America has to do a better job teaching people to communicate and preparing them for the work place if it is to successfully compete in a rapidly changing economy, a consultant working with Southwest Mississippi Community College said at a series of public meetings last week.
“I submit to you that there’s a continuing process of change, and good things can cause bad things to happen to good people,” said Roger Slater of The Slater Group, a Canton, Ga.-based management consulting firm that is conducting the meetings across the four-county region served by SMCC — Pike, Amite, Walthall and Wilkinson.
SMCC President Dr.Oliver Young said the meetings are designed to get the public’s ideas about how the college is doing and how it can improve.
Twelve Pike County residents, including school and public officials, met at the college’s Horace Holmes Student Union on Thursday to discuss the college and its future.
“Our future is in the hands of people living in places that we may never visit,” Slater said.
He said India and China are rapidly advancing in education and catching up to the U.S. in technology and work force training. Meanwhile, America is losing its edge, he said.
“At one time, we had the ideas, we produced them and marketed them. Then we had the ideas and had other people produce them. But now we’re running out of ideas,” Slater said.
He gave these projections about the U.S. work force:
• By 2015, about 3.5 million white-collar jobs in the U.S. will be sent overseas.
• 70 million baby boomers in the U.S. will exit the work force in the next 18 years, with only 40 million people entering the work force.
• By 2018, 54 percent of jobs in Mississippi will require a post-secondary education from either community college or a four-year college.
The big challenge for America is regaining the ability to communicate, Slater said, “because we’re so technology-involved.”
That means having people who know how to deal with conflicts in the work place and communicate with the younger generation, he said.
“We hold our children’s future in our hands, and we need to start here,” Slater said.
Rhonda Gibson, director of institutional advancement for SMCC, said the response has been good except for Wilkinson County, where no one attended because of bad weather.
Young said two major questions asked by participants at earlier meetings involved transportation and work force training.
“We were asked about buses to pick up students in Amite and Walthall counties,” he said. “The college did that at one time, but it was stopped when participation became too low.
“I don’t know of any Mississippi community college that has bus transportation, but it may be something we may have to consider in the future,” he said.
Young said questions also center on work force training and the potential of the college’s new $6 million training facility, groundbreaking for which was held earlier this year.
“We also had people who said they were satisfied with what the college is doing,” he said.
Gibson said participants at each meeting were asked to answer a 10-question survey about their community and the college.
Six of the survey questions sought opinions on community education systems, quality of life, problems, future challenges and work force issues. Four questions addressed issues involving the college and how it can better impact and work with the communities it serves.
Gibson said the participants’ answers were written on note cards, which will be reviewed by The Slater Group.
“They’ll be evaluated and we should have the results by sometime in August,” Gibson said.
SMCC employee Gene Marsalis of Summit called the meeting “beneficial. I wish more people had been here.”
Chadwick Taylor, a Magnolia resident who works offshore, said the statistics that Slater discussed opened his eyes.
“I wasn’t aware that by 2015, 54 percent of the jobs in the state are going to require a degree,” said Taylor, who has a year of studies remaining at Delta State University.
“That’s going to make people graduating high school think about their future,” he said. “It means they’re going to have to get a better education and a two-year or four-year degree if they want a good job.”
