Racing to Keep Up With a Job Boom: Scaling Louisiana's Community and Technical Colleges

Ask anyone to name regions of high economic growth in the country, and historically Louisiana would not be on the list. However, Richard Nelson, President of the Louisiana Community and Technical College System paints a different picture of a state on the rise, with new employers and infrastructure rapidly coming to the state. The President of the 12-college network knows this better than anyone as the former Revenue Secretary for Louisiana and former member of the state legislature. Nelson recently shared how LCTCS is preparing to meet emerging employer needs as a wave of new capital investment is expected to bring roughly 100,000 jobs to the state.

Transforming a System Built for a Different Economy

With the influx of jobs coming into the state, Nelson is quick to point out that this requires a new way of thinking. "I think we have a pretty good machine of connecting people to opportunity, but at the same time, it was designed for our old way of doing business," he said. Historically, when a new employer moved into the state, LCTCS could stand up ad hoc training programs to meet employer needs. However, with employers moving into the state at a much faster rate, ad hoc programming is no longer sustainable. He recounts, "These employers come to me and they tell me all the time, ‘I literally need a thousand welders.’ And you're like, ‘Well, the state only trained 1,600 last year’... That’s orders of magnitude that don't add up."

Standing up the right programs to meet employer needs requires decision-making structures designed to come to faster decisions. Perhaps even more importantly, institutions need to get students into the right programs. In Louisiana’s case, this poses the question of which types of institutions students should be encouraged to attend. While a four-year degree has long been the push, a gap is emerging in the labor market. Nelson explains: "70% of the new jobs that are coming to the state are going to be associates degree or below. A lot of them are skilled trades…The state is really leaning on the community and technical colleges to meet the gaps of both in filling these jobs but then also making sure they're filled with citizens in Louisiana."

Standing Up Training Before the Facility Opens

Community and technical colleges are traditionally associated with meeting local employer needs, but multi-billion employer agreements introduce new urgencies. Programming doesn’t need to just be ready by the time a new facility opens, but before construction even begins. For example, a Meta data center coming to Richland Parish is expected to employ 5,000 people, where at its peak, a quarter of local residents could be working on-site. To proactively address this need, the local community college built a six-week data center technician program in partnership with the contractors building the site. "It's an interesting deal that didn't exist a year ago. It wasn't there. Now you have this huge industry." The new data center is just one of many agreements, so Nelson explains that learning and replicating is essential: "We're trying to copy some of those models with what we need in some of these other community colleges in those regions because we're going to have that same issue again."

A similar approach is underway with a Hyundai steel mill bringing 1,600 jobs to the state. "I think it's the first new steel mill to be built in the country in 50 years or 60 years. And so we have a partnership with them where we're building a training facility that we're going to operate to train their first round of employees and also do the continuing hires," he said. Nelson wants this kind of employer partnership to become the state's pitch to any company considering a move to Louisiana: "If you come to Louisiana, you don't ever have to worry about hiring people. We will find a way to get you everyone you ever need to know. And if the skills aren't there, we'll fly in these guys from Korea who will show you how to do it. And we will copy that and make it effective."

Making the Case to Legislators in Numbers They Understand

Funding a system built around fast-moving employer partnerships requires convincing a state legislature to put money behind it. As a former legislator, Nelson has developed a specific pitch for that audience. "I try to relay it to them in numbers they can understand. LSU, Louisiana State University, they have a new football coach. It costs $14 million a year. And I tell them, hey, look, for that 14 million, I can give you 3,000 welders. So just keep that in perspective," he said.

Nelson also likes to highlight what exactly an investment will do for the citizens of Louisiana and the legislature’s constituents. He explains: "I'm not interested in the abstract pursuit of knowledge. You're trying to get people from making $10 an hour to making $40 an hour and that changes their life," Nelson said. At a recent Louisiana Community and Technical Colleges Day at the state capitol, Nelson took a different approach. While he typically saw colleges demonstrate new pieces of high-tech equipment, his team "filled the rotunda of the capitol with a bunch of students who are able to say, ‘This is how this degree changed my life.’"

One Metric, Not a Portfolio of Them

While Nelson uses specific metrics to make the case to the state legislature, he expects his staff to present the same type of information when they come to him with requests. Ask Nelson what he wants to see when a college brings him a new program proposal, and the answer isn't enrollment growth or credential counts. "The only thing I really care about is that when they [students] graduate, they have a job. And it's a better job than what they would have had before they came here," he said. While higher ed can produce a bevy of metrics at any given moment, he considers most of them to be noise. For him, metrics such as certificates issued and graduate counts are nothing more than "phantom metrics."

This filter shapes how his team evaluates any new offering before it launches. "When they're talking about new programs and all these other things, I'm like, ‘Where are these people going to work? What's the demand for it?’" he said. For Nelson, the employment side of the equation will always be the number one consideration that drives whether a program gets the green light.

Becoming the System of Choice Earlier and More Often

If 70% of new jobs require an associate-level degree or below, why are four-year universities still the institution of choice? Nelson traces some of Louisiana's current mismatch to decades of funding decisions that favored four-year degrees over the credentials the state's job market actually needed. He also highlights the impact this has on retaining students after graduation:  "What you did is create this export engine of folks to Texas or Florida or somewhere else where there's a higher demand for that [four-year degrees] versus if you would have trained them to be pipe fitters or welders," he said.

His fix isn't to push more students toward two-year programs by default and stop there, but to make movement between credential levels far easier than it is now, starting with certifications and building toward a four-year degree later if a student chooses to. "I think it's going to be a much more cyclical lifelong search of skills and employment that will require more nimble training," he said.

Nelson's larger ambition for LCTCS centers on not just attracting more students, but getting them in the door earlier. He points to the system's average student age, around 26, as an opportunity cost problem. "That's a lot of wasted human capital because they could have been making a lot more money if they would have started earlier," he said. He poses a question that gets at the heart of the problem: "Could LCTCS have been the first choice? And how do we make it the first choice? I don't want to be anybody's best kept secret. I want to be the primary choice that people are making."

If Nelson gets his way, the next chapter for LCTCS will mean more than just filling Louisiana's coming jobs. The community and technical college system will be the place students choose first, not the one they settle for after four-year plans don't pan out.