but not the potential solutions facing the Rhode Island community.

WARWICK – In a frank discussion of the education and skills gap facing Rhode Island’s workforce, participants in the Providence Business News Employers & Education Summit laid out competing visions of the road to success.

The participants on the panel, “Mid-Skill Jobs: What Employers Need/What Students are Learning,” were in basic agreement on what the challenges were – the large number of young Rhode Islanders who were ill-equipped in basic math and reading skills, the lack of core “soft” skills needed to succeed in the workplace, and the lack of financial resources and support for students trying to better themselves.

Their disagreements – often very stark – centered on what the solutions should be. The challenge, according to Ray Di Pasquale, president of Community College of Rhode Island as well as the state Commissioner of Higher Education, is to stop just talking about the issues and take action. “We need to develop an action plan, rather than a talking plan.”

Di Pasquale painted a dismal picture of the skills gap in education: 70 percent of CCRI’s students need at least one remedial class, 50 percent need two remedial classes and 10 percent need three remedial classes. As a result, only 10 percent of CCRI students graduate with an associate’s degree in three years. “The graduation rate is deplorable,” he said, saying that the community college’s goal is to help improve the skill set of students. “It isn’t going to happen tomorrow, but it is going to happen.”

- Advertisement -

One of the biggest problems, Di Pasquale said, has been the $40 million cut by the state in public higher education funding.

Andrea Castaneda, who oversees middle and high school reform, career and technical training education and virtual learning for the R.I. Department of Education, argued that it was not productive to pass the problem back and forth between K-12 and higher education; both needed to be held more accountable for results.

She said it was important to stress math skills, such as long division, and push students and teachers to improve performance. Castaneda said her department has just revamped the state’s career and technical training education to be focused on information technology.

Brandon Melton, senior vice president at Lifespan, the state’s largest private employer, said that in the last year, the hospital had received 185,000 applications for some 1,800 jobs, and only a very small percentage are available to those who only have a high school education. As a result, Melton continued, Lifespan has invested in initiatives such as a summer internship program for young people in Rhode Island’s urban communities to build a pathway to employment. The program emphasizes building the social skills needed to succeed in the workplace as well as building a support system for training.

The opinions of those attending the summit were varied and plentiful. Dennis Littky, co-founder of the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center (also known as the Met School), said that the emphasis needed to be placed on enabling students to unlock their passion and creativity, not on improving test scores. Littky talked about the importance of creating internships for students at businesses where a sense of entrepreneurship should be rewarded.

Steve Adams, a partner at Taylor Duane Barton & Gilman LLP, refocused the conversation on the importance of the quality he called “grit” – the ability to overcome obstacles and succeed.

Pierre La Perriere, senior vice president at Gilbane Inc., spoke of the importance of internships in retaining mechanical engineers at his company.

From the audience, Trudy Mandeville, president and CEO of Techcomm Partners, pointed out what she called an important gap in the discussion: the voice of small business was not represented on the panel. While she applauded Lifespan’s investment of $350,000 in its summer internship program, Mandeville said her small business lacked the resources to make that kind of investment.

“The panel did a good job of dissecting the complexity of the challenges in workforce education, and the competing pressures for expectations and measurements in preparing people for jobs,” Rick Brooks, executive director of the R.I. Governor’s Workforce Board, said, praising the panel’s discussion of the complex issues.

During the second half of the summit, focused on higher education and continuing education, the message was clear: In order to help fill available jobs, businesses and educational institutions need to provide better transparency on what those jobs are and what they will cost in terms of degrees and training.

“Reality has to come in somewhere,” Charles P. Kelley, executive director of the Rhode Island Student Loan Authority, told educational and business leaders during the latter panel discussion. “I wanted to be an architect in the 1970s, when the economy was [much] like today, and I realized I needed to switch to accounting if I wanted a job.”

Kelley touched on the brain drain, or the disappearance of graduated students out of Rhode Island due to lack of employment, with other panelists identifying other issues, including the lack of soft skills among potential employees, higher education curriculum, and attracting students to the [science, technology, engineering and math] industries that have been identified as central to Rhode Island’s knowledge economy.

Panelists agreed that there needs to be better collaboration between the state, schools and businesses to present a unified front and goal in investing in job creation and education in order to solve the state’s problems of a skills gap and high unemployment rate.

And that collaboration, they said, needs to expand beyond changing college curriculum and training.

“We need to make sure we are better at informing [students] at the K-12 level of demand. We don’t do that well,” said Steve Kitchin, vice president at New England Institute of Technology. “Part of my challenge is making sure students and the business community know who we are. That’s part of our dilemma on the supply and demand side.”

The summit, held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel Providence-Warwick, was held to bring educators and business leaders together to address real-time ways of solving the so-called skills gap that has been pinpointed as an obstacle to lowering the state’s dismal unemployment rate.

Other higher education panelists included Jose-Marie Griffiths, vice president of academic affairs at Bryant University, Tim Hebert, CEO of Atrion Networking Corp., and David M. Dooley, president of the University of Rhode Island.

No posts to display

1 COMMENT

  1. All I need to know about the quality of RI education is in this online letter to Burrillville HS students regarding summer 2012 reading:
    http://bhs.bsd-ri.net/sites/bhs.bsd-ri.net/files/2012%2012%20EEP%20Summer%20Reading.pdf

    The third paragraph – of just 2 sentences– has a significant typo (using the same word twice in a row) that MS Word regularly identifies – but the writer missed it.

    Much worse (!!!!) is the beginning of paragraph 4 in this letter “Use should have…” I guess the writer meant “Youse” ??? (Shades of Joe Pesci and Jersey Shore!!!). At any rate, “youse” is not an accepted term in the English language and it is extremely distressing to see a HS ENGLISH teacher using it in a letter to students. What kind of emphasis on quality education can one possibly expect when offering such a pathetic model?