Widening the Circle of Prosperity through Post-Secondary Education

Mobilize.org has released the preliminary analysis of the data collected at its three-day summit, Target 2020, in Charlotte NC that gathered community college students from across the state to discuss post-secondary completion.  Students identified key actions that government could take to improve student success including fully funding community colleges and improving the design of financial aid to make it more accessible and useful to students of all ages.  In addition, students from Central Piedmont, Durham Tech, Richmond and Wake Tech Community College received funding to implement their ideas for additional student supports, expansion of early college high schools and raising awareness of the post-secondary completion challenge on their campuses.

The information and efforts presented by community college students will hopefully provide policymakers with insight into the barriers that need to be addressed.  Evidence continues to mount that increasing the number of North Carolinians with some education beyond high school will be necessary if prosperity is to be broadly shared.

MDC, Inc. released a report last week highlighting the ongoing economic transformation in the South that has led to a bifurcated economy with low-wage jobs in retail and services and high-wage jobs in fast-growing industries.  Post-secondary education, and the efforts particularly at community colleges to increase student success, will be key to connecting more North Carolinians to economic opportunity and protecting them from economic crises.

For states and communities, a citizenry with a higher level of educational achievement has multiple pay-offs. For one thing, people who go beyond high school have a habit of avoiding poverty; people with some college education or better tend to figure out how to sustain themselves in the middle class. What’s more, the more parents are educated, the less likely their families and their children will fall into poverty; an aggressive offensive to increase the numbers of young people with degrees and credentials amounts to a frontal assault on intergenerational poverty.