Page 12
February 6, 2019
O PINION
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Career Education is Pathway to Opportunity
D r . K arin e DwarDs
There’s something
about the turning of
the new year that gives
people a mind to make
changes. The new
year presents us with
a blank slate, a chance
to reinvent ourselves.
People want to eat bet-
ter, get into shape, spend more time
with their families, do more of the
things they love to do.
All of these things are worthy
goals, but why not aim for a fun-
damental change? Why not decide
to make this the year that you find
a great new career?
The fact is, having a steady job
with good pay and benefits – in oth-
er words, a career – leads to a more
satisfying life with more self-de-
termination. I’m not suggesting
that money buys happiness, but a
gainful job offers a person more
choices: choices on where to live,
what to do with your spare time,
how you wish to raise your family,
and much more.
Today’s gainful employment,
according to a recent Georgetown
University study, can increasingly
by
be found in “skilled service fields,”
which include industries
such as health care, fi-
nance, and information
technology. In addition,
as members of the Baby
Boom generation tran-
sition into retirement,
there is a rising demand
for traditional skilled
workers, like electricians, weld-
ers, and mechanics. For example,
according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, by 2024 our economy
will need as many as 165,000 new
trained electricians to meet market-
place demand.
What these trends mean is that
most living-wage jobs today re-
quire a significantly higher stan-
dard of technical training and ed-
ucation than in generations past.
According to the Georgetown
study, more than 95 percent of
the jobs created during the recent
economic recovery have gone to
people “with at least some college
education, while those with a high
school diploma or less are being
left behind.”
What does this mean, then, to
someone contemplating a change
in career, or to a young person con-
sidering options for their future? It
means it’s time to enroll in commu-
nity college.
Why community college, you
might ask? For two reasons: First,
not everybody is interested in
earning a four-year degree, and
there are lots of living-wage jobs
out there that don’t require a four-
year degree. Second, the price of a
bachelor’s degree has increased ex-
ponentially over the past three de-
cades. Community colleges remain
the section of the higher-education
system with the fewest barriers to
entry. For many students, partic-
ularly low-income students and
students of color, this can mean the
difference between a bright future
and not much future at all.
Third, community college career
and technical education programs
maintain a very high standard of
training and education, and remain
in constant communication with
private-sector to ensure that stu-
dents are trained with the latest cut-
ting-edge equipment, technology,
and techniques to ensure that they’re
ready to enter the workforce.
Here’s just one example of what
I’m talking about. Vigor Industrial
Inc. operates a 60-acre facility on
Portland’s Swan Island, where they
build, repair, and refit ocean-go-
ing ships of all kinds. Through our
partnership with Vigor, Portland
Community College maintains
a training facility at Vigor’s site
where PCC Maritime Welding stu-
dents can learn their trade on real
ships alongside skilled industry
veterans. These students are sup-
ported by faculty and staff at PCC’s
nearby Swan Island Training Cen-
ter, where people can also learn to
become electricians, millwrights,
industrial mechanics, and a range
of other skilled trades.
Newly-minted maritime weld-
ers can expect a starting wage of
around $17 per hour to as much
as $27 per hour, depending on the
specifics of the job and the work-
place. And these are jobs that are
unlikely to be outsourced -- as long
as the world needs ocean-going
ships, it will need welders to work
on them.
What’s more, PCC is pursuing
a federal designation of its Swan
Island facility as a Maritime Cen-
ter of Excellence, which would
expand its capacity to train domes-
tic maritime workers by admitting
more students, expanding facili-
ties, creating new maritime career
pathways, and awarding credit for
prior learning experience – includ-
ing military service.
These kinds of opportunities
didn’t come to pass by accident.
They’re part of a deliberate push by
PCC to become our area’s premier
job training and workforce devel-
opment engine. In fact, at PCC, we
call them “Pathways to Opportuni-
ty,” and they are spelled out under
our president’s work plan.
The Maritime Welding program
is but one example of the many
Pathways to Opportunity available
through PCC. Whether you want to
be an electrician, a medical assis-
tant, a paralegal, a web designer,
a medical lab technician, or any
one of a wide range of gainful oc-
cupations, PCC could be the right
fit for you. There is a path to a liv-
ing-wage career, economic securi-
ty, and a prosperous future – and it
leads through community college.
Dr. Karin Edwards is president
of Portland Community College’s
Cascade Campus.
Reparations as Answer to Racial Wealth Divide
Black America’s
vanishing wealth
is bad for all
b ob l orD
Want an
impossible
task?
Try
identifying
the most dis-
turbing trend
in America
today. Con-
sider the choices: Climate change
denial, extreme political polariza-
tion, gun violence, etc.
Those are just the ones on the
national radar. Here’s one that isn’t,
but needs to be: the systematic de-
struction of black wealth.
The reality is horrific, accord-
ing to the recent Institute for Pol-
icy Studies report Dreams De-
ferred. “Between 1983 and 2016,
the median black family saw their
wealth drop by more than half af-
ter adjusting for inflation,” the re-
port notes, “compared to a 33 per-
cent increase for the median white
household.”
Further, the report finds, “the
median black family today owns
$3,600 — just 2 percent of the
$147,000 of wealth the median
by
white family owns.”
This affects you regardless of
your color. Because inextricably
connected to the widening racial
wealth divide has been the extreme
concentration of wealth at the very
top.
During the same three decades
over which black wealth eroded,
wealth at the very top also explain
why the racial wealth gap existed
in the first place? No — but two
and a half centuries of slavery and
another century of Jim Crow do.
(Although those same immoral
laws also created incredible fam-
ily fortunes for plantation owners
and others, whose descendants still
reach parity with their white coun-
terparts.
Narrowing the racial wealth
divide must necessarily involve
not only de-concentrating wealth
— the nearly exclusively white
wealth — at the very top. It also
must address a moral imperative
that’s been neglected for too long:
Narrowing the racial wealth divide must necessarily
involve not only de-concentrating wealth — the nearly
exclusively white wealth — at the very top. It also must
address a moral imperative that’s been neglected for too
long: America must repay its centuries’ overdue debt
to the descendants of enslaved Africans, the children
and grandchildren of Jim Crow, and the victims of mass
incarceration.
three of the wealthiest American
families — the Koch, Walton,
and Mars clans — increased their
wealth by an astounding 6,000
percent. With the racial wealth gap
dragging down America’s median
wealth, that gives these billionaires
ever greater say over what happens
to the rest of us.
Does the concentration of
benefit today from that accumula-
tion of extreme wealth.)
Concentration of wealth at the
top doesn’t even explain fully the
destruction of black wealth that’s
occurred in recent decades. Struc-
tural and overt racism contribut-
ed as well. America’s policy of
mass incarceration has hamstrung
the ability of black Americans to
America must repay its centuries’
overdue debt to the descendants
of enslaved Africans, the children
and grandchildren of Jim Crow,
and the victims of mass incarcer-
ation.
Only one policy fits the bill:
A reparations program. Wealthy
Americans should pay the most,
but nobody that’s benefitted from
the discrimination should be ex-
empt.
Designing an effective repara-
tions program will be tricky, to say
the least. At a time when the coun-
try’s billionaires are systematically
fleecing not just black Americans,
but all Americans, reparations
would have to lift black America in
way that isn’t temporary. That will
be a monumental challenge.
But the challenge involved in
designing a reparations program
pales in comparison to the chal-
lenge that shouldn’t be a challenge
at all: getting a critical mass of
white Americans to recognize that
the wrongs of the past have never
been righted, that they’ve contin-
ued to this day, and that repaying
America’s debt to black Americans
cannot be ignored any longer.
And before we even begin the
challenge of persuading white
Americans to do right, we first
must persuade ourselves to stop
doing wrong. Racism, structur-
al and overt, is alive and well in
America today.
It’s time for decent Americans to
recommit themselves to these chal-
lenges. If not now, when?
Bob Lord is a Phoenix-based tax
attorney and an associate fellow
at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Distributed by OtherWords.org.