Making do

A flat tire can mean different things to different people. Maybe it’s a postponed appointment and a call to AAA. Or maybe you have to get a ride to work from your spouse.

But for some folks, a flat tire can start a snowball effect.

“For so many, that flat tire, that’s the end, right? It means they’re missing a shift at work. If they miss a shift at work, and they’re an hourly employee, they’ve lost a day’s pay, and they still have to repair that tire. And, ‘Oh, am I going to school now, too?’ That’s how quickly it can unravel for far too many people,” says Paula Pando, president of Reynolds Community College, based in metro Richmond. “I’m going to say in our region — but I would say across the country — that they’re one life emergency from being completely derailed from fulfilling their potential.”

Meeting students where they are and helping them succeed is part of the mission behind the Virginia Community College System, which has 23 state-funded colleges with 40 campuses serving more than 200,000 students across the commonwealth.

People attend community college for many reasons, but getting certifications and training for desirable careers is a major motivation for many, especially students who are older than average college age and often juggle family and work responsibilities with their educations. Pando says the state’s community college students often are the ones who view a flat tire as a major obstacle, not just an inconvenience.

Similarly, community colleges are working with shoestring budgets, with relatively tight state funding.

Do community college students need English as a Second Language classes? Of course. Do they need remote learning classes? Sure thing. Scholarship money? Yep.

And at many of the state’s community colleges, leaders are figuring out other ways to bring learning directly to students, or at least within a bus or shuttle ride. Virginia Highlands Community College offers free bus trips to the Abingdon college from the city of Bristol and Washington and Smyth counties, while Eastern Shore Community College reimburses toll payments to students who commute via the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. Most other schools have agreements with local public transportation systems that allow students to ride for free or at reduced fares.

For Pando, accessibility also means offering more classes at Reynolds’ downtown Richmond campus, which is convenient to the regional bus line, and offering free shuttle service to its Parham Road campus in Henrico County.

For Virginia Peninsula Community College, which covers the region of James City County, Williamsburg, Hampton and Newport News, it means building new satellite classrooms.

“If I want to get to a program that’s only offered on one campus, or I don’t have the classes I need at my Williamsburg campus — if you had to rely on public transportation, you now have to figure out two different bus companies and what their schedules are,” says VPCC President Towuanna Porter Brannon. “If you’re traveling what for me is a 25-minute ride in my car from Newport News to Williamsburg, it could possibly [take] two hours for a student who is relying on public transportation.”

Answering student needs

To respond to these challenges, VPCC opened a trades center in Toano in 2023, offering welding and commercial driver’s license classes, which previously were only offered in Hampton, about 37 miles away.

But building new classrooms and hiring faculty, especially for specialty workforce programs, is not cheap — and community colleges can’t rely on tuition to pay for them.

At $163 per credit hour, Virginia’s community colleges offer the lowest-cost postsecondary education in the state. For most of VPCC’s students, tuition is affordable, Brannon notes, but transportation has been a big roadblock for some students when classes are offered in only one location, especially for hands-on skills training classes.

“The individuals in [the Toano] part of our service region, it’s just probably impossible for them to train at our Hampton campus,” explains Todd Estes, VPCC’s vice president of workforce development and innovation. “We were able to open that facility and offer four different trades training courses in 2023 with the help of a U.S. [Department of Labor] grant, and we also are in the process of opening another facility in southeast Newport News, which is the other end of our service area, and a historically underserved community.”

Elsewhere in the state, colleges have purchased or leased older buildings to convert them into classrooms. Wytheville Community College opened WCC WEST (standing for workforce, education and skills training) in Marion, in a former auto dealership purchased by the Smyth County Economic Development Authority. And next year, Paul D. Camp Community College is set to open a new nursing and allied health facility in the former Tidewater News building in Franklin, a project funded in part by the Sentara Foundation.

In October, Danville, Southside Virginia and Patrick & Henry community colleges signed an agreement to expand building trades programs in Southern Virginia, collaborating with K-12 schools and regional business partners. 

Tidewater Community College, VPCC’s neighbor to the southeast, partners with the Virginia Ship Repair Association on its maritime trades program, says Laura Hanson, associate vice president of corporate solutions at TCC. Students complete training in welding, pipefitting, marine painting and other trades in two or three weeks.

“One of our motivators at TCC … is accessibility for our students, and our current skilled trades academy is in Portsmouth,” Hanson says. “So, when you factor in tunnels, [students] have a hard time with that, especially if you’re unemployed. So, our next goal is to acquire a location in Norfolk. And then the next step, we are renovating a building on our Virginia Beach campus,” which will also host skilled training courses for maritime trades, including offshore wind.

Set to open in June 2025, VPCC’s Newport News satellite center is a response to achieve “geographic accessibility” in a community that “historically has had transportation issues,” Estes says. “That community is not as far as, say, Toano, but if you’re talking about public transportation, it’s still an hour and a half or two hours to get to our Hampton campus, which is just prohibitive for anybody in that area.”

The Newport News facility will offer training for three maritime trades and four construction trades, and its proximity to major employer Newport News Shipbuilding will be a big benefit to students, Estes says. “So, that community will have that direct connection of training within their community, and then employment less than a mile away.”

Newport News Shipbuilding is one of multiple large employers with big expansion plans in Virginia, hoping to hire 19,000 people over the next decade for its nuclear shipbuilding workforce. And that’s just one work sector. Across the state, businesses and other institutions need to fill vacancies in health care, vehicle repair, teaching and child care, as well as in the growing industries of renewable energy, cybersecurity and manufacturing, among other fields. Many employers and state officials are looking to community colleges to train the next generation of these employees.

A heavy responsibility

The community college system is tasked with a large segment of the state’s workforce development strategy. The Virginia Talent Accelerator Program, a collaboration between VCCS and the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, trains workers for specific job duties at no cost to businesses relocating or expanding in Virginia.

Additionally, the community colleges’ FastForward and G3 programs, created in the past decade, are specifically geared toward people training for in-demand careers, and some courses take less than a month to complete. According to the college system, more than 53,000 students have completed FastForward programs, seeing average wage increases of more than $11,000 within 12 months of receiving their new credentials.

Total enrollment in Virginia’s community colleges has grown for six consecutive semesters, after about 10 years of declining enrollment. Approximately 230,000 students enrolled in 2024.

The state has nearly 250,000 unfilled jobs, according to Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration, and a big reason is a dearth of relevant job skills among Virginians. In a February op-ed published by Cardinal News, VCCS Chancellor David Doré and Virginia Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Barry DuVal noted that 3.2 million Virginians lack postsecondary credentials that would qualify some of them for open jobs.

Community college students, many of whom stay in their communities after completion, are often a good fit for these jobs, but Doré and DuVal note that for every dollar spent on students at four-year public universities in Virginia, the state invests only 57 cents per community college student, which impacts how many classes community colleges can offer and leaves institutions pursuing outside funding.

The community college system, Doré says, plans to ask for $90 million in one-time funding from the state for the 2025 fiscal year, going toward facility improvements, equipment and program startup costs. VCCS also expects to request an additional $46.2 million in recurring state funding, which would go toward hiring additional faculty and support staff, as well as other costs associated with expanding educational programs.

Additionally, VCCS is asking the state to increase its investment in nondegree program FastForward by $32.5 million, Doré says. He also hopes legislators will change the funding mechanism in Virginia so that the state automatically allocates more money for higher-cost workforce programs that train in-demand professionals such as nurses, dental hygienists, welders and mechanics.

In the meantime, private and public sector partners are a crucial funding source for new projects and expansions.

“I would love to get more funding, but I can just say that I’m really very impressed by how entrepreneurial our presidents are,” Doré says. “Our presidents are really looking for every opportunity to get investment to build these workforce centers, but … it’s my hope that we’re going to make our case to the General Assembly to get funding for these programs.” 

‘Rob Peter to pay Paul’

As Pando and Brannon note, to fill the state’s open jobs, community college students need training courses available and accessible to them, and that’s not always easy, especially when its costs a lot more to build a welding training workshop than a traditional classroom.

“When we start talking about needing to triple the number of welders, OK, that welding job — that’s a million-dollar lab,” Pando explains. “Finding a welding instructor who is going to take a pay cut to come teach welding is another challenge, and that story is replicated in virtually all of our programs — HVAC instruction, health care programs, our automotive program.”

Asked how her college affords new high-tech facilities, Brannon replies with a laugh, “Begging,” as well as applying for “tons of grants.”

In Virginia, “there’s not a lot of infusion of state funds that help us buy new equipment … to stay competitive with what someone may be experiencing in the workplace,” Brannon adds. “And so, a lot of the ways that we have been getting funding is to ask [for donations] from our local businesses — people who are actually interested in hiring, who have a high demand for those positions.”

Ultimately, Pando says, “the way we do it is through aggressive fundraising. I mean, we’re constantly hat in hand. I had to raise money and do a song and dance and rob Peter to pay Paul to build our automotive tech building, which is modest but beautiful.”

Reynolds has partnered with Richmond city government, Loyalty Toyota and VCU Health, among other institutions, to staff and fund workforce training programs to produce auto mechanics, nurses and truck drivers. The community college’s automotive program includes a specialty master technician course for Toyotas and Lexuses, and students work at Loyalty Toyota service centers around the Richmond area, earning wages while learning on the job.

“Then the other three days are in lab with us,” Pando says, “and those students are pretty much guaranteed a job interview because they’ve been [essentially] interviewing for a few years. It’s an excellent example of an earn-and-learn program that keeps students from having to work a job at McDonald’s.”

Similarly, VPCC has received funding from Newport News Shipbuilding and other partners to help them hire and retain more faculty members, as well as advising the college on what skills employers need.

“I don’t believe we’ve gotten a generous donation from a donor in a while. We’ve been really lucky to have a community of business partners to support us, but we’re all dealing with a very similar, small profit margin,” Brannon says. “So, a lot of what we’ve been doing is trying to advocate at the state level for some sort of parity and funding when it comes to these high-cost programs.”

Freelance writer Courtney Mabeus-Brown contributed to this article.

At A Glance: Virginia Community College System

Founded

The Virginia Technical College System started in 1964 with two schools: Roanoke Technical College and Northern Virginia Technical College. In 1966, it was renamed the Virginia Community College System, and by 1972, it had expanded to all 23 community colleges in existence today. In 1987, the system began offering dual enrollment courses, allowing high school students to earn college credits at community colleges, and in 1996, the system launched online classes. In 2016, the General Assembly created the nation’s first short-term, pay-for-performance workforce training program, now known as FastForward. Today, VCCS has 40 campuses across the state, with approximately 230,000 students enrolled in 2024. 

Enrollment^*

Total enrollment: 207,108
Full-time students: 89,338

Student profile^**

Male: 42%
Female: 56%
Unknown: 2%
Students of color: 47%

Academic programs

VCCS offers hundreds of programs of study at its 23 colleges statewide. They include two-year associate degrees, one-year certificates and career studies certificates. Some programs offer college credits that are transferrable to four-year colleges and universities, and others offer noncredit programs geared toward training for specific careers, including welding, auto mechanics and HVAC technology.

Teaching Faculty^*

Full-time: 2,052
Part-time: 4,168

Tuition^**

$163 per credit hour

*2023-24 academic year
**Spring 2024