CREC Project News and Updates

CREC Helps M-SAMC Expand Training to Community Colleges

January 5, 2016

The Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness (CREC), in partnership with the Multi-State Advanced Manufacturing Consortium (M-SAMC), has produced a number of training videos that show community college administrators how to best use federal statistical agency programs to understand their local communities and build programs that better serve their students’ needs.

Specifically, the videos use tools that are powered by data that is collected and organized by the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. By honing in on the publicly available information that powers the products and services that these federal agencies provide, community college administrators can discover information that is applicable to current and future students and develop curricula based on:

  • The levels of educational attainment found around a particular community college
  • The demographics of workers living within a particular radius of any community college
  • The levels of pay that people earn from very microscopic geographic levels
  • The number of educational programs that students complete in a specific geography
  • The exact level that specific industries contribute to individual economies
  • The affect that local unemployment has on specific local economies

With 13 college partners across 10 states, more than 40 industrial partners, and state-of-the-art technology, M-SAMC leverages its combined experiences to increase student success locally, and it brings manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. The CREC-produced videos, available through M-SAMC’s YouTube channel, can be used to improve community colleges’ decision making about manufacturing educational program development, investment, and strategic marketing to various industries.

The video-production project is part of a larger effort to help schools in the consortium find innovative and effective methods to develop curriculum that addresses specific industry needs in local communities.

A list of the videos is provided below:

How much does the manufacturing sector contribute to my regional economy?
How many people are completing programs in neighboring colleges?
What are the common occupations in a given industry?
How to convert job titles to occupation codes
What levels of educational attainment are found in your area?
What is the unemployment rate for your region?
How many manufacturers are located in your metro area?
How big is my region’s manufacturing sector compared to other counties in my state?
What proportion of my industry’s workforce is age 55 or older?
What are the demographics of workers living within a 30 mile radius of my college?
How much should a worker in a given occupation be making in my region?
How has my region’s population grown?

About the Client

Rutgers Research

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New York State Department of Taxation and Finance

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North Carolina Biotechnology Center

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George Washington Institute of Public Policy

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Los Rios (CA) Community College District

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