A story in the Community College Times notes that creating new training programs for clean energy jobs isn't always an easy path. As budgets tighten, school-to-school collaborations like the one at Laramie Community College for wind training, which also includes students from Delta College and Pueblo Community College, help to ease the strain. 

The story notes, "Given the high start-up costs for wind energy programs, Schmidt said he thought LCCC’s resources could be more fully utilized to help other colleges. The collaboration with Delta and PCC, which have well-established industrial maintenance and engineering technology programs, is the demonstration test. Beginning in June 2010, LCCC will offer intense, month-long wind technology courses to Delta and PCC students. The students will stay in LCCC dorms and will likely pay out-of-state tuition, though this is among the details still being worked out by the colleges. The students’ degree programs will require them to return to LCCC for a second intense session the following summer."

Michael Schmidt, program director of wind energy technology at LCCC, says that the school's partnership could help to reduce the burden of teaching new curriculum, but adds, "It’s an immature industry. We’re not really sure how things are going to develop over the next several years."

Responsibility is in the air at this weekend’s Bioneers conference. The attendees are, by and large, concerned about the impact they and their organizations exert on a stressed planet, and perhaps no one feels more culpable than teachers and education leaders.

During yesterday’s Education for Action session, Jim Baizer, science policy advisor at Arizona State University, said, “We work at institutes that are creating future leaders. They are coming up with economies that crash and lose $13 trillion. We are responsible for all these people and all these ideas.”

If higher education’s job is to prepare students for the world ahead, panelists and speakers seemed to suggest, it has so far failed to meet the challenge.

But no one is giving up. Tony Cortese, founder and president of Second Nature, said, “This is the first time in higher education that I’ve seen people saying that we need to be the first to try something and figure it out, rather than wait around and see who else can work it out first. Of course, sometimes when we try to solve a problem, we cause worse problems, because we think too much in the short-term. What we need to do is get people to look at multiple consequences, in an interdisciplinary and long-term way.”

The all-day session included workshop time for small groups, in which 70 or so faculty, administrators and students broke out to devise solutions on their specific campuses, or tell stories of projects that had already demonstrated success. One standout was UC-Santa Cruz, which has been pioneering a project that gets students to spend a semester researching a solution to a problem in their community and presenting the results to university staff.

Crystal Durham, executive director of the California student Sustainability Coalition, said, “We’ve probably saved millions of dollars in consulting fees by using the curriculum. Students run a research-based class that solves a problem. For example, they might say they want more recycling on campus. So they spend a semester working to understand how the local waste management system works, bringing in someone to talk, finding out how the university could make this happen, then at the end of the semester they present their results.” The class gives students real work to do that not only prepares them for their careers and incorporates environmental literacy into the curriculum, but also moves the school towards climate neutrality.

This is the most immediate way to influence students, said participants: the college must walk the walk toward climate-neutrality and involve youth in the process. Most attendees were already familiar with the President’s Climate Commitment, either because their school had signed, or because they were campaigning to get their president on board. More than 650 college presidents have signed, out of the 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S.

The importance of the Commitment, said Cortese, is that it moves beyond the historical segregation of environmental studies from the rest of the university: “When universities have done environmental work historically, what they’ve done is create environmental studies departments, which reach 5% of the students, and create more specialists. What’s great about the PCC is that it moves beyond these models.”

For everyone in the room, moving their institutions towards climate neutrality was a priority. Amber Katherine, a professor of philosophy at Santa Monica College, made the point that schools can no longer ignore the urgency of rising greenhouse gas emissions and increasing water, food, and resource scarcities. “What must we do at one minute to midnight?” she asked. “There is no time left, and excuses aren’t acceptable.”

We just hosted a half day workshop with Jobs for the Future at the Greening of the Campus Conference: Leading for a Sustainable Future: Green Workforce Training.

We wanted to feature the role of community colleges in workforce training, because we feel now (as we did six months ago) that enough attention hasn't been paid to the need for the campus to act as laboratory for green jobs training. The session featured some great speakers and ideas:

• Gloria Mwase from Jobs for the Future discussed the opportunities for under-served communities in the new clean energy economy, positioning green jobs as an important pathway out of poverty.
• Jay Antle from Johnson County Community College in Kansas helped the audience understand all the different definitions of a green job (and how difficult it is to define a “green job”) and talked about JCCC’s green workforce training programs on sustainable agriculture, energy auditing, and for corporate sustainability officers.
• Jennifer Hayward from Lane Community College in Oregon presented on how Lane uses their campus projects for hands-on training opportunities for their students in the workforce training programs.
• Ragini Kapadia from the AFL-CIO highlighted best practices in working with unions and presented a couple of campus/union partnerships.
• Patrick Fitzgerald from National Wildlife Federation reviewed funding opportunities for campuses committed to providing green workforce training for their students. Patrick also stressed that education and training needs to be supported through the climate bill if a clean energy future is to become a reality.
• Finally, Julian Keniry, also from National Wildlife Federation, discussed how campuses can be used as a laboratory for job creation. As campuses construct new green buildings or retrofit existing buildings with more efficient systems, students can be brought into the process to earn hands-on experiences that will help them in their careers.

Members of the Campus Ecology team are blogging at Greening of the Campus VIII at Ball State University. Kristy Jones is Manager of Campus Climate Education and Action.

USA TODAY has a new story on campus sustainability, focused on the rise of degree programs that prepare students to work in sustainability fields, such as green construction or sustainable business:

"David Soto of The Princeton Review says student interest is driving colleges to create programs that offer training in sustainability. Two-thirds of students surveyed for the company's recent "College Hopes and Worries" survey said a college's 'environmental commitment' would be a factor in where they applied."

The story also highlights the rise in technical programs at community colleges, such as Kalamazoo's 26-week program in wind turbine operation:

"Jim DeHaven, vice president for economic and business development at the college, says the school is offering the program to meet the needs of wind farms that are "scrambling" for trained technicians.'They can really write their own future at this point because they're needed at all the wind farms,' he says. 'They don't want us to wait and put people through a two-year program or a one-year certification — they want a fast track to employment.'"

What's interesting is the assumption that students will be able to find jobs easily in these disciplines, and that trained workers are already in demand for certain energy fields. Even a recession won't dampen hiring in all sectors: economists say that certain careers, such as health care, are usually immune to all but the most dramatic market fluctuations. However, it's less common to see climbing demand during bad economic times. The shift may signify that green careers in energy, environmental engineering and other sustainability fields are not only popular among students, but also make up a growing segment of the workforce.

“These green buildings have propelled us into the educational experience,” says Paul Matthews, vice president of facilities maintenance during yesterday’s green campus tour of Saint Xavier University and University of Illinois at Chicago.

Like many institutional leaders, Matthews could have opted to design and operate the campus’ two LEED gold rated buildings, O’Brien and Rubloff Hall, largely behind the scenes, with little connection to the students. Instead, Matthews made the student educational experience a core facet of the green building projects, providing training and experience that will give Saint Xavier graduates an edge in the emerging green jobs market. Graduate level interns are trained by Matthews to design educational displays, give tours of the building, help inventory campus greenhouse gas emissions and design the campus’ climate action plan.

It’s not mere busy work, says Matthews. The tasks completed by the students also help move the university towards meeting the targets and timetables of the American College and University President’s Climate Commitment (ACUPCC), a complex and difficult task that always needs more hands. 

This week marks the first edition of AASHE's Global Edition of the Bulletin. Alongside ClimateEdu, the Bulletin is one of the best sources of news on the campus sustainability scene, but until now has only covered stories in the US and Canada. The new international version will be released twice a year, sent by email for free to subscribers of the existing Bulletin.

The first issue, released yesterday, covers such topics as green building awards in Dubai and Ho Chi Minh City, as well as student projects in Sydney and biodiesel parks in India.

See More:

Shanghai Calling: International Collaboration for Sustainability

Youth Activists Vocal at Climate Talks in Poznan, Poland

Last week, President Obama announced the creation of the American Graduation Initiative, which is expected to funnel $12 billion to community colleges to educate underemployed or unemployed workers in preparation for the day when the economy swings upwards again.

"..[T]he hard truth is that some of the jobs that have been lost in the auto industry and elsewhere won’t be coming back," said Obama. "They are casualties of a changing economy. And that only underscores the importance of generating new businesses and industries to replace the ones we’ve lost, and of preparing our workers to fill the jobs they create." 

The plan calls for an additional 5 million community college graduates by 2020--about 6 million are currently attending--and provides those students with a pathway to completing a four-year degree, if they so choose. About $9 billion will go towards two grant programs intended to better track promising strategies for teaching and learning and increase completion rates. Some money will also go towards renovating facilities, providing more guidance to students exiting high school, and expanding online educational opportunities.

So, is this good news for green jobs education and training, which we've talked about here, here, and here? Maybe.

While clean energy is a platform of the Obama administration, the $12 billion, which would be disbursed over the next ten years, hasn't been specifically dedicated to green jobs training. Until the budget committee makes its allocations, the focus on renewable energy training won't be clear, but so far it looks as if the program is making immediate employment, not clean energy, its primary concern.

However, the shift towards training workers for careers in sustainability may not need federal support, simply because it's already inevitable. A recent UN report predicted the creation of more than 20 million jobs worldwide in clean energy and other green fields by 2030, and many of those jobs are what's termed "middle-skilled," requiring a level of education that is greater than high school but less than a Bachelor's degree. (Job opportunities in health care are also expected to rise.)

Community colleges are expected to take on the bulk of this training because they are typically more agile and diverse than liberal arts schools, and have access to different populations of students. These schools also tend to be very connected to local employers, and have good data on the jobs available to their graduates, which means that in many regions, they are expanding their clean energy programs in response to demand. So, the AGI funds that go to those schools may help to support green jobs by default, though it's not yet the explicit support that advocates, including National Wildlife Federation, hope for.

We'll watch as the allocations are made in the next few months, and see where this goes.

A new article in Inside Higher Ed profiles a growing trend: hosting a themed "year of sustainability" on campus. The story notes, "with multiple campuses, including Davidson College, New Mexico State, Villanova University and University of Denver having just finished up their years, the results have been varied, and some question whether the concept is more than a gimmick."

The schools featured took different approaches, including everything from reducing food waste and increasing recycling to creating new graduate programs or minors that focus on sustainability.

The story goes on to quote NWF's director of campus and community leadership, Julian Keniry, who says, "Sustainability is something that needs to be the purpose of education across operations and disciplines and sustained over time. The idea of focusing on a one year theme doesn't lend itself to a [sustainable approach]. But it might be a way to catalyze thinking that could lead to long term work."

The point almost seems too obvious to make. A "year of sustainability" shouldn't be a discrete event, but rather a kick-off to bolder steps. By definition, sustainability is about the long-term, about making communities and campuses more flexible, more resilient and more useful over time. If treated as a fad, it will fail.

So it's encouraging to see that none of the faculty or staff interviewed for the story thought of their efforts as a one-off. Says Kealy Devoy, Davidson's sustainability fellow, "We haven't achieved 100 percent on most of the goals, but I don't consider that an issue because we're not going to just stop." 

The Charleston Regional Business Journal reports that Virginia Tech has teamed up with Trident Technical College to develop curriculum in the green sector. According to the article, "the two schools will develop curricula on green building, green engineering technology and other energy efficiency-related areas. Virginia Tech will also help Trident develop a comprehensive energy efficiency retrofit program."

While many schools have set up such collaborations in order to get access to solar panels or other renewable energy equipment for their students, Trident's focus will be on weatherization and energy audits, as one of six energy efficiency training centers in the state of south Carolina. Money for the training program is coming from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

A short-and-sweet story at the Chronicle of Higher Education notes that even English majors can get their hands dirty at Furman University:

"The course was about Henry David Thoreau's Walden,
but instead of simply reading the memoir and discussing it in a traditional classroom setting, David Bernardy took his class to a wooded area near a 30-acre lake on the college's campus to build a cabin similar to the one Thoreau had written about in his book," says the report.

Thoreau might have approved. Considered a pioneer of nature writing, he is often referenced by modern environmentalists and social justice advocates who admire his commitment to deliberately living well with less, his thoughts on equality, and his willingness to spend most of his time out in the natural world, providing for himself and learning about his environment. Walden is as much an examination of the ways people should live as a memoir, and the questions Thoreau poses are as valid today as when they were written, particularly in the face of large-scale environmental collapse. So, as this group of students read Thoreau and then put themselves in a similar place, doing similar work, one imagines they were able to gain more from the text than they would have by simply reading it in an American Lit course.

Drew Woten, a sophomore in the course, believes it was a success. He said, "It helped us come to appreciate what he did, and to learn what it's like to really use your hands and use engineering and construction, as well as problem solving." He adds that Thoreau would have found it "silly for someone to sit in a classroom and just listen to lecturing."

More and more, faculty are deciding that students need these chances to learn differently. Bernardy says, "I think anytime you can help the students understand the text through something tangible and experiential, you create pathways of understanding that go beyond typical classroom learning."

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