Schools look to fill ‘unmet need’ for adult learners

IN THE GAME: Joanna Senay, left, director of continuing education at Salve Regina University's Center for Adult Education in Warwick, talks with student Kimberly Bissell of Glocester. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
IN THE GAME: Joanna Senay, left, director of continuing education at Salve Regina University's Center for Adult Education in Warwick, talks with student Kimberly Bissell of Glocester. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

Paul Masse Chevrolet in East Providence sent four employees to a weeklong boot camp for Bryant University’s new emerging-leader certificate program in early August.

Company Vice President Scott Wellington, 48, of Cumberland, says he and CEO Paul Masse are trying to develop a company approach to leadership in the workplace.

“We’re not ready to be put out to pasture yet, but we’re also preparing for the future,” he explained. “We want to become better leaders, to realize there’s a difference between management, which is very task oriented [and] leadership, [which] is about people.”

The professional-development program is a response to what Bryant and other schools in the region see as growing demand from adult learners, aged 25 and up, looking to boost credentials to advance in – or find their way back into – the post-recession workforce. And more businesses, spurred in part by Gov. Gina M. Raimondo’s Real Jobs Rhode Island plan, are partnering with schools to develop programs focused on their needs.

- Advertisement -

“There seems to be this need for this management piece, from entry level to supervisor,” said Annette Cerilli, director of Bryant’s Executive Development Center, whose enrollment for professional development has seen a gradual rise over the past decade.

“There’s a pipeline of adult learners,” Cerilli said. “I don’t think it’s going to end. As more of the millennials are entering the workforce, they are looking to continuously learn and make more money. And the way to do that is through certifications and professional development.”

Bryant, Rhode Island College, Brown University and Roger Williams University all cite modest increases in enrollment in recent years, suggesting latent demand, particularly in leadership, health care and cybersecurity, they say.

‘UNMET NEED’

At the same time, postsecondary educators say another branch of academia traditionally serving adult learners aged 25-64 – continuing education – is also poised for a comeback. Though recent enrollment has been typically stable or declining, educators cite an “unmet need” to help working professionals add skills to advance in the workplace or shift careers.

At Roger Williams, for instance, President Donald J. Farish says more attention than ever is being paid to adult learners.

“There is an unmet need for adult learners, for augmenting their skills during their working lifetime,” said Farish. “So, we are directing our energies to the population that needs us the most. This is a shift [for RWU]. I don’t think we’ve seen the end of the growth curve yet.”

The university last month announced a refocused mission to “strengthen society through engaged teaching and learning,” dubbed “Roger’s Revolution.” Farish said the school will implement objectives for training students for the workforce across the university, setting the specific goal of generating 2,100 skilled, job-ready workers through its School of Continuing Studies over the next three years.

RWU’s Continuing Studies program currently produces about 250 students a year.

Combining high-quality teaching with intensive experiential learning and, in tandem, expanding adult-education initiatives “dramatically,” will be the way RWU gets there, he said.

RWU and other schools say part of the answer to identifying the unmet need lies in the types of older students currently seeking work-related certificates, degrees and credentials.

Today’s adult learners are seldom returning to school just for personal enrichment or what some called “edutainment,” say educators.

Instead, in more challenging economic times, adult learners are pursuing not only degree completion – the traditional focus of continuing education – but also advancement or changes in their jobs or careers – all while working, raising families or caring for parents.

In response to what they see, professional development and continuing education leaders at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth as well as at most colleges and universities in Rhode Island are striving to provide flexibility and convenience. That means offering courses and classes online, day and night, in blended-learning arrangements that mix Web and on-the-ground programming, or in intensive seven-week sequential classes taken back to back instead of concurrently.

Enrollment cycles tend to run counter to economic trends, explains Johan Uvin, acting assistant secretary of the Office of Career Technology and Adult Education with the U.S. Department of Education.

“Usually enrollments go up when the economy isn’t doing all that well,” he said, and people return to school to become more competitive in their field. Whereas when the economy is improving, he said, people are more inclined to work than go back to school.

Economically, Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts are still struggling, though Rhode Island’s unemployment rate, still one of the country’s highest at 5.6 percent, has been steadily improving.

Partly because the local economy is traditionally slower to bounce back from economic downturns than neighboring states, some schools are collaborating with private companies to develop curriculum to update employees’ skills.

“Creating partnerships within industries to identify the skills gaps and address the needs through training and education – that in large part is taking place in coordination with the colleges,” said Deb Quinn, workforce readiness director for the Rhode Island chapter of the Society for Human Resource Management.

She cites Raimondo’s Real Jobs Rhode Island program, in which schools, employers and other partners are devising curriculums to train workers and the unemployed or underemployed for jobs that may be in demand but are difficult to fill.

Dan Egan, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Rhode Island, which represents the state’s private schools, says Real Jobs RI expands the connections between private institutions and industry.

Besides the state’s three public schools, the University of Rhode Island, the Community College of Rhode Island and Rhode Island College, several private schools are partnering in Real Jobs RI with industry. Participating schools include Johnson & Wales University, the New England Institute of Technology, Bryant and Salve Regina University’s Pell Center.

“Traditionally, the role of serving this type of population has been one provided by the public schools, with the private institutions augmenting that role with a degree-based approach,” explained Egan. “Now, Real Jobs RI takes the state’s need for training the workforce and provides an opportunity for institutional and industry partnerships in the continuing ed and professional-development space on several of the private campuses.”

RWU spokesman Brian Clark cited as one example a customized professional-development program launched this past summer with CVS Health Corp., called “Executive Learning Series for Diverse Suppliers.” The training program helps vendors gain critical management skills that allow them to expand their partnerships with CVS Health and improve in the areas of marketing, finance and human resources, Clark said.

At URI, Donald H. DeHayes, provost and vice president for academic affairs, says the university is in talks with Care New England, now that CNE has completed competency analysis of its workforce, about possibly customizing an academic program that could lead to a post-baccalaureate certificate for employees to update their skills.

CNE spokesman Jeremy Milner said there have been discussions about that potential but that the hospital system could not elaborate.

At UMass Dartmouth, Angappa “Guna” Gunasekaran, dean of the Charleton College of Business, said industry partners include Ahold, a logistics company in Quincy, Mass., and the South Coast Hospital system in New Bedford that hosts an on-site MBA for 14 employees. Both programs are blended, with online and on-the-ground components, he said.

‘WE SEE A MARKET’

As these partnerships evolve, colleges seeing enrollment increases attribute those gains to the challenging economy and the need for adult learners to focus on getting job skills that will make them marketable.

At RIC, one of three public schools in the state, enrollment in professional studies and continuing education combined surged in 2013-14 to its highest-ever count of 1,666. A year later, it had dropped off by 180 students because some of the programming from a National Science Foundation grant had ended, said Dante DelGiudice, RIC’s director of continuing education.

The rest of the grant runs through 2018, he said.

While 2015 enrollment figures are not yet available, he predicted those 2015 numbers “will show we made up any decline in 2014. We see a market. We’re growing.”

RIC President Nancy Carriuolo brought professional studies and continuing education under one umbrella to promote the interaction of employers and students, most of whom remain Rhode Islanders after earning their credentials, she said.

Worksite training programs at RIC constitute professional development, whereas continuing education more often comprises degree-completion and certificate programs that lead to new credentials. Three worksite programs are at General Dynamics Electric Boat in the Quonset Business Park, Tanury Industries in Lincoln and Taco Inc. in Cranston, DelGiudice said.

As many as 363 students are participating in these three programs combined, studying English as a second language at Tanury and Taco, and management and communications for supervisors at EB, DelGiudice said.

Continuing education certificate programs in health and human services also are very popular, he added.

“Businesses are looking at training more employees; they’re looking at retention and increasing productivity,” he said.

RWU also has seen its enrollment in its School of Continuing Studies grow – by 41 percent when defined by total credit hours, as opposed to student numbers, said Jamie Scurry, the school’s dean – from 6,337 credit hours in fiscal 2010 to 8,930 in fiscal 2015. The number of credits is a truer reflection of participation, since one student may be working on multiple credits at different times, she said.

Meanwhile, enrollment over the past two years at RWU’s Professional Education Center has more than doubled, from 325 in 2014 to 675 in 2015, the university reports. There, Farish says, RWU provides customized programs with larger employers for a group of employees who need the same set of skills.

New programming is being provided at Salve Regina, where growth is slight, though measureable, in the form of leadership certification for 2016-17, said Joanna Senay, director of continuing education and the university’s Center for Adult Education in Warwick.

The center tripled in size three years ago and offers graduate and continuing education courses year-round in both the traditional classroom and hybrid formats, Senay said.

“We’re offering more classes than we were before, which is allowing our students to complete their degrees more easily,” she said, “and we’ve developed new programs in leadership and administration of justice.”

Burdened with jobs and families, unlike the traditional college student whose full-time job often is his education, adult learners can take several years to plan before returning to or embarking on a collegiate path, Senay said.

“We have to be sensitive to the fact this is going to take time,” she said. “You have to look at the long-term, big picture with adult students.”

URI and CCRI also have had mixed results in enrollment, yet are anticipating a need to partner with businesses and offer more programming to adult learners, their leaders said.

While CCRI, which has by far the largest adult-learner population, in the tens of thousands, has seen noncredit continuing education enrollment decline over the past 10 years, professional-development enrollment is picking up, and business demand is part of the reason, says Peter N. Woodberry, dean of CCRI’s business, science and technology department.

“People with advanced degrees are taking our courses,” he noted.

That includes certificates for six different computer-related courses like C+ programming and Web design, as well as biotech and chemical-technology certificates. Pharmacology, chemical and manufacturing firms all want these graduates, whose average age is the late 20s, he said.

“Students get hired away so quickly we have difficulty keeping them in the program,” he added. “We’re in growth mode.”

STAYING COMPETITIVE

Brown shuttered its continuing education program in 2014 because it never did what most such programs are designed to do – enable degree completion nights and weekends, said Karen Sibley, dean of Brown’s School of Professional Studies. It had focused more on “edutainment” and personal enrichment, she said.

Midcareer professionals who in many cases already have college degrees and professional credentials are seeking out Brown’s professional-development programs, which have small cohorts of 20 to 30 people each but are poised for future growth, Sibley said.

“I’m looking to move my numbers to 300 to 400 in a few years,” she said. “I’m looking at that population that already has their education but is saying, ‘Wow: my workplace is changing. I need to continue to evolve to be a valid contributor.’ ”

Christine Hansen, 50, of Taunton, the chief operating officer at Blackstone Valley Community Health Care in Pawtucket, is taking Brown’s executive master of health care leadership program, though she had never had any intention of going back to school. But after witnessing a class that came to her clinic, she was hooked. Now she wants to become more “well-rounded.”

“I have never felt I was missing something [professionally],” she noted, “but when I saw this program, I felt this would round things up for me nicely and expose me to [new] areas of health care.”

Not every school locally has seen gains in adult-learner programs, though all serve adult learners in some form.

Johnson & Wales says its continuing education programs have remained stable in recent years.

RISD spokeswoman Jaime Marland attributed a prolonged decline in continuing education enrollment at RISD since 2009 to the troubled economy.

“Many employers were less able to support professional-development training, and many past or prospective students were unemployed and unable to take classes,” she said. “Several classes held at offsite locations were discontinued, as they were ultimately cost prohibitive.”

Yet, since design is such an important factor in the success of many companies, RISD now offers a Product Development + Manufacturing certificate program, Marland said.

New England Institute of Technology has neither continuing education nor professional development, per se, but spokesman Steve Kitchin explains that preparing students for professional and technical careers is inherent in the school’s mission.

Adult-education programs have helped Giuseppe “Joe” Mattiello, 52, of Cranston, advance in the competitive engineering field.

He decided to transfer college credits to RWU in 2010 while working as a technical support engineer at Taco Inc. in Cranston. Today, he is a field application engineer there, after earning a continuing education bachelor’s degree in general studies from RWU in 2013. He’s also working on an MBA at URI.

“When I was [applying] for the current position, supervisors were questioning why I hadn’t completed a four-year engineering degree,” he said. No [local] university offered engineering part time then, so it was difficult to continue working full time and pursue a four-year engineering degree.”

Now a single father with three adult sons, he is the liaison between factory representatives and customers, troubleshooting for and offering resolutions if there are issues with company products.

“It helps me to communicate more effectively,” he said of his degree. “I don’t want to be complacent. … If you continue with your studies [it] makes you more marketable.” •

No posts to display