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Chamber Government Affairs Council Hears Education Officials
BOARDMAN, Ohio -- Students need better exposure to training programs and career options that are available to them, an official with the Ohio Board of Regents says.
Cheryl Hay, deputy chancellor for higher education and workforce alignment, was one of two speakers who addressed members and guests of the Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber’s Government Affairs Council at a Wednesday luncheon at the Boardman Holiday Inn. She was a late substitute for Ohio Board of Regents Chancellor John Carey, who had to provide testimony in Columbus but would rather have been at the chamber event, she remarked.
“Our students don’t understand the broad spectrum of careers that are available to them,” Hay said. “They may know one or two jobs in an industry but they don’t understand the whole career ladder. So they probably don’t spend time looking at the industry as a potential career for them.”
Ohio has added 238,200 jobs over the past three years and the educational system has to grow to accommodate that, Hay said.
The administration of Gov. John Kasich is focused on trying to partner the Ohio Regents with the state Board of Education “so that we’re looking at this whole continuum of students from all the way through their post-secondary work, and how we’re creating strategies aligned to support a talent pipeline in developing a talent pool for businesses.”
One example Hay shared with the chamber audience was of a student who, despite his grades and lack of high school coursework, pursued and was accepted into a pharmacy program. By his third year he was on academic probation and was out of the program the next. Although he managed to put together a major in biology, he didn’t have the background to pursue paths offered with that degree, such as teaching, and wound up as a pharmacy technician making just $12 an hour but with $75,000 in debt.
Among the issues the would-be pharmacist encountered was discovering that he wanted greater contact with people, an issue that could have been discovered with guidance counseling and exposure to career paths through an internship or co-op, she said. He is now enrolled in a respiratory therapy career tech program.
The state is promoting programs that enable students to accrue college credits while in high school, helping them toshorten the time needed to achieve a post-secondary degree and lowering costs associated with getting that degree.
The second speaker at the luncheon was Shawn Brown, interim executive director of the Northeast Ohio Council on Higher Education, who pointed out that by 2020 63% of jobs will require a college degree, and 31% will require at least a high school education.
“We’re focused a lot on getting more people in Northeast Ohio with college degrees,” he said.
That means increasing college and career readiness prior to college, including how students get prepared academically and how they think about careers; increasing college retention so students complete their degrees, whether in a two-year or four-year program; and getting adults who have some college but no degree back into the classroom so they can achieve their degrees. In Mahoning and Trumbull counties alone, he said, 50,000 adults fall into the latter category.
Among the encouraging signs locally is the percentage of high school students in Mahoning County going to college increased 11% from 2009 to 2013, he reported. “That’s a huge jump. No one else in northeastern Ohio jumped that much in getting high school students going to college. That is good news and the ripple effect will be amazing when we see how many students go on to finish college in the future.”
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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