And to my right is my distinguished colleague from the State of Wisconsin, a sponsor of one of the three bills before us, and I refer to my good friend and also a hard-working, dedicated individual, Congressman Steiger.

Our first witness this morning is Dr. Robert D. Looft, Superintendent of the Iowa Western Community College, Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Dr. Looft?

After you deliver your statement, there will be a period of questioning and if you desire your associates to answer questions, or if you want them to implement whatever statement you may make, they may do so. I want to caution the press that there may not be any pictures taken while the committee sits. That is a violation of the House rules. You may proceed, sir.

STATEMENT OF DR. ROBERT D. LOOFT, SUPERINTENDENT, IOWA WESTERN COMMUNITY COLLEGE, COUNCIL BLUFFS, IOWA; ACCOMPANIED BY LESLIE WARD, PRESIDENT, COMMUNITY COLLEGE BOARD, AND SENIOR CONSULTANT FOR NORTHERN NATURAL GAS; AND ORAN BEATY, ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT, COMMUNITY COLLEGE, AND EDUCATOR

Dr. LooFT. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee: I am Robert D. Looft, superintendent of the Iowa Western Community College, which has campuses at Council Bluffs and Clarinda, Iowa. I am accompanied today by Mr. Leslie Ward, president of our college board and a senior consultant with Northern Natural Gas, and Mr. Oran Beaty, administrative assistant with the college and an educator for more than four decades, most of which has been in vocational education in Iowa and Kansas.

Our college district is comprised of seven counties in Southwest Iowa with a population of approximately 190,000. This district, one of 15 in Iowa, is governed locally by an elected school board of nine persons. This board has placed great emphasis, since the college was formed in 1966, upon serving citizens. We are serving and preparing to serve citizens in the areas of vocational education, technical education, and adult education.

I have been an educator in Iowa since 1947. I have taught in small schools, in city schools, in junior high, high school, and the university. I have been a teacher, coach, principal, and superintendent. All my educational experiences have taught me that we must do a better job of preparing people for job entry at all levels. I am currently a member of:

Iowa State Education Association, National Education Association, Iowa Vocation Association, American Vocational Association, Iowa Association of School Administrators, American Association of School Administrators, and Council Bluffs Chamber of Commerce.

People in educational positions, along with persons in many other walks of life, have long recognized the need to educate youths and adults to an employable level. Any person today without a salable skill can expect only to join the ranks of the unemployed.

Without more effort on the part of all groups concerned with education and manpower development, what we at present call our unemployment pool will fast become our unemployment abyss.

Within a period of a little more than 50 years there have appeared upon the scene, numerous national efforts to solve the skilled manpower problems. Among these were the Smith-Hughes Vocational Education Act, other vocational education acts which included most recently the Vocational Education Acts of 1963 and 1968, the acts of the 1930's involving the National Youth Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Defense Training Act and the War Manpower Training Act of World War II, the Area Redevelopment Act, the Manpower Development and Training Act, and acts which have resulted in Job Corps, Neighborhood Youth Corps, JOBS and Work Incentive as well as other projects.

These efforts are mentioned only as means of pointing out that after all of the great expenditures that have been made and with all the experience that we have had, we are still faced with the problems of unemployment and a shortage of skilled manpower.

We will be the first to agree that a manpower act is essential to get people out of the unemployment ranks. We also again hasten to mention that any legislation directed at the unemployment problem can only be an emergency measure, and it can be nothing more than temporary.

Such ad hoc efforts have inherent problems such as: staff members who are not permanent, limited contracts for the project, and lack of accountability. In order to really combat and treat the combined giants of unemployment and shortage of skilled manpower, we must look at the problem in its entirety, as well as from a stopgap point of view. The need, therefore, is for the development of a more far reaching program of vocational education for adults and youth as well as manpower training for adults. In saying this we recognize that the proposed Manpower Act provides some phases of education for youth still in school, but we quickly point out that the education of youth of elementary and secondary age is a problem that must be handled by our regular schools systems in cooperation with advisers. from outside the ranks of school personnel.

We all recognize that we must help those who haven't been helped. We must identify, recruit, evaluate, counsel, identify interests, determine needs of business and industry, educate, place in jobs and follow them up. We must take these people from the ranks of the strained and restrained and place them into the ranks of the trained and retrained.

Recently Congressman Lloyd Meeds, a member of the House Education and Labor Committee, in addressing a National Vocational Education meeting, pointed out that during fiscal 1969 approximately 975.000 persons were removed from the unemployment pool to federally assisted manpower programs.

At the same time he stated 900,000 students dropped out before completing high school. If you will add these 900,000 untrained youth and countless other youth graduating from highschool without skills for employment to the number of people who are becoming technologically unemployed, it is not difficult to recognize the rate at which we are losing ground.

You can readily see why I am an advocate of a program much broader than a manpower act, even though the work that is contemplated to be done by the Manpower Act must be accomplished by

some means.

It will only be accomplished through a coalition of vocational education and manpower training.

Now when I look at the proposed Manpower Act. If I am any judge of the intent of the law, there is little included in it that will meet the specifications that I have just set forth. Any new Federal legislation should provide that the educational phases be handled by the schools with the referral and subsistence phases handled by the U.S. Department of Labor, in a coalition as indicated above.

Because I am convinced then of this I must go on record as opposing any Manpower Act legislation which does not include education as an equal partner in the program development, operation and in program evaluation.

I am sure that the vast majority of my colleagues in both the general and vocational education field support me in this contention. I am also sure that a majority of people in business and industry will support this principle.

I pointed out a few moments ago that we had much experience in trying to solve the unemployment and skilled worker shortage problems. We have had enough experience in one program alone to indicate that we need no new agencies and very few new regulations to solve our problems.

This experience has been under the Manpower Development and Training Act of the early 1960's. In this program the U.S. Department of Labor; the State Employment Security Commission; the State Employment Service; the Bureau of Apprenticeship and Training; and the U.S. Health, Education, and Welfare; and the State Education Agency, the numerous local schools, and business and industry cooperatively started to work out ways by which our adult manpower education needs could have been met.

There is little doubt in the minds of many of us that these organizations would have been successful if Congress had been willing to channel all appropriations through these coordinated agencies.

This was not the case, however. Separate and uncoordinated agencies were created by the Congress and parachuted upon the local scenes. Now after someone has taken stock of what has happened, the conclusion has been reached that we need a new creation which is to be directed by the Secretary of Labor, but without education becoming an equal partner.

Let us next look at the situation with respect to educating youth for employability. The various vocational education acts were intended for this purpose. Witness, however, the situation with respect to vocational education during the fiscal year 1970.

It is not news to anyone in this group that vocational education programs were conducted by the schools throughout this land for 8 months before Congress could agree upon the amount of money that was to be allocated for the serious purpose of preventing youth and adults from being dropped into the unemployment abyss.

The number of millions of dollars that it will take to undo this omission is your guess as well as mine.

No dollar goes farther in preventing unemployment and in proving a sound basis for the development of a skilled labor force than when it is expended to provide the proper education for youth while still in school.

Now let us put two great problems together under already existing and experienced Government agencies, as we have outlined above and we will have done more to solve the real problems that we must have come here today to work on, than anything else we could do.

The schools, in providing vocational education and technical education to youth and adults, have proved their worth and their versatility since 1917 when the Smith-Hughes Act came into existence. Thousands of adults have been provided opportunities to reach higher skill levels through the vocational technical programs in peace times. During the recent great war, the vocational education shops were available in which to start manpower training the very day that the National Defense Training Act of 1940 became law.

Following the war, the then Labor Secretary stated in an article in the Saturday Evening Post that the war would not have been ended so soon without the aid from the schools in providing trained manpower. The programs conducted by the schools will continue to do the economic job that they have in the past, and do a much more complete job if they are only adequately financed.

On this day that we are talking together here, there are many fine programs in operation that were designed and developed under the Manpower Development and Training Act.

More recently the work incentive program was developed. It is also a thriving operation. On the job training programs have been developed and have been successful. Related instruction classes for apprentices and journeymen have been highly successful when agencies cooperated to conduct them. We believe we need not give other examples to illustrate our point.

Gentlemen, no new agencies are needed. Let us use the existing agencies. Provide us with adequate financing, not just for the emergency programs, but for the programs that will eventually make it possible to discontinue the stopgap activities. Make education an equal partner in solving the great puzzle of unemployment and shortages of skilled workers.

In conclusion, I respectfully suggest that Congress should:

1. Provide for proper vocational education of students while still in school, through strong financial support.

2. Provide adequate and full funding of vocational and technical programs also, through postsecondary schools.

3. Recognize that vocational education knows how to get the job done, and has proven that it can do so quickly and efficiently. Must we "rediscover the wheel" all over again? Make education an equal partner in those programs of vocational education that are called manpower programs.

4. Congress should avoid a dual system of education, one for the "haves" and another for the "have nots". This is the danger in the manpower bills as they are written. If we isolate training programs for the "disadvantaged" we then, in effect, condemn more than half our population to second-class status.

It has been a privilege to appear before this subcommittee. Thank you for the opportunity.

Mr. DANIELS. Dr. Looft, on behalf of the committee, I thank y for coming here and giving us the benefit of your views.

I have noted your disapproval, so to speak-at least that is the ference I draw-that you disapprove of the three bills before us, th no new legislation is needed. However, that is not the opinion the chair. I am quite sure other members of the committee share view, too.

The legislation before us does not exclude the consideration of r cational education in the programs. If the legislation is analy very, very carefully, you will note that at least two of the bills prov that plans be filed with the Secretary or with the State agency at would leave it entirely up to the judgment of the agency in charge the plan to incorporate vocational education in its program.

It is not excluded by any means. If you have deducted that from your reading of the bills, I think you are in error.

Dr. LooFT. As I interpret the bills as they are currently printe there is failure to include education per se. It seemed to me there : a direct intent not to specify education as a partner in any means all. It almost, in my opinion, is treated as an outside agency that con fight for the right to serve educationally, but that other agencies woul have as much opportunity to assume the responsibility for develo ment of programs and so forth.

My plea in my statement is that education should not be made equal partner and a specifically stated partner in this approach te consolidation of those things that the Federal Government is now doing.

Mr. DANIELS. I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin, Mr. Steiger. Mr. STEIGER. Let me pursue this just one more moment. The con cern that has been expressed by vocational educators in Wisconsin, for example, touches on the use of the world dual school system.

They are afraid that we are giving to the Labor Department some additional authority which they now don't have. I guess I would ass you to look at my bill, in terms of section 6, where I say that the comprehensive plan among other things, shall require, first, that in stitutional training be, where possible, arranged or provided through State education or training agencies and that such training and on-thejob training provided for under the plan be of high quality.

Second, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare is required to approve the plan jointly with the Secretary of Labor. In the administration's bill, you will note on pages 15, 14, and at least two other sections in which there is the need for approval of consul tation with HEW. This is by way of asking whether or not you are saying to this committee that you want the Secretary of Labor to have the authority for education. Is that what you are asking for!

really

Dr. LooFT. No, sir. I feel those aspects of vocational education or manpower, which I think could be treated as interchangeable terms manpower training is certainly a part of vocational educationthink vocational education should be in the hands of educators.

It seems to me that development of programs, based on perhaps re

search that has been conducted by the Labor Department, should

show the need but educators should determine the means for alleviat ing the need for skilled manpower. In other words, certainly, my plea is that educators and the field of education should have the respons