DANVILLE, Ill. (AP) — On Chicago’s South Side, students are learning to work on Rivian electric pickup trucks and SUVs through a new technician program at Olive-Harvey College.
About 150 miles (240 kilometers) south, students at Danville Area Community College in Illinois are being taught climbing and safety, as well as troubleshooting troubleshooting giant wind turbines dozens of feet tall.
In Albuquerque, students receive training in wiring and repairing solar panel installations through Central New Mexico Community College’s electrical trade courses.
In Boston, students are researching how to strengthen homes and buildings against extreme temperatures at Roxbury Community College’s Center for Smart Building Technology. The focus is on automating and modernizing heating and air conditioning systems so that they contribute less to climate change.
These are all examples of how students across the United States are looking to public universities for up-to-date training for a growing number of jobs in climate solutions, from electrification to wind and solar, from energy efficiency to weatherization to water and farmland conservation. More.
Kyle Johnson has long enjoyed working on gasoline-powered cars. But cars are increasingly becoming electric.
“I knew times were changing when it came to electric vehicles, and I didn’t want to be left behind,” said the 34-year-old, who is currently enrolled at Olive-Harvey. “Climate change has a lot of work to do, my decision.”
The warming planet is piqued the interest of many students like Johnson. The job market was already changing as more businesses emerged to combat climate change, and now legislation, including the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, is adding more investment, meaning they’ll have plenty of jobs to pursue. Millions of clean energy workers are needed to meet ambitious targets set by governments and companies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; thus many of these job opportunities are growing faster than overall employment in the US
Instructor Brian Lovell saw this firsthand.
“Students are employed while they are still in the program because the demands of the industry are so fierce,” he said of Roxbury. “We have seen an extreme increase in the last few years.”
Of course, job seekers can also seek workforce training through local employers and labor unions to gain skills for the clean energy trade. But taking their cues directly from companies in their districts and state departments of economic development and labor, community colleges are quickly adapting hands-on training for open jobs and pairing it with academics.
“More than half of these jobs will require less than a bachelor’s degree and more than a high school diploma,” said Kate Kinder, executive director of the National Council on Workforce Education. “This is world-class university space.”
The prospects intrigue students like Tannar Pouilliard, who remembers the rapid emergence of a wind farm near his childhood home. She had considered becoming an automotive technician, but learning about the opportunities in wind led her to enroll in wind energy technician courses in Danville.
“Turning keys and stuff like that is the kind of thing I’ve always wanted to do. “It’s just a broader opportunity,” he said. “This really opens the door to employment for people here.”
At the same time, the bigger picture for community colleges is that, unlike other institutions of higher education, they are losing students. More people are now entering the workforce right after graduating from high school, and some public universities have not recovered from a decline in enrollment during the pandemic. That’s why some schools say investing in these programs is a balancing act between staying current and taking a risk on very nascent technology.
“We’re feeling the pressure,” said Monica Brummer, director of the Pacific Northwest Clean Energy Center of Excellence at Centralia College in Washington. “If we create a curriculum today for, say, a hydrogen technician, two or three years from now it may not be the curriculum we need because technology is changing so quickly… I say let’s weave technology into existing classrooms.”
Some schools hope to adapt without spending money on expensive new tools and expert instructors who may be hard to find. Inver Hills Community College in Minnesota launched a climate change certification in 2022, leveraging existing study spaces at the school, and administrators are considering expanding it. Similarly, Cape Cod Community College recently transitioned from specialized workforce training to a broader sustainable energy certification that students in different fields of study can pursue.
Other community colleges are focusing on helping students like Sarah Solis transition to a four-year degree related to climate change.
The 1,000-acre Inglewood Oil Field near West Los Angeles College, where he first enrolled, is what motivated Solis to pursue environmental studies. He then moved on to the school’s then-new climate change degree. Climate proposals have increased since then; it currently houses the California Climate Change Education Center.
Solis transferred to the University of California at Davis and earned a degree in environmental science and management. But he credits his community college experience with the success he has today teaching urban farms how to sustainably adapt to a warming future (like adding cover crops or using compost).
Many other students do this too.
“This was completely life changing,” Solis said. “If I hadn’t gone West, I wouldn’t be an environmental scientist right now.”
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This story has been corrected to refer to Centralia College instead of Centralia Community College.
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St. John reported from Detroit.
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Alexa St. John is a climate solutions reporter for the Associated Press. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter). @alexa_stjohn. Reach him at ast.john@ap.org.
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