Our view: Why can't welding students get student aid?

Yet if you’re a low-income student who wants to learn a trade — say, welding — there’s no aid available, even though the training program is a lot shorter, a lot cheaper, and there’s a strong market demand for welders.

So we wind up with this frustrating situation, be it with potential welders, or certified nursing aides or pharmacy technicians or what have you: “Often, the people who can gain the most by obtaining an industry-certified postsecondary credential cannot afford the training necessary to earn it,” says Glenn DuBois, chancellor of Virginia’s Community Colleges.

Why is this?

Or, perhaps more to the point, what can be done to fix this?

We can’t really answer the first one, other than to pontificate about a society that sometimes devalues things it ought to value — in this case, skilled trades.

As for the latter, there are two potential fixes worth talking about.

• Last month, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., introduced a bill that would amend the federal Pell Grant program to allow grants for students enrolled in short-term job training programs. “We need to ensure that federal higher education policies support a wide range of career pathways that meet the demands of a 21st century economy,” Kaine said in introducing the bill. Washington being Washington, it’s hard to tell what will happen there, although Kaine is hoping to get the bill incorporated into what should be a routine reauthorization of the Higher Education Act that Congress will take up this fall. He’s picked up a Republican co-sponsor — Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire — so that should help the bill’s prospects.

• The Virginia General Assembly, meanwhile, has taken some modest but important action of its own. The legislature, in its current budget, allocates $1,075,000 to the community college system to set up pilot programs to provide financial aid in trades programs at six locations across the state. Three of those schools are in our part of the state: Virginia Western in Roanoke, Patrick Henry in Martinsville and Blue Ridge in Weyers Cave.

The details for the aid packages are still being worked out, but the demand for such programs is very real — both from students trying to get into them, and from a marketplace seeking the qualified job candidates they produce. The trick is getting public policy — which often means funding — aligned with the realities of the marketplace.

Community leaders spend a lot of time talking about the need for more jobs in the Roanoke Valley — and they’re right. What gets a lot less attention, though, is the fact that there are a lot of jobs already here that are going unfilled because there aren’t qualified applicants for them.

There aren’t enough applicants for two reasons.

Some potential students simply can’t afford the cost of the training. Leah Coffman, coordinator of Workforce Development Services at Virginia Western, sees this all the time when she has potential students who can’t afford to pay for even a training program that might be as short as four weeks. “If you’re working at McDonald’s flipping burgers and you want a higher-paying job and a career, but you can’t afford to come to school — those people get caught in a Catch-22.” That’s what the pilot program — and, ultimately, Kaine’s bill — seek to address.

Then there’s the fact that a lot of these programs are expensive to run, so community colleges can offer only so many of them, which in turn also limits the number of slots available. Some examples:

Virginia Western had 34 welding students in the past academic year — and welding students invariably get hired when they complete their training and earn an industry-recognized certificate. Employers would love to see that number tripled, Coffman says, “but funding holds us back.”

The list goes on. “Certified nursing aides are another one where we can’t get enough students in to fill that demand,” Coffman says. “Nursing homes need them, hospices need them, hospitals need them at an entry level. Last year we had 22 people go through. If there was funding, I would have tripled that.”

Commercial truck drivers are another in-demand field. “We start a class in commercial driving every Monday,” Coffman says. It takes four weeks. “We teach you about all the laws, all the regulations, how to do a pre-trip check list.” Last year, Virginia Western graduated 252 truck drivers, and that still wasn’t enough. “We have 18 different employers waiting for our students to graduate from that program,” she says. Most start in the $40,000-a-year range.

The demand for some of those programs is expected to grow even more in coming years, as baby boomers retire from the workforce.

A few years ago, the Roanoke Regional Partnership economic development group did a study on workforce issues in the region. Among its findings: “There are serious pending workforce replacement needs in manufacturing industries that will require significant training . . . . The region has a limited training capacity for skilled production technicians that is likely only serving to produce workers for immediate turnover needs and may not even be sufficient for that purpose. Retirements pending in the manufacturing sector over the next ten years will be incredibly difficult to fill without more training capacity and a larger talent pipeline.”

That was five years ago, so that time horizon is now five years closer. Coffman colors in the details this way: “We have 25 machine shops in Roanoke Valley,” she says. “There was a survey that showed two-thirds of the owners were considering retirement, so how do we fill the need for that skilled machinist if they cannot afford to come to school and learn?”

How indeed?

That’s why she’s excited about the potential for Kaine’s bill — and the prospect of showing the next General Assembly just how useful that pilot program turns out to be.