Dear Mr. Vice President,

Thank you for continually ignoring the Central Valley, and Fresno City College by extension.

During your recent tour of community colleges in the various swing states, from Tennessee to North Carolina to Ohio, you frequently touted the work that community colleges are doing to provide students access to the most inaccessible necessity in our society: jobs.

On the stump, you’ve boasted that colleges like FCC are “part of the fabric of our communities.” Going so far as to say that “Americans are tired of being tired.”

While it’s nice to use the folksy rhetoric and the political platitude of the day, the hard truth is that community colleges aren’t exactly standing tall on the pedestal on which you have placed them.

Over the past few weeks, our college district has had to cut another $3.5 million, in addition to a mid-year cut of $2.5 million, from its current budget while also worrying about the budget for next year. The result? Students feeling cheated because their educational opportunities are being drowned over babble about scrimping and saving.

The real problem with our community colleges? Your assessment of them is outdated and just plain wrong.

Two separate studies by California’s State Chancellor’s Office and Little Hoover Commission, found that California’s community college students are so unprepared for the workforce, that its hitting hard at our lagging economy.

Soon, this vast unpreparedness could create a vicious circle of a downtrodden economy, in which the workforce can’t expand or keep pace, leaving businesses with slowed growth because of a shrinking supply of skilled labor. Soon, the Golden State ceases to be golden.

The two reports found that our community colleges are spectacularly failing to provide ill-prepared students the skills to succeed at attaining a degree or gaining enough work skills to survive in the workforce and stay off of the breadline.

While echoing each other over the failures of students and their work in junior colleges, the two studies split over the role of community colleges in adult education, with the Little Hoover Commission backing the notion that community colleges should take adult education from K-12 institutions, where the State Chancellor wants to leave K-12 districts with the jurisdiction.

The solution to our jobs problem can’t just be found in the classroom, contrary to the administration’s belief, but in the marketplace.  This is about discovering the demand for skilled labor and naturally adjusting to that demand, rather than pretending that the status quo is “fine and dandy.”

While we wait for serious economic recovery to trickle down in to the Valley, our community will have to stick to worrying about how to have students keep pace in an ever expanding local and global economy, and ensure that they’re performing up to current academic standards, too.

Now is the right about the time we ought to put our community’s fabric in the washing machine and clean out the failures of skills-based education.

Until then, I’ll continue to be tired of being tired.

Sincerely,

Alex Tavlian