On Monday the Obama administration unveiled a critical part of its FY2013 Federal budget proposal: an $8 billion dollar educational investment in a program designed to help propel millions of Americans into good paying career opportunities over the next several years, and in turn catalyze, strengthen, and quicken the slowly recovering economy.
The Community College to Career Fund will be run jointly by the Department of Labor and the Department of Education and it will, according to a fact sheet on the program released by the White House, “help forge new partnerships between community colleges and businesses to train two million workers for good-paying jobs in high-growth and high-demand industries.” The program’s strategy is to help community colleges, states, and businesses coordinate with each other in order to better train students in high-demand fields, including “health care, transportation, and advanced manufacturing.”
The White House stated that program which still must be passed by Congress, including the Republican-led House of Representatives, will focus on four areas:
- “Developing community college partnerships to train skilled workers for unfilled jobs
- Instituting “Pay for Performance” in job training
- Bringing jobs back to America
- Training the next generation of entrepreneurs”
“Employers today are looking for the most skilled, educated workers,” the President stated in a speech on Monday at Northern Virginia Community College in front of an audience of students and faculty. “I don’t want them to find them in India or China. I want businesses to find those workers right here, in the United States. The skills and training that employers are looking for begins with the men and women who educate our children.”
The President also remarked on the need for opportunities to be made available at all levels of the education system to students of all ages willing to work hard to achieve their goals.
“When an American of any age wants to pursue any kind of higher education -- whether it’s that high school grad who's just trying to get that first couple years of college education, or somebody like Mike who's in the process of retraining -- whether it’s two years or four years or more, we’ve got to make sure that education is affordable and available to everybody who wants to go.”
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