In the 1932 movie, Horse Feathers, Groucho Marx plays Professor Adams Wagstaff, the new president of Huxley College. Professor Wagstaff decides to recruit two older students, who he mistakenly believes to be professional football players, to enroll in Huxley and help Huxley defeat its rival Darwin. Chico (Baravelli, the iceman) and Harpo (Pinky, the dogcatcher) enroll at Darwin, where they, with Groucho, Zeppo and Connie Bailey, the "college widow", predictably create chaos at the college.
While Chico and Harpo are older students returning to college, they are not really at Huxley to improve their skills for better jobs. Today though in California the phenomenon of older students returning to college for job skills has grown; and for the first time is being actively encouraged by the state’s workforce system and Workforce Investment Boards (WIBs).
The latest state job numbers released last Friday showed a decline in the California workforce. California’s workforce in June 2010, seasonally adjusted, stood at 18,314,000, down from 18,338,000 in May 2010, and further down from 18,347,000 in March 2009. Some of this decline is due to discouraged workers–California workers who say they are no longer actively looking for work. A growing percentage of this decline is California workers who are leaving the labor market to return to school, at community colleges or California State Universities (CSUs) or other educational centers.
For most of the past forty-six years since the enactment of the Manpower Development Training Act, the federally-funded job training system has been aimed at helping unemployed workers move as quickly as possible into jobs. Job training has been an important element of this system. However, the job training has been relatively short-term, from three to nine months, aimed then at job placement. Longer training has been discouraged both because of the cost to the training system and the inability of the worker to be without a paycheck for any additional time.
Since 2009, though, many of the state’s forty-nine local WIBs, as well as state workforce entities, have encouraged unemployed workers to look at longer term training and higher education, given the dearth of jobs. Workers who are in school are encouraged to stay and perhaps expand their skills. Unemployed workers who are not in school are encouraged to consider community colleges or CSUs, if they can make it financially.
To help older workers survive financially while they are at community colleges or CSUs, the opportunity to collect unemployment insurance while in classes has been expanded, and the local WIBs have expanded the length of training for dislocated worker training subsidies. The Trade Adjustment Assistance program was amended by the federal government in 2009, and laid-off workers who qualify can now continue to collect Unemployment Insurance/Trade Readjustment Allowances for up to 130 weeks while they are in training.
For college-age students in school in California, this summer has been among the worst in forty years in finding summer employment. There are several government-funded summer job programs, but they are near-entirely targeted at very specific populations of households receiving public assistance, or foster youth, or youth with disabilities. Workforce officials have encouraged college students to take summer classes, if financially possible, or unpaid internships, rather than focus on job placements.
In summary, in this time of job scarcity, the workforce system in California is encouraging a range of older workers and younger workers to return to or remain in higher education. Paging Professor Wagstaff.