How Community Colleges Can Spur Economic Development




Except that he has.


The Oregon District, courtesy:

The plant was made famous by the HBO documentary The Last Truck. The film follows the months and weeks leading to the last day the GM plant operated, but Murka didn't have to watch that show on cable. He witnessed it firsthand. His aunts, uncles and step-father all spent most of their working lives at the plant, as did most of the parents of Adam's childhood friends. Those adults who didn't work at GM were likely as not down the street at Delphi, making parts for GM. Both factories are closed and empty now, hulking behemoths the size of ghost towns. Adam told me that the people of Dayton rallied to keep out the vultures - scrap dealers with plans to dismantle the buildings and their contents and sell it all off by the ton. The rally was successful so the carcasses remain, picked over and lifeless, a harsh reminder that high-paying union jobs are largely a thing of the past in Dayton.




"For every drone that goes up you need a dozen analysts on the ground to handle the data," Murka told me. "That's a lot of good jobs." Not as many as GM and Delphi provided, mind you, but at least, he said, a start.

Murka introduced me to Sinclair's President, Steven Johnson. Johnson, a farmer's son, has degrees in marketing and a PhD in education administration. He's seen a lot of things in his life, lived a lot of places, and worked a lot of jobs. Like Murka, he doesn't have much faith in private unions, especially unions like the UAW that, he said, put the needs of its membership ahead of the needs of the community. Nor, he made clear, did he have much patience for people who insisted that college be purely "academic." 

"We're not Sarah Lawrence, not Wellesley," he says. "We're trying to help people get enough education to make something of themselves, people who are financially limited, academically limited, logistically limited." 

Johnson explained that the UAV training program is part of his plan not only to prepare students for 21st-century jobs, but to promote a new educational model. "For most of us, college is one of the few things you do only once - you go when you're 18, stay until you're 22, and never go back," he said. "That model doesn't work for everyone. Sinclair is a place you can come back to for the rest of your life -- to refresh, retrain. You've heard of 'just-in-time' manufacturing? This is 'just in time' education."

Apparently the good people of the larger Dayton region agree: Johnson told me that 550,000 people - fully half of county residents - have taken at least one course at Sinclair. During last year's graduation ceremonies, a man stood up and claimed he'd spent 32 years getting his associate's degree, course by course - and he said it with pride.

Adam Murka holds an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, courtesy Ellen Ruppel Shell

While visiting Sinclair, I met a number of students. Some had lost their high-paying jobs and were retraining for new ones. Others were just starting out, but seemed to have already adopted Johnson's philosophy - they were dipping into college to pick up skills for the next job, anticipating that they'd probably return to "re-skill" in the future. They have reason for optimism: a couple of months ago, Moody's Investor Services upgraded Ohio's outlook from negative to stable, and a recent report predicts the unemployment rate - already below the national average - will continue to decline. Of course, the 300,000 well-paying manufacturing jobs are not coming back, nor, it seems, are a lot of well-paying jobs of any variety. The state's largest employer these days is Walmart - with an astonishing 50,000 workers, most of them low-paid.

Still, Murka is hopeful that Dayton will continue to rise from its recent setbacks, and that Sinclair will be part of the solution. But he is less certain that GM will play a major role. Pulling away from the assembly plant's hulking remains, he recalled many a long afternoon spent on these grounds as a child, waiting with his friends for dads and moms and uncles and aunts to finish up their shifts. "It's hard to believe a guy my age would be looking at a place like this and talking about the good old days," he said, looking hard ahead. "What I'm trying to do now is everything I can to make sure what happened here never, never happens again."

Photo credit: Nikolaj Kondratenko/Shutterstock

This post originally appeared on the Atlantic.


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