Shannon NickinsonFlorida Gov. Rick Scott wants the state university system to aim high.
To achieve that he announced the “Ready, Set, Work” College Challenge this past week at the Association of Florida Colleges Trustee Commission meeting in Lake Buena Vista.
The governor wants all 28 state colleges to participate by graduating 100 percent of their full-time students to attend a four-year university or begin a career. The average state college graduation rate in Florida is 43 percent.
Ed Meadows, president of Pensacola State College, has said he accepts the challenge.
It will be a big one.
Colleges will be scored based on four categories:
- Completion rates for students.
- Retention rates for students.
- Job placement.
- Continuing education for graduates and the entry-level wages for graduates.
PSC lost $613,000 of its $34 million in base funding for this academic year because of the school’s showing on the state performance metrics announced this year.
PSC has the chance to recoup half of that lost funding when it gives the state a progress report in December.
Earlier this year, Meadows said, administrators decided to focus on two of the metrics they thought they could most influence: retention rate and graduation rate.
PSC’s graduation rate was 34.65 percent for students who started in the fall of 2010 and finished within 150 percent of the time required to complete their degree. If you measured how many students completed their degrees in twice the typical amount of time it should take, PSC’s completion rate is 46.3 percent.
The improvement plan PSC submitted to the state says an expanded student orientation program, an expanded group advising to branch campuses, and a peer-to-peer mentoring program for at-risk students are among the steps the college will take to improve graduation and retention rates.
In July, Meadows said PSC would add advisers to the staff, create a dashboard to tracks red flags (absenteeism, dropping out after one semester, poor mid-term grades) that may hold students back, and even open up scholarship money for students just a couple of credit shy of graduating but couldn’t complete their degree for financial reasons.
Clearly data show that jobs with higher wages require more training than a high school diploma. College graduates tend to earn more than those without degrees.
Data from the Studer Community Institute’s metro report indicates that only 10.4 percent of the people in Escambia County – and 9.4 percent of the people in Santa Rosa County – have an associate’s degree.
In both counties only about 15 percent of the population holds a bachelor’s degree.
That means many of our residents are missing out on earning opportunities by not pursuing and completing a post-secondary degree.
“We want to diversify our economy and have the most skilled workforce so more businesses will want to move to Florida,” Scott’s news release says. “That means we must have an educated workforce ready to fill jobs in competitive fields.”
A gap analysis of the Pensacola area job market conducted by the Haas Center for Business Research and Economic Development at the University of West Florida for the Greater Pensacola Chamber of Commerce focused on what jobs would be in demand locally and how well the local education pipeline matched those needs.
It focused on two industry clusters – advanced manufacturing and information technology – as key to improving the metro area’s labor prospects.
It found that as demand will increase in those clusters, the workforce education pipeline won’t produce enough workers with the right skills to meet all of that demand. And state colleges can be a key gateway to an education, higher skills and ultimately, a better job and a better quality of life.
The governor’s goal is laudable. But the data for Pensacola shows we are in the beginning of a long walk.
It’s one that will require collaboration from the secondary school system, the state college system and the community to make successfully.
Shannon Nickinson is the editor of PensacolaToday.com, a news and commentary website in Pensacola, Florida. Follow her on Twitter @snickinson.com. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
