Page images
PDF
EPUB

Mr. RUTTENBERG. That is right. This is one of the areas we need to get at.

Mr. FLOOD. If the gentleman will yield, are you speaking now of employables only?

Mr. RUTTENBERG. I am speaking of employables. Those in the labor force that look for work.

Mr. FLOOD. These are the real employables.

Mr. RUTTENBERG. That is right. Defined as in the labor force looking for work.

Mr. DUNCAN. So with only 10 percent of those people in the program, you are going to cut 25,000 off your training enrollments.

CONCENTRATION ON THOSE WITH LESS EDUCATION

Mr. RUTTENBERG. What we are going to try to do is to concentrate less on the individuals with 12 years of education or more and concentrate more on those with less than 8 years of education, because we have the same problem there.

Seven percent of our institutional trainees have less than eighthgrade education. Sixteen percent of the unemployed have less than an eighth-grade education. Really, what you said earlier and Congressman Flood, too, we have skimmed the cream off the top. Therefore, the job that we have before us is that much harder.

Mr. FLOOD. Wait a minute. You have skimmed nothing.

Mr. RUTTENBERG. Skimmed the cream off the top in terms of who we put in the training program.

Mr. FLOOD. You had nothing to do with it. It just happened. You have a piece of it, so have we. You got a break.

Mr. RUTTENBERG. All I am saying is those that we have put in training and gotten jobs because the economy expanded have not really been those with less than an eighth-grade education. We have not done as good a job as we should.

Mr. DUNCAN. That factor just aggravated the situation because each one is drawing off the best people and the ones left are more difficult to work with.

Mr. RUTTENBERG. That is right.

COST OF TRAINING PER TRAINEE

Mr. DUNCAN. That is why I do not think the average $64 increase in cost of training is realistic and I do not see much sense of cutting this program by 25,000 workers. Let me go into a local type thing. I can remember leaving on my desk for a period of several weeks a piece of paper, which I think came from your office, announcing_a training school for fish filleters. I am speaking from memory. It may not even be your department.

Mr. RUTTENBERG. Yes, it was.

Mr. DUNCAN. It was fish filleters. I was going to do something about it, but I get so much paper, so I just threw that in the wastebasket finally.

Mr. FLOOD. I would like to go to that school. I have a heck of a time on the bottom part.

Mr. DUNCAN. Maybe you are answering my question. This, as I recall it, was a 12-week program, and I could not see why you could not teach somebody to fillet a fish with three or four fish.

Mr. FLOOD. I agree with that.

Mr. DUNCAN. A 12-week program for a fish filleter. Why? Is it because you have to do this in a cannery and you cannot get the cannery people to take these people on unless you subsidize them to the extent of a 12-week program?

Mr. MURPHY. This was an on-the-job training program. In Brookings, Oregon.

Mr. DUNCAN. Precisely.

Mr. MURPHY. There were 10 trainees involved for a 9 weeks at a total cost of $2,200. It was an on-the-job training program in the plant, not an institution.

Mr. DUNCAN. Was not it 12 weeks?

Mr. MURPHY. Nine weeks.

Mr. PRZELOMSKI. The program was developed with cooperation of the industry. I am told this is a commercial producer and I am sure there was not very much reimbursement to the employer for $2,200. Mr. RUTTENBERG. That was $220 per trainee.

Mr. PRZELOMSKI. The seafood people were quite happy with that program from the reports we received. All the people that were in the program have become employable and were employed. This was for new entrants.

Mr. DUNCAN. If I see one on fish scaling, for 12 weeks, I am really going to be upset.

DIAPER SERVICE TRAINING PROGRAM

Mr. MICHEL. If the gentleman will yield, how is that diaper service training program going? We had 1 to train 700.

Mr. RUTTENBERG. This was a contract to provide route salesmen for the diaper area.

TREE PRUNER TRAINING PROGRAM

Mr. DUNCAN. We had another one of some 12 weeks for tree pruners that I think ended up with only two of them employed as tree pruners. Again it seems to me that three trees ought to be enough to teach a guy how to prune a tree.

Mr. FLOOD. That is a quorum call. Can we get back at 1 o'clock? We have a lot of work to do.

[blocks in formation]

TECHNICAL TRAINING IN JUNIOR COLLEGES

Mr. FARNUM. With regard to technical training, it was evident from information I have received that there is a psychological barrier here, both to adults who take extra training or skilled training to go back to a high school where they already have children in high school and young people who have just graduated from high school to take further skilled training in the same school that they just graduated from and I would like to know what the plans and the

progress is in the Department as far as MDTA training is concerned as it relates to the utilization of our broadly expanding community colleges that we are now having bouncing up all over the country in great numbers.

What are the programs and plans?

Mr. RUTTENBERG. Howard Matthews would be the most appropriate person to respond to that since he is really what Mr. Flood described earlier. He is the head of the Manpower Development Training Division in the Office of Vocational Education in the Department of HEW.

Mr. MATTHEWS. I can give you some data, sir. At the present time about 16 different types of administrative units are operating manpower programs, varying from high school to the local MDTA centers set up specifically for manpower and nothing else. Of these 16 types, roughly 8 percent of the training is being done through the junior or community college as an administrative unit and about 12 percent are being done through area vocational technical schools. Some 12 percent in comprehensive high schools; 10 percent in vocational high schools.

STATE OR LOCALLY OPERATED MANPOWER CENTERS

We see emerging a combination of either State-operated or localoperated manpower centers. They are only concerned with how long it takes to help the individual become what it is we want to assist him to become; 6 weeks, 9 weeks, or whatever.

In this type of a center, the adults or youths or both are referred on a cycle of maybe every week or every 2 weeks and they go through a basic education cycle and what we call a prevocational cycle where they learn attitudes for work, for safety-I couldn't help reflect as you spoke this morning on that fish filleter program out in Oregon. In that program these people had a lack of dexterity or skill in sharpening knives or just holding them.

This was the first coupled OJT institutional project. There was a considerable amount of time spent just teaching these people how to sharpen a knife, how to hold it, how to keep from cutting the wrist, and so forth.

Also, these people bring with them problems many of us never heard of before. This specialized skill center, as we refer to it, addresses itself to the kinds of problems they bring with them. In the skill center, the adults have been a prevocational endeavor alongside of the youth.

Theoretical people might say you can't do it this way but it works anyhow. You keep them in prevocational training and basic education until they are ready to enter a specific occupational training program and the specific program is on a cycle basis also. Instead of taking 22 automobile mechanics and holding them together for 26 or 50 weeks, the curriculum is on a rotating basis so every 2 weeks or very month you can take a new group.

BROAD USE OF COMMUNITY COLLEGES FOR SKILL TRAINING

Mr. FARNUM. Again you get away from the question I ask. You talk about the skill center. The skill center is fine if conducted in con

junction with a community college. I am talking about looking at the whole broad concept of providing educational opportunity here in many skills through the use of community colleges which offers an opportunity to all the people in a given big community, rather than confining the operation or the opportunity, I should say, to maybe a small high school area where they have one room that is equipped to handle a specific skill.

I am also looking forward to the day in the future on which, if this concept of utilization of our community colleges is fulfilled, that we have an ongoing part of the curriculum of the community college in terms of having a facility available for training in many skills all the time. And also taking a look at the future of the new skills we are going to have to train in, so we take people and train them before they are needed. Or at least the opportunity is there to train people before we need them.

What I want to know is, what are you going to do about this? Are you doing anything really constructive in this area and, if not, why not? And when are you?

Mr. MATTHEWs. Is your question_addressed to what is being done in the Manpower Development Training Act or what is being done generally?

Mr. FARNUM. Through manpower development, as well as what is being done generally because I think both of these fit in together.

Mr. MATTHEWs. Some States tend to designate the junior, or community college, as a training vehicle for manpower and to get around to the question you raised earlier about the reticence with which some adults will come back into an organized formal classroom setting, they have solicited facilities outside the housing capabilities of the community college and put them in some place in which the adults can relate to it. It might be the basement of a settlement house, or somewhere that the adult will readily go, but the community college is the administrative vehicle for doing this.

Mr. FARNUM. In my particular area we have a new community college that opened this fall. Oakland Community College. This last September. It has 4,000 young students who registered on two campuses. They had equally as many who wanted to get in. They have another campus under construction and another one where they are trying to buy buildings and start in another area of the county. This is four. I mean they will have approximately 7,000 to 8,000 who will be in this community college.

MORE VARIED SKILL TRAINING NECESSARY

In this area also there are many skill needs, and it seems that when we talk about manpower development training, we usually discuss welding, automotive, and similar skills in most of our high schools we have this kind of training that goes on all the time.

I am talking about some of the other skills that are needed. They are needed in my area in the field of electronics. I am talking about another area that is quite evident after sitting through last year's hearings, especially with the Department of Health and the National Institutes of Health hearing and talking about this whole area of training that is necessary in paramedics and the fact of the matter is,

a very good friend of mine who attended the President's Conference on Health, Dr. W. G. Paine of Lansing, Mich., talked not only with myself, but with people from the Department, on establishing in some of our community colleges a training program to train those young ladies and technicians who work right in a doctor's office, on how to handle patients when they come in. Not the registered nurse, just the person they need in the office. They have to spend 6 months to a year training and by the time they get the training done they leave. Then they have to start training a new person all over and it is becoming crucial in doctors' offices.

I think somewhere in these programs we should be looking toward these skills also in terms of training, just as well as we look toward the regular ongoing automotive kind of skills that we look at all the time.

POSSIBLE ROLE OF COMMUNITY COLLEGES

This is again the question: What plans do you have to talk to States that do not do it, what plans are in the future in order to be able to broaden out in these areas where I think it is a vital area we need to concentrate?

Mr. MATTHEWS. I can't answer that question for you, sir. The general position of the Department would be something Mr. Keppel would have to respond to. We can supply an answer for the record. (The information requested follows:)

This statement which appears in the "Second Report to the President" represents the position of the Office of Education on the 2-year junior and community college.-HoWARD A. MATTHEWS.

[Excerpts from the "Second Report to the President." The President's Committee on Education Beyond the High School, July 1957, Washington, D.C., pp. 64, 65, and 72]

"TWO-YEAR" HIGHER INSTITUTIONS

The expansion of the 2-year college has been one of the most notable developments in post-high school education in 20th-century America.

The phenomenal growth of these institutions, which include junior colleges, both private and public, community colleges, technical institutes, and 2-year offcampus centers of 4-year colleges and universities, is testimony to their ability to meet diverse student needs.

From 8 in 1900, these institutions grew to 596 in 1955 with enrollments increasing from 100 students to 700,000 in the same period.

The program of the comprehensive community college includes (a) the first 2 years of a full collegiate program; (b) many kinds of programs, varying in time requirements, needed by vast numbers of students for general education integrated with vocational-technical training for the subprofessional occupations; (c) many kinds of short courses required for upgrading employed persons and for retaining employees because of changes in business and industrial developments; and (d) adult or continuing education programs and courses of the kinds desired by the community. There are indications that adults are more likely to take advantage of opportunities for continuing education if those are offered in a collegiate rather than a secondary school setting.

In many areas the community college has also become a center for social and cultural life, providing opportunities in the creative and performing arts as well as a meeting place for various community groups and individuals seeking to enrich their lives through learning.

These institutions extend further educational opportunities to youth and adults near their homes, thereby reducing the cost to students and frequently to the taxpayers. The cost of constructing a community college where boarding facilities are not required is less than the cost of constructing a residential college. In many cases, at least part of the facilities are available in the local high school on a temporary basis. The program offerings may cover a wide diversity

« PreviousContinue »