  Mrsjdaniels Member Username: Mrsjdaniels Post Number: 435 Registered: 08-2005 |
Philadelphia Creates College Access Center To Boost Number of Degrees in City by Associated Press Feb 18, 2008, 22:39 PHILADELPHIA The mayor’s goal of raising the lowly percentage of residents with bachelor’s degrees received a boost this week when a nonprofit initiative opened an outpost at a downtown mall to help working adults return to college. Right next to a dollar store and across from a nail salon, Graduate! Philadelphia will help evaluate transcripts, plan programs of study, give advice on financial aid and offer other support, organizers said. “This center represents our belief in the future of Philadelphia’s economy and the power of our people to take us there,” said initiative co-founder Sallie Glickman. As Philadelphia seeks to replace manufacturing jobs lost over the past half-century, officials hope a more educated populace will attract employers that pay better wages for skilled workers. Only about 21 percent of Philadelphia residents have bachelor’s degrees, below the national average of 27 percent and less than half the rate in other major cities. More than 50 percent of residents in Seattle and San Francisco hold such degrees, according to the U.S. Census. Mayor Michael Nutter drew gasps from the audience during his inauguration speech last month when he spoke of Philadelphia’s low rate, considered especially jarring in a region with more than 80 colleges and universities. Nutter then set a goal of doubling the bachelor’s degree rate in five to seven years. That would put Philadelphia on equal footing with Boston, where nearly 42 percent of residents have degrees. The College Access Center at the Gallery mall is a linchpin of the mayor’s effort, said Lori Shorr, the city’s chief education officer. “There’s nothing more important to him than getting this right,” Shorr said Tuesday at the center’s grand opening. Many adults who never finished their degrees are discouraged from returning to school because the college process is geared toward 18-year-olds, said Graduate! Philadelphia executive director Hadass Sheffer. But would-be older students need to know that much has changed in the college world, including a plethora of online, night and weekend classes, Sheffer said. “It’s not the same old college. Colleges have moved forward to meet the needs of working adults,” she said. Tyrone Mays, 52, of Philadelphia, is one of an estimated 70,000 city residents who started, but never finished, a degree. After attending community college in the 1980s, Mays said he got derailed by housing issues and other personal problems. Graduate! Philadelphia is helping him re-enroll in community college, where he wants to earn an associate degree in criminal justice and then transfer to nearby Temple University through a joint admission program. “The more they told me, the more they showed me, the more excited I got,” Mays said. “I didn’t have a real good vision before I got here.” Temple President Ann Weaver Hart said the university is proud of its record of embracing nontraditional students like Mays. If more students follow suit, she said, the city as a whole will benefit. “For us to be a place where people can come and know that they’ll have the educated work force that they need to be successful, we absolutely have to do this,” said Hart. “It’s really a part of all of us doing better, not just the individual who gets the college degree.” The mayor also hopes to achieve his goal by improving the financially and academically troubled public schools to ensure that students are college-bound when they graduate, Shorr said. He also wants to examine ways to stop the “brain drain” — people who come to Philadelphia for college, but then take their degrees elsewhere, Shorr said. Nutter has talked of creating an office of colleges and universities to enhance the partnership between the city and its educational institutions, which are also among Philadelphia’s biggest employers. Graduate! Philadelphia is an initiative of the nonprofit Philadelphia Workforce Investment Board and the United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania. It is being funded by a $250,000 grant from the city and a $535,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. On the Net: www.graduatephiladelphia.org | ||
Jtw Member Username: Jtw Post Number: 201 Registered: 06-2005 |
how about a tax credit to citizens with college degrees? | ||
Ndavies Member Username: Ndavies Post Number: 2952 Registered: 10-2003 |
How about Jobs for people with College degrees? We graduate tons of kids and they leave because they can't find a job here. | ||
Evelyn Member Username: Evelyn Post Number: 120 Registered: 02-2005 |
Hear, hear, Ndavies! | ||
Parkguy Member Username: Parkguy Post Number: 219 Registered: 04-2007 |
Ndavies-- As they leave, they take the chance of building a new economy with them. Here's the Parkguy Plan: 1. Encourage those with HS diplomas to get Associate's Degrees. A two-year degree is better than no degree. 2. Encourage those with two-year degrees to put in the extra two years to earn their BA. 3. Change the mentality that you have to FIND a job created by someone else to one that focuses on BUILDING a career. 4. Provide a clear and efficient system of building new businesses. 5. Get some real programs going, massive and city-wide, to wipe out illiteracy and get the thousands who never finished high school to get their GED or a diploma, then get them into a 2-year college program. This should come before everything else. Educational level affects income, crime, health--and everything else. It will take 10 or 15 years to get thing turned around, but my motto (as it is with transit, building neighborhoods, politics-- everything): "You have to start somewhere." They obviously get that point in Philadelphia. | ||
Trainman Member Username: Trainman Post Number: 630 Registered: 04-2006 |
We could hire college graduates to run DDOT? Maybe this will help. | ||
Paulmcall Member Username: Paulmcall Post Number: 612 Registered: 05-2004 |
That little thing about lack of jobs might cause some problem with that idea. It's like the reason why there are a lack of people in many beautiful places. The few residents complain, "You can't eat the scenery". | ||
Dinnc Member Username: Dinnc Post Number: 25 Registered: 08-2007 |
http://modeldmedia.com/feature s/leader131.aspx I thought this was a nice article in keeping young talent in the area. Maybe some of this should have been more available to me before i moved 700 miles alway. | ||
Rugbyman Member Username: Rugbyman Post Number: 240 Registered: 06-2005 |
You know, my fiance and I were talking about this not too long ago. Why not start some state or local program where recent (1-2 years removed) college grads get access to state or locally subsidized mortgages or large property tax abatements? Encourage home ownership, keep some of the college grads from fleeing the state before the ink on their degrees are dry, start giving companies a reason to relocate here. Gotta spend money to make money, people. A state and job creation is no exception. | ||
Danindc Member Username: Danindc Post Number: 3896 Registered: 10-2003 |
quote: The problem is, college graduates aren't leaving Michigan because of the unaffordable housing. | ||
Royce Member Username: Royce Post Number: 2550 Registered: 07-2004 |
The program in Philly sounds great. A program in Detroit has to first encourage many residents to get their GEDs first, then a college degree. The sad reality is that many students who drop out of high school are already on track in middle school to do just that. Many are just passed on to high school until they reach 16, when they can officially drop out. I have a student now who repeated the sixth-grade and failed every subject this past quarter in seventh-grade. He will be 14 this year, which means the administration will probably pass him to 9th grade at some point. Remember, this young man has at a minimum a sixth-grade education. The probability of him successfully completing high school is remote. He and others like him are the ones we need to find an answer for. | ||
Rugbyman Member Username: Rugbyman Post Number: 243 Registered: 06-2005 |
True, Dan, not exclusively, but I'd think that a fairly significant number of graduates would take the cheese (myself included) and make it one more tick in the "reasons to stay" column. I'm not claiming this alone would be sufficient to turn around the state's lagging economy, I'm just suggesting it could be one component of a more holistic approach to stopping the brain drain. "Stick around, gain equity for four points below market rates" sounds a lot better to a grad than "we cut millions from your school's budget last year and took a chunk to preserve manufacturing jobs." Toss us a bone- make the decision to leave difficult. | ||
Livernoisyard Member Username: Livernoisyard Post Number: 5249 Registered: 10-2004 |
The major problem with a program as this revolves about having insufficient jobs for those with college degrees already, not only in the city of Detroit, but throughout Michigan. That's why the current crop of new graduates have to leave. Obviously, more older un- or underemployed with degrees would leave metro Detroit if only anybody would buy their houses and freeing up that equity so that they could permanently resettle elsewhere. It all boils down to: "Where's the jobs?" | ||
Dougw Member Username: Dougw Post Number: 2070 Registered: 11-2003 |
Sorry Rugby, but Dan is right. Detroit has some of the cheapest housing of any large city as it is, further subsidizing that would be worse than doing nothing. Let's work on fixing the things that are actually problems, such as blight, crime, inefficient delivery of services, and poor infrastructure including lack of transit. Jobs of course are perhaps the biggest issue, but a city can't just magically create jobs on its own, it needs to fix its other problems in order to attract employers and retain educated people. |
