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Jul 27, 2010

More Job-Seekers Hitch Ride on Asian Economy

Bettina Wassener/International Herald Tribune

Jan Mezlik, 29, moved to Hong Kong from the Czech Republic for a job as a trainer in a physical therapy studio called Stretch.

By BETTINA WASSENER

HONG KONG — Shahrzad Moaven quit a public relations job in London and moved to this teeming metropolis four months ago to take up what she saw as a more exciting post: communications director at the exclusive jeweler Carnet.

Jan Mezlik, 29, moved here from the Czech Republic in late April for a job as a trainer in a physical therapy studio called Stretch. For him, the move brought a secure job and the chance to learn to become a yoga instructor.

Charlotte Sumner, a lawyer, arrived eight months ago, thanks to a transfer within her firm. She had spent six months in London and another six in Moscow and had jumped at the chance of a stint in Asia, which she felt would lead to more opportunities than a posting elsewhere.

Before the global financial crisis, none of the three had thought seriously about moving to Asia. But growth in China, India, South Korea and many other countries in the region is outpacing that of Europe and the United States. Many local companies are enjoying rapid expansion, while international employers are shifting positions to Asia and are hiring again. So increasingly, European and American job seekers are hoping that Asia is a place where opportunities match their ambitions.

“Things are just so much more dynamic here,” Ms. Moaven, 28, said. “Back in London, there were fewer resources for P.R. events or advertising. Here, everyone is expanding and spending on marketing activities. That makes my job here a lot more interesting.”

In Hong Kong, the recruiting firm Ambition estimates that the number of résumés arriving from the United States and Europe has risen 20 to 30 percent since 2008. These now make up about two-thirds of the more than 600 résumés its Hong Kong office gets every month, said Matthew Hill, Ambition’s managing director for the city. Similarly, at eFinancialCareers, an online job site, applications for positions based in Singapore and Hong Kong have jumped nearly 50 percent in the last year, its Asia-Pacific chief, George McFerran, said.

Landing a position in Asia, though, is not just a matter of being willing to make a new life halfway around the world. Many employers prefer candidates who have track records in the region and who bring language skills and local contacts to the job.

Mike Game, chief executive in Asia for Hudson, an international recruitment agency, said the number of Westerners actually making the move was still fairly small. Many employers, he said, are more demanding than they were during the economic peak of 2007 and are “setting the bar very high in terms of what they want.”

Nevertheless, many Westerners seem to be looking to make the move.

No wonder. The jobless rate in the United Stands is 9.5 percent, Britain’s is at nearly 8 percent and Spain’s is 19.9 percent. In Hong Kong, by contrast, the unemployment rate is 4.6 percent. In Singapore — another hub of banking, legal and other white-collar positions — only 2.2 percent of people are registered as being out of work. In Australia, the jobless rate fell to 5.1 percent in June, the lowest level in nearly a year and a half.

During the downturn, millions of people in Asia — from factory and construction workers to bankers and architects — lost their jobs as demand for the region’s exports plummeted and multinational companies cut back. But with most Asian countries free of bank failures and the crippling debt loads that governments and households in the West are trying to pay down, economies in the region have bounced back quickly. (Japan is an exception.)

“The speed of the recovery has caught people slightly by surprise,” Mr. McFerran of eFinancialCareers said. “The jobs market is starting to be candidate-driven again.”

Hudson said in late June that the percentage of companies in Hong Kong that planned to hire workers soon was at the highest level since it began monitoring the data in 1998. Two-thirds of companies queried in Hong Kong and in mainland China in May said they planned to add workers in the third quarter of this year. In Singapore, the figure was 57 percent, the highest proportion since 2001, Hudson said.

Many companies in Hong Kong said it was hard to find qualified candidates and complained that salaries were rising, Ambition said in another report.

The renewed hiring has been especially strong in the financial industry and in legal services. But there is movement pretty much across the board — in architecture and engineering, marketing and sales.

Hardly a day goes by without news of expansion in the hospitality and luxury goods sectors, where companies are seeking to tap booming demand in China for luxury handbags, clothes and hotel accommodations.

“You have to staff up now, ahead of the curve, to be ready for the sort of company you will be in five years’ time,” said Pradeep Pant, head of Kraft Foods in Asia-Pacific.

Lauren Kwan left San Francisco to take a position at the global public relations firm Burson-Marsteller in Hong Kong last year.

“I was seeing the hiring freezes and layoffs happening all around me, so I cast my net wider and wider to see what was out there,” she said.

“We’re seeing the beginning of a trend here,” Jeffrey A. Joerres, chief executive of the employment service Manpower, said by telephone from Milwaukee. “With prospects so weak at home, people are considering different options and looking for where the action is. Sure, there is still a lot of hesitation; people want to stay within their comfort zone. But the pressure is on.”

A Westerner hoping to move to Asia often needs to have a profile that fits the region. Employers want people who are familiar with the local culture, as well as the business and regulatory environment. For many jobs — like sales and marketing, or investment banking and wealth management — they are looking for candidates who bring contacts and clients.

Local language skills are a plus — and often a must — for anything China-related, especially jobs that involve interaction with customers.

As a result, local candidates and Asians raised overseas tend to stand a better chance. Ms. Kwan at Burson-Marsteller is just such a person: she grew up in the United States but is fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese.

“Employers don’t want to have to do a lot of baby-sitting and training,” said Matthew Hoyle, who runs his own company, which specializes in hiring senior staff members for banks and hedge funds. “There are plenty of local people with good qualifications who speak Mandarin and Cantonese — you’d have to bring something pretty special to the table to top that.”

Those who have the qualifications to secure a position in Asia will find that jobs are unlikely to come with the sort of lavish benefits they once did. So-called expat packages, which used to include school fees for children and generous housing allowances, are pretty much a thing of the past.

Still, wages in many countries and sectors are starting to rise as the search for qualified personnel intensifies. For example, Ambition found that nearly three-quarters of respondents to its queries had received both salary increases for 2010 and annual bonuses for 2009. In the firm’s previous examination in Hong Kong six months earlier, only 60 percent said they thought they would get both bonuses and raises, indicating that pay had risen more than many expected.

Employers are also increasingly willing to make counteroffers to dissuade important staff members from resigning. Hudson, for example, found in its recent examination that many companies in China, Hong Kong and Singapore were prepared to raise salaries by more than 10 percent to retain top talent.

With taxes rising in other parts of the world — the European Parliament approved one of the world’s strictest crackdowns on bank pay this month, and Britain recently announced tax increases — parts of Asia are beginning to look increasingly attractive in financial terms, too.

Mr. Hoyle’s advice for those interested in working in Asia is to spend time in the region and knock on doors, rather than rely on long-distance networking. If possible, he said, get an internal transfer to build up at least 12 months’ worth of experience in the region.

“Treat Asia as a medium- to long-term project, not just as a stop-gap solution,” counseled Mr. Game of Hudson. “If you’re prepared to learn Mandarin, and if you have a genuine interest in the region, the long-term prospects here are very good.”

Jun 19, 2010

College graduates are less choosy as they launch into their work lives

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

By Jenna Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 19, 2010; A12

One year ago, the Class of 2009 left college and jumped into one of the worst job markets in history.

Cautionary tales about the real world were quickly passed down to younger students: Searching six months for a job, waitressing and bartending stints, moving home with mom and dad, racking up more debt.

"Many of my best friends graduated last year. One out of five has a 'career job,' " said Christina Haley, 21, who just graduated from Marymount University in Arlington County. "We all had seen a couple of years of people graduating and not finding jobs. It put the fear in us to start earlier, to pull strings so that we wouldn't be stuck."

Several career center directors from around the region say the vibe is different in the Class of 2010.

Instead of debating salaries and benefits, many students set their sights on simply getting a job. They begged for internships. They hyper-networked and filed dozens of applications. They often locked in on early offers rather than holding out for something better.

And some 2010 grads decided to wait things out. This academic year, more have taken the Law School Admissions Test than last year. Teach for America, which recruits for hard-to-staff public schools, received a record 46,000 applications for this year's class and was the top employer at some universities.

Image by Oregon State University Archives via Flickr

"People have not waited for the dream job because they don't think it will ever open up," said Beverly T. Lorig, the director of career services at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va.

A national survey of about 13,000 graduating seniors found that 39 percent had received job offers and 59 percent of those students accepted them, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. That's higher than last year, when 40 percent of seniors got offers but only 45 percent of them accepted. The result is that 24.4 percent of 2010 graduates reported having a job before graduation, up from 19.7 percent of the Class of 2009, according to the survey.

Several career centers saw record numbers of students at the beginning of the school year in September and October: More seniors wanted to start their job search early, more underclassmen wanted to find internships and more out-of-work alumni wanted help.

To keep up with the traffic, career centers had to be creative with resources -- after all, this is not a time when universities are bursting with extra cash. The University of Maryland at College Park moved some of its career services online, shortened one-on-one appointment time slots and offered more clinics. Catholic University, in the District, upped its outreach to employers, added more walk-in and evening hours, shortened consultations to 30 minutes and reviewed more résumés by e-mail, usually from home on the weekends.

"Usually the fall semester, for us, is a little more relaxed," said Jen Spataro-Wilson, director of career services at Shenandoah University in Winchester. "From the very beginning, at freshman orientation, we're talking about after-graduation. . . . I think now students are actually listening. They want to be prepared."

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Simone Smith, 22, who graduated in May from George Washington University in the District, watched the unemployment rate her entire senior year and realized that she had to do something drastic to land a job in the California Bay Area, where her parents live.

Her dream job: Being a professional millennial generation trend-spotter.

Her plan of action: Apply for at least 100 jobs.

Backup plan: Live at home, do freelance work.

Smith created accounts on several career Web sites. She set up an RSS feed for relevant job listings that popped up on Craigslist. Then, she applied to everything she could find.

"It's hard to get used to rejection. It isn't just your experience and résumé that they are rejecting -- it's you," she said. "If I apply to 100 jobs, then I will get used to that rejection."

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

She easily hit 100 applications by the Sunday in mid-May when she graduated. She moved home that Monday, and started job interviews Tuesday.

Before the end of the week, she had an offer to be an online marketing and community coordinator for HubPages, a compilation of blogs from across the country. She canceled her other interviews and signed a contract.

"I just wanted to find something," Smith said. "I had no intention of finding something so soon."

Haley, the 2010 Marymount graduate, landed a job with a political fundraising and financing firm in the District after applying "for anything and everything" and tapping all of her connections, including the parents of children she once babysat. She had worried about being stuck in her retail job.

At her graduation party, no one talked much about jobs and job searches. Of the six grads at the party, only three had definite plans.

"Yeah, we're happy, but we're not going to make a big deal out of it," she said. "I was one of the lucky ones."

Right now, Kristin Parris is one of the unlucky ones. Parris was one of 20 honors students to graduate from Howard University's business school, in the District. Typically, those top graduates receive six or seven job offers each during their first semester of senior year.

Such calls during the past two years have become much rarer, and the director of the honors program said some recruiters who once called her looking for students to hire are now calling to see whether she has heard of job opportunities for themselves.

This year, the offers didn't come until second semester. The most offers anyone had was three -- and Parris didn't get a single one.

"I never in a million years thought I would graduate and not have a job. I never, ever thought I would," said Parris, 22, who searched for months for a human resources position. "I was too narrow in my job search. I think if I had opened myself up a little more, I might have a job. Probably not my dream job, but a job."

Soon after graduation, she signed up for a two-week seminar that teaches the basics of media sales and began to learn the trade from scratch. She completed that program this month and hopes the connections she made will land her a job.

"I could do sales," she said. "I never thought that I would. But I could do it."

Mar 11, 2010

Obama outlines strategy to boost US exports -- and jobs

Obama is ordering the creation of an ‘export promotion cabinet’ – one of several things he described in a speech Thursday in an effort to double US exports. The goal is to create 2 million jobs within the next five years.

President Barack Obama speaks at the Export-Import Bank's Annual Conference in Washington, Thursday. He ordered the creation of a high-level team to promote US exports, with the goal of creating 2 million jobs.
(Charles Dharapak/AP)

By Mark Trumbull Staff writer
posted March 11, 2010 at 3:17 pm EST

President Obama moved Thursday to create a high-level team to promote US exports, with the goal of creating 2 million jobs within the next five years.

The project will span from efforts to reduce hurdles for companies in shipping goods overseas, to adjusting trade policy with a blend of carrots (a push for new free-trade agreements) and sticks (tougher enforcement of trade rules). The near-term goal is to double US exports within five years.

"For the first time, the United States of America is launching a single, comprehensive strategy to promote American exports," Mr. Obama told the annual conference of the Export-Import Bank, an institution in Washington designed to promote US trade.

Getting that many more jobs from exports won't be easy, but new efforts on trade are very much needed, economists say. The most obvious reason is that America needs more jobs, at a time when consumer demand at home remains tepid. A second reason is that the world economy continues to become more competitive, which means that the US can't rest on its laurels as the world’s leading exporter of goods and services.

"Ninety-five percent of the world’s customers and the world’s fastest-growing markets are outside our borders. We need to compete for those customers. Because other nations are," Obama said. "We need to up our game."

Obama outlined a multipart "national export initiative":

• He signed an executive order "instructing the federal government to use every available federal resource" to boost exports. The order created an "export promotion cabinet," made up of the secretaries of State, Treasury, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor, plus the US trade representative and other officials.

• He revived a separate body, called the President’s Export Council, and named Boeing CEO Jim McNerney and Xerox CEO Ursula Burns as co-chairs. The panel will make recommendations on trade policy.

• Multiple cabinet departments will help create a "one-stop shop" for small employers that want help identifying opportunities and setting up operations overseas. The effort would include embassies and consulates abroad, as well as agencies like the Departments of Agriculture and Commerce.

• Obama pledged to promote new free-trade agreements while also enforcing laws on the books, such as intellectual-property rights. "China moving to a more market-oriented exchange rate would make an essential contribution" to a more-balanced global economy, he said. That move could also help narrow the large gap by which US imports exceed exports.

• The administration will increase access to trade financing. Obama commended efforts by the Export-Import Bank over the past year to step up its activities when US credit markets were impaired.

In addition, Obama pledged to be a kind of salesman in chief for US companies, with him and his cabinet members plugging the virtues of "made in America" when they travel overseas. Next week, the president will take his export evangelism to Indonesia and Australia.

The announcement about export strategy came as a government report showed a narrower-than-expected trade deficit for the US in January. Imports exceeded exports by $37.3 billion, with the volume of oil and automobile imports falling for the month.

Obama first announced the goal of doubling exports within five years during his State of the Union address to Congress in January.

Some economists, running the numbers, have said it's a difficult objective to reach.

"During the last 25 years nominal exports never grew this quickly in five years; it took an average of 11 years for exports to double," economist Sven Jari Stehn wrote in an analysis for Goldman Sachs.

Hitting the goal, he estimated, would require a combination of strong global economic growth and an adjustment of the dollar's value relative to currencies such as China's yuan.

"If global real GDP grew by an above-consensus 4.5 percent during the next five years, the dollar would still need to depreciate by about 30 percent, slightly more than the largest 5-year real depreciation on record during the last 25 years," Mr. Stehn concluded.

This doesn't mean that Obama's target is unreachable, however. And efforts to boost exports and achieve a more-balanced global economy could bring benefits even if his goal isn't reached.

Mar 1, 2010

With pressures high, South Korean women put off marriage and childbirth

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 1, 2010; A10

SEOUL -- In a full-page newspaper advertisement headlined "I Am a Bad Woman," Hwang Myoung-eun explained the trauma of being a working mom in South Korea.

"I may be a good employee, but to my family I am a failure," wrote Hwang, a marketing executive and mother of a 6-year-old son. "In their eyes, I am a bad daughter-in-law, bad wife and bad mother."

The highly unusual ad gave voice to the resentment and repressed anger that are common to working women across South Korea.

In a country where people work more and sleep less than anywhere else in the developed world, women are often elbowed away from rewards in their professional lives. If they have a job, they make 38 percent less money than men, the largest gender gap in the developed world. If they become pregnant, they are pressured at work not to take legally guaranteed maternity leave.

Thanks to gender equality in education, the professional skills and career aspirations of women in South Korea have soared over the past two decades. But those gains are colliding with a corporate culture that often marginalizes mothers at the workplace -- or ejects them altogether.

Women who do combine work and family find themselves squeezed between too little time and too much guilt: for neglecting the education of children in a nation obsessed with education, for shirking family obligations as dictated by assertive mothers-in-law, and for failing to attend to the care and feeding of overworked and resentful husbands.

As Hwang complained in two mournful newspaper advertisements she bought last fall in Seoul newspapers: "We work harder than anyone to manage housekeeping and earn wages, so why are we branded as selfish, irresponsible women?"

When the ads were published in September, Hwang's name did not appear in them. But she has since acknowledged buying them and has gone on television to draw attention to the pressures endured by working women.

Most South Korean corporations do little to accommodate working mothers -- or working fathers, experts say. South Korean law allows a full year of subsidized parental leave, but intense peer pressure at work means that working mothers usually take little time off, according to government surveys. Only about 35,000 parents in this country of 49 million people took advantage of child-care leave subsidies last year.

"The longer leave they take, the less the likelihood of getting their old job back, even though that is illegal," said Yoo Gye-sook, an associate professor of family studies at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. "Flextime is frowned on by human-resources managers. They feel that company discipline might erode."

To lower stress as they climb corporate ladders, women in South Korea are postponing marriage and motherhood. The number of unmarried women in their 20s and 30s is surging. For three years running, South Korea has had the world's lowest birthrate, according to the U.N. World Health Organization.

The no-husband, no-baby trend has become a demographic epidemic in East Asia. Among the 10 countries or territories with the world's lowest fertility rates, six are in the Asia-Pacific region, according to a 2008 CIA ranking. From Japan to Singapore, the percentage of women who remain single into their mid-30s is rising at historically unprecedented rates. In South Korea, the percentage of unmarried women ages 30 to 34 nearly doubled in the past five years, rising to 19 percent from 10.5 percent.

"Women in their late 20s are just not willing to make the sacrifice of having children, juggling family responsibilities and working," Yoo said.

Collapsing birthrates are alarming East Asian governments, which in coming years will face a demographic crunch as the proportion of pensioners rises and the number of working-age adults declines. South Korea, which has projected a population decline beginning in 2018, is scrambling to encourage childbirth with incentives including low-interest home loans for families with three or more children.

But for South Korean women, choosing to have children usually means falling off the career track. There is a 30 percent employment gap here between men and women, the fourth-largest gap in the world, after Turkey, Mexico and Greece. Even if women choose to stay on the job, they have no guarantees of career advancement.

U.N. statistics show that gender empowerment, as measured by women holding management and professional jobs, is falling.

"This means that despite Korean women having good health and excellent education, they still have a much greater chance of becoming a politician or even a middle manager or computer programmer in countries like Kyrgyzstan, the Dominican Republic, Botswana or Nicaragua," said James Turnbull, whose blog, "The Grand Narrative," tracks sex discrimination and the role of women in South Korea.

Hwang, the working mom who says she spent about $8,600 last fall buying newspaper ads to vent her frustrations, works 10 to 12 hours a day as a chief strategic officer in charge of product promotions for a Seoul marketing company. She said her salary is about double what her husband makes -- a rare and delicate equation in a South Korean family.

"When you make more than the husband, you have to be careful not to hurt his pride," said Hwang, 38, who makes about $86,000 a year. "I make a point of getting a suggestion from him, when I buy my own clothes or a new aquarium for my son's fish."

Even more problematic, Hwang said, is her husband's mother.

In the "I Am a Bad Woman" advertisement that she placed in the newspaper, Hwang gives this account of telephoning her mother-in-law to ask for help with child care:

"Her sharp scolding returns from the other side of the phone: 'Have you forgotten today is the day of your father-in-law's memorial service? Your other family members are already here. I understand you are talented and all, but do you ever fulfill your family obligations?' "

Hwang said her husband is more sympathetic and "does more at home than other husbands in South Korea." She said she understands that it is not easy for him to have a working wife.

"The husbands here expect a warm home and a pat on the shoulder, but sometimes my husband may not get that," she said.

Hwang's husband declined to comment.

Special correspondent June Lee contributed to this report.

Jan 27, 2010

Why the Federal Government Can’t Recruit and Retain Hispanic-Americans

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

John Bersentes and Mark Havard

Jan 27, 2010, 5:21 am ET

The U.S. is subject to powerful cultural forces rooted in demographics and ethnicity. Nowhere is the influence of these cultural crosswinds more evident today than in our growing Hispanic population and its increasing claim on a share of the American Dream. By the numbers, Latinos are the dominant minority group in the nation, totaling more than 15 percent of the population, a proportion that continues to grow at an unprecedented rate. They make up just under 13% of the U.S. workforce nationwide, certainly a significant portion but still lagging their overall share in the American population.

But the participation of Hispanic-Americans in the federal workforce is a different story. According to the latest data (2008) from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Latinos make up barely 8% of the Federal workforce. In recent years, a number of high-visibility initiatives have been directed at the challenge of Hispanic participation, but the numbers continue to lag. Despite their seeming best efforts, Federal agencies have generally made little progress in recruiting and retaining Hispanic employees over the last decade.

At TMP Government, this situation has puzzled us as well. In the March Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership (ERE’s print publication geared at recruiting leaders), we lay out a seven-step suggested solution to the problem.

For now, though, we’ll kick it off online by suggesting a few possible causes and symptoms of the government’s apparent failure to make headway on this challenge.

Statistics Tell the Tale

Again, Hispanic-Americans are the largest and fastest-growing minority segment in the U.S. By all predictions, this trend will continue at least through the first half of this century. As of its last estimate (2007), the U.S. Census Bureau pegs the median age of U.S. Hispanics at 27.7 years, compared to 36.8 years for the rest of the population. And almost 34% of U.S. Hispanics are younger than 18; for the population as a whole, only 25% of Americans are under 18. By 2050, again according to the Census Bureau, Hispanic-Americans will make up nearly 25% of the total population.

These predictions promise significant implications for our culture and economy — not to mention the U.S. labor market. Overall employment numbers in the U.S. are already showing the impact of this accelerating demographic shift. Since 1980, the American labor force has grown by more than 41%. Fully a third of this increase is accounted for by Hispanics.

Human capital professionals in the corporate world appear to dealing effectively with this groundswell of Hispanics in the general workforce, and are diligently preparing for the new HR imperatives it will bring in its wake. But this is not the case with government human capital leaders. We have one question for them:

Why is the Federal government’s track record of recruiting and developing Hispanic employees so bad?

Across the board, the feds have managed to achieve only 7.8% participation by Hispanics in the government workforce. And the news gets worse: Hispanic men and women today represent only 3.6% of individuals at federal senior pay levels — a proportion that drops to 2.5% when you take political appointees out of the calculation.

These numbers are puzzling, to say the least. The government has traditionally been the standard-bearer for minority participation in the workforce. Consider African-Americans: they make up 13% percent of the U.S. population and — according to the latest available count (2008) — more than 18% of the Federal workforce. Certainly we should credit most of this progress to vigorous initiatives by Federal agencies, beginning in the early 1970s, to recruit and retain talented African-Americans.

But when it comes to leveling the playing field for Hispanics in government, today’s recruitment initiatives appear to be yielding only marginal gains at best, and in some cases they are barely holding the line against attrition.

We’re prepared to suggest several factors that may be diminishing the government’s success in making recruitment gains among Hispanic-Americans. At the same time, we are identifying a number of technical and strategic measures that in our view can go a long way toward helping the government succeed in this mission. Moreover, these innovations have the potential to enrich other dimensions of Federal human capital management substantially — beyond recruitment and beyond the Hispanic-American segment.

What factors influence the government’s disappointing track record in recruiting and retaining Hispanics?

Here, in brief, are a handful of factors that may be contributing to the Feds’ apparent lack of success with the Hispanic-American segment.

Competitive Barriers From Industry

The corporate community has seemingly mastered the Hispanic recruitment challenge. Indeed it may hold the trump card here, both by reason of the resources it can devote to Hispanic engagement programs and the pay premiums it can offer to talented Latino candidates. The government simply can’t keep pace on either score. The Feds aren’t empowered to offer pay incentives based on minority status, and most agencies today don’t have the budgets or staff resources to build comprehensive recruiting/retention programs targeted at the Hispanic segment.

“Geo-Demographic” Barriers

Most federal entry-level positions tend to be in the national capital region. In the District of Columbia and the two adjacent states (Maryland and Virginia), the population of Hispanics is well below that of many other regions, especially in the Southwest and California. The “hire-able” population is simply not that deep in Washington, despite some clustering of Hispanic blue-collar workers in Washington and its near suburbs. Compounding this difficulty is a disconcerting “psychographic” factor suggested anecdotally by many recruiters: young, job-seeking Hispanics in general are less inclined to relocate, because it means leaving their extended families for new positions away from home. In the absence of family ties here, a move to the Washington area for a government job may be inherently less attractive for some Hispanic-Americans.

Lack of High-level Commitment and Resources Among Individual Agencies and Departments

Let’s face it: campaigns to improve Hispanic participation in the Federal workforce simply cannot draw on the same driving momentum in society as the widespread movement for civil rights and equal opportunity for African-Americans. From the 1960s on, in fact, the federal government was the primary institutional driver behind this movement, and a natural leader in the crusade to roll back hiring barriers impeding black Americans.

But when it comes to Hispanics and other underserved minorities, there’s neither the degree of enforced commitment nor even (so far as we can tell) a deeply felt personal commitment at high levels. Without the visible presence of management champions of the cause, there’s little incentive to build real momentum for Hispanic programs within agencies. By the same token, agency funds are rarely available to mount Hispanic programming on the same scale as earlier equal opportunity initiatives centering on African-Americans (except, perhaps, where Spanish language skills are a job requirement).

Misleading Emphasis on Recruiting for Spanish-speaking Positions and Bilingual Skills

Break down the government’s current roster of Hispanic employees and you will find a disconcerting reality: they tend to cluster in public interface positions that call for fluency in Spanish, as well as in low-paying service jobs, like maintenance and food service. In the first instance — although it’s anything but pleasant to contemplate — we’re suggesting that some agencies that need to recruit aggressively for bilingual positions may unconsciously put bilingual qualifications first when they evaluate any Hispanic-American candidate. The result: they may unconsciously filter non-Spanish speaking Hispanics out of consideration for ‘mainstream’ positions that don’t require Spanish-language skills.

We realize that this element is potentially controversial, and are not suggesting that conscious prejudice plays any part in this cycle (if it exists). But we are suggesting that maybe, just maybe, unconscious habits of mind among hiring officials could be channeling Hispanic candidates into the constituent interface track and not considering them carefully enough for mainstream positions if they don’t — or even if they do — fit the bilingual mold.

Scarcity of Agency Resources to Take Comprehensive, Top-down Action

It’s the rare individual agency or department that elevates the full cycle of Hispanic recruitment, retention, and development to a top-level institutional initiative. We have encountered few agencies that have set out to elicit engaged participation from senior leadership, the agency management team, hiring managers, and their operating components, and all units in the agency HR infrastructure. An agency that adopts this kind of vertically integrated organizational strategy would have an advantage ion recruiting all diversity classes, not just Hispanic-Americans.

There’s another flavor of integration that might also help at the agency level: effectively integrating its recruitment outreach thematically by underscoring:

the full employment life-cycle at the agency, and
the agency’s commitment to productive inclusion of all diversity classes in the workplace community.

Agencies that approach the Hispanic/diversity recruitment challenge from all of these integrative perspectives, it seems to us, stand a much better chance of success than agencies that revert to standard “checklist” practices of minority hiring.

Lack of Concrete, Government-wide Initiatives for Meeting This Challenge

Up until now, agencies have tended to go it alone rather than teaming with other agencies in the Hispanic recruitment mission. While surely this is due to budgetary constraints (as well as something of a competitive dimension, owing to the perceived scarcity of Hispanic candidates), it’s a less-than-effective way to tackle the challenge. In the typical agency HR infrastructure, recruiting resources are limited and/or distributed across multiple initiatives. The result: Hispanic recruitment and retention (despite the current hue-and-cry) may not attract the urgent managerial, budgetary, and strategic attention they deserve. And while a given agency may have its share of individual champions for the Hispanic cause, it can find itself without the resources and allies to gain real purchase on the initiative.

The alternative is collective effort across agency boundaries. If insularity and inter-agency competitiveness can be set aside and budget barriers cleared, this approach could create empowering economies of scale, not to mention bringing individual, agency-based champions together on the same team, where their collective talent, energy, and enthusiasm can be harnessed and channeled.

Of course, government-wide taskforces to analyze the challenge are a critical (and-all-too familiar) first step, but up to now they haven’t demonstrated the power to implement collective solutions. Luckily, today’s Office of Personnel Management is a leading champion of collective government-wide common action among agencies. OPM is developing similar programs to coordinate recruiting pools of special talent, like technology and finance, for multiple agencies to draw on for new employees. A similar initiative for Hispanic recruiting could go far to address the current challenge.

We realize that many of the influential factors we suggest above will likely stir discussion and controversy. It’s important to regard them as topics for consideration, not hard formulas. We want to inspire more dialogue on this topic, and ultimately spur progress on this very serious challenge. Again, check out the March Journal for our proposed solutions.

Jan 10, 2010

Immigrants invest in U.S. businesses in exchange for visas

Image by yewenyi via Flickr

By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 10, 2010; A06

The number of foreigners willing to invest $500,000 to $1 million in a U.S. business in exchange for a visa roughly tripled in the past fiscal year, as dozens of cash-strapped enterprises and local governments scrambled to attract wealthy foreign backers through a previously obscure provision of immigration law.

Under the EB-5 visa program, immigrants who can demonstrate that their investment created or preserved at least 10 U.S. jobs after two years are granted legal permanent residency along with their spouses and children.

Although immigrants are allowed to establish businesses under the program, most prefer to invest in "regional centers" -- public or private enterprises that are certified by the government to receive funds from EB-5 investors and that can count jobs indirectly created by the investment toward the 10 required.

The minimum outlay mandated is $1 million, but immigrants can reduce that to $500,000 by investing in a regional center or establishing businesses in areas designated as economically disadvantaged.

The program was established in 1990, but potential investors and businesses were often dissuaded by the U.S. government's slow and inconsistent administration of the complex rules. In the past year, however, a gradual streamlining of procedures coincided with the recession and credit crunch to dramatically boost interest in the program.

In a matter of months, more than 50 private and public enterprises were certified as regional centers, increasing the total from 23 to 74. Three are in the Washington area.

With so many more investment opportunities to choose from, the number of immigrants (including investors and their immediate family members) who obtained EB-5 visas jumped from 1,443 in fiscal 2008 to 4,218 in the 2009 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, according to the State Department.

Most were granted to people from Asia, particularly China and South Korea. Several scholars said they expect the number to double again this year.

"What happens with programs like this is that sometimes, all of a sudden they get discovered, and then intermediaries begin to really promote them both here and internationally," said Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank that recently released a report about the trend.

Statistics on the total invested through the EB-5 program are not available, but the capital infusion has been a boon to Washington area businesses. The Capitol Area Regional Center, a real estate investment fund based in the District, has been working to raise a projected $250 million from immigrant investors for use in Washington area construction projects.

Perhaps the greatest potential beneficiaries are nonprofit agencies such as the District's Anacostia Economic Development Corp., which was approved as a regional center in June. Over the next three years, the group hopes to raise $50 million from immigrant investors to develop real estate projects and small businesses in wards 7 and 8 -- a princely sum compared with the $2 million in private capital it raised for its last major building project in Anacostia.

"Normally, to get equity capital to these areas is almost impossible," said Michael Wallach, chief operating officer of the corporation. "These two wards have the highest unemployment rate in the city and the lowest incomes."

But because the primary motivation of the immigrant investors whom Wallach is wooing is to create enough jobs to meet the visa requirement rather than to maximize the return on their investment, they might prove less skittish.

'It was worth it to me'

Program participant Eric Canal-Forgues, a law professor and businessman from France, is a case in point. In 2007, he invested $500,000 in a regional center that funded construction of Comcast's headquarters in Philadelphia.

He said it is unlikely that he will get more than a 1 percent return by the five-year point at which he will be allowed to withdraw his money. That will barely cover the roughly $50,000 in administrative costs of his investment, let alone the loss of value because of inflation.

But Canal-Forgues, 47, who has moved with his wife and two children to Miami, said he has no regrets. "I knew the conditions going in, and it was worth it to me," he said. He said that Miami was attractive because of its financial opportunities and that he plans to open a franchise of children's clothing stores.

But more than anything else, he said, "we really wanted our children to be raised in a dual culture, French and American, especially because I think the educational system at the university level is much stronger here than in France."

Statistics suggest that many EB-5 applicants might also find the program appealing because it is considerably speedier than other options: Nearly 70 percent of immigrants granted investor visas in fiscal 2009 were from China or South Korea, countries whose nationals face decade-long waits for family-reunification visas because of quotas on the annual number allowed in from any one country.

Concerns about fraud

That immigrant investors are more focused on obtaining visas than maximizing profits -- combined with the government's limited capacity for oversight -- has caused even some avid proponents of the EB-5 program to worry that a profusion of fraudulent or ill-advised ventures might soon flourish alongside legitimate ones.

"The thing that concerns me most is that some fly-by-night [operation] will lose a large group of investors' money, and it will poison the well for the rest of us," said David Morris, founder of EB-5 America, a Washington regional center that invested $20 million to refurbish the Sugarbush ski resort in Vermont in past years and is now raising money for construction projects in the District.

Yet Morris also notes that some of the stricter rules of the EB-5 program -- including the rigid timeline by which the job creation requirement must be met -- do not always mesh with the realities of the business world, with consequences for both immigrant investors and potential business ventures.

For instance one of Morris's clients, Rodrigo Martinez, a Mexican immigrant who lives in Arlington County, was initially keen to invest in a project to renovate the historic O Street Market at Seventh and O streets NW. "The fact that you are helping to have a positive effect on the community that you're joining, I really liked that idea," said Martinez, 27.

But fearing that construction delays would prevent that project from creating sufficient jobs in time, Martinez, who attended law school in the United States and now works as a business consultant, switched his money last year to the Sugarbush resort instead.

Supporters of the EB-5 program also complain that the government's review process for approving potential regional centers is still too slow, especially at a time when a similar Canadian visa program is attracting three times as many immigrant investors.

Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor at Cornell University's law school and executive director of a trade association of regional centers, said the number of EB-5 visas being granted falls well short of the maximum 10,000 allowed each year.

"There's a lot more that we could be doing to promote the EB-5 program so that it can achieve its true potential in this economic recession," he said.

Bipartisan support

Powerful members of Congress on both sides of the aisle agree. In a rare bipartisan convergence on an immigration issue, Sens. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking member, recently joined forces in an effort to make the regional centers permanent. (The centers were established under a pilot program that has been extended several times since the 1990s).

Leahy said he was impressed by the millions of dollars that EB-5 visa holders have invested in ski resorts such as Jay Peak and other projects in the distressed northeastern region of Vermont.

Because of legislative wrangling unrelated to the EB-5 program, Leahy had to settle for a three-year extension in the fiscal 2010 Homeland Security Appropriations bill adopted in the fall.

Still, Leahy predicted that not only will all aspects of the program soon be made permanent but also that the annual number of visas might be increased.

"Once it's permanent, I think we're really going to see the true value of this," he said. "At a time when we're seeing so many of our jobs exported out of the country, this creates jobs in the United States."

Jan 7, 2010

Obama administration adds gender identity to Equal Employment Opportunity policies

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Policy Marks First Time Transgender Individuals Are Explicitly Protected In Federal Employment

WASHINGTON – Beginning in 2010, the Obama administration, through the Office of Personnel Management, has started to list gender identity among the classes protected by federal Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) policies. By including gender identity as a protected class, the federal government is stating its commitment to protecting transgender employees and has taken a significant step toward ending employment discrimination of LGBT people in the federal workforce.

Although a long-standing federal law prohibits any federal employment decisions that are not based on merit and another law prohibits sex discrimination, the new EEO policy marks the first time that gender identity discrimination has been explicitly banned from the federal workplace. The policy is now on the federal government’s jobs Web site as a link from more than 20,000 current federal job listings. The American Civil Liberties Union praised the Obama administration for initiating the change in EEO policy and urged Congress to continue to work for further protections for LGBT Americans.

“This new policy is a very significant development,” said Christopher Anders, ACLU Senior Legislative Counsel. “The inclusion of gender identity in federal EEO policies is a very clear statement that the federal government will not discriminate based on gender identity. The Obama administration is demonstrating a strong commitment to an effective workforce by making clear that the federal government will not discriminate against transgender employees.”

The new EEO policy protects federal employees and applicants for federal employment, but federal legislation is still needed to protect millions of LGBT employees working for businesses and state and local governments. The House and Senate currently have versions of the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) pending. ENDA, if passed, would be the first-ever federal ban on employment discrimination of LBGT Americans in the workplace.

“Employment discrimination can have a devastating effect on transgender Americans and the families they support,” said Anders. “With its new policy, the federal government is setting a good example for all employers. Although many state governments and businesses already provide workplace protections for transgender employees, explicit protection of transgender federal employees will likely be a catalyst for many more states and businesses to apply the federal policy. With this new policy and ENDA pending in both the House and Senate, we have an unprecedented opportunity to protect the rights of all Americans at work. When Congress returns later this month, both houses should make passing ENDA a priority.”

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A copy of an ACLU report, Working in the Shadows: Ending Employment Discrimination for LGBT Americans, is available at: www.aclu.org/lgbt/discrim/31836pub20070917.html

Oct 6, 2009

Federal Diary: Government Lags in Hiring of Latinos

By Ed O'Keefe
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Latino Americans may be the nation's fastest-growing minority group, but they're also the most underrepresented among civilian federal employees. As of last September, Hispanics accounted for about 8 percent of the total civilian federal workforce, according to the Office of Personnel Management. That's well below the 13.2 percent of Hispanics in the national civilian labor force, according to Labor Department statistics.

Of the 25 largest government agencies, 17 saw modest increases in Hispanic hires in fiscal 2008 over fiscal 2007, with most being made at the lower- and mid-level General Schedule levels. At higher levels of government, Hispanics accounted for 3.6 percent of the Senior Executive Service during fiscal 2008, according to OPM figures.

The overall Latino hiring disparity is equivalent to more than 100,000 jobs or roughly $5.5 billion in salaries, according to Gilbert Sandate, chairman of the Coalition for Fairness for Hispanics in Government. His group has met with White House and OPM officials to discuss the issue.

Put another way, practically every new hire in the federal government would have to be Hispanic to make up the difference between the population size and the numbers represented in the government civilian workforce, said Jorge E. Ponce, co-chairman of the Council of Federal EEO and Civil Rights Executives.

Nobody is advocating such a move, and regardless, most Hispanic leaders that track the issue are pleased with what the Obama administration has done so far to address their concerns.

"We are encouraged by the enthusiasm and some of the things that they want to do, that they hope to do in terms of addressing this issue," Sandate said.

Hispanic activists applauded Obama's decision to appoint Hilda L. Solis as labor secretary and Ken Salazar to lead the Interior Department. The White House counts at least 43 Senate-confirmed government officials of Hispanic origin (including ambassadors and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor), a number higher than at the same point in the Clinton and Bush administrations. More than 30 other Latinos work on the White House staff, three of whom participate in the daily senior staff meetings, according to White House officials.

Those senior Latino officials should help recruitment efforts at lower levels of government, said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

"One of the things we do know, and it's not surprising, is that when we have Latinos as Cabinet secretaries, we have increases in Hispanic hires," he said.

"It really comes down to a commitment from the senior-most individuals at these agencies, in this case Cabinet secretaries and directors, that they make a commitment to diversifying the workforce. It has to come from the top," Vargas said.

The OPM is working to develop a new strategy to address hiring diversity, said Elizabeth A. Montoya, the agency's chief of staff. But observers said the OPM can only do so much because it lacks the ability to enforce its hiring suggestions or hold agencies accountable.

"The federal agencies are left to self-police themselves," Sandate said. "While it's true that OPM asks the individual agencies to submit annual reports, there are no consequences whatsoever if they've done good or bad. As a result, Hispanics continue to be the only underrepresented group in the federal workforce."

Janet Murguía, president of the National Council of La Raza, has also called for more accountability.

"The nation's demographics are changing fast, and the government needs to react to that," she said.

Montoya said accountability measures will be considered as part of OPM's new recommendations.

"It's under discussion how we implement that accountability," she said.

In the meantime, several agencies are seeking new ways to recruit and hire Latinos for entry- and mid-level positions, according to the OPM. "Across the board, a lot of departments are struggling with the hiring in general, and that is something that everyone is willing to admit," said Vince Casillas, the former Hispanic media director for the Obama campaign who is now a partner with Balsera Communications. He has met with several government agencies to discuss launching campaigns aimed at potential Latino recruits.

"There's definitely right now a deliberate and conscious effort to start reaching out to Latinos and recruiting them," he said.

Sep 14, 2009

In China’s Alleys, Shouting Vendors Sow Echoes of the Past - NYTimes.com

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By ANDREW JACOBS

BEIJING — Not long after daybreak, before the city begins its full-throated roar, the shouts and calls can be heard up and down the old alleyways and deep within the walled courtyards that form the crowded heart of the Chinese capital.

“Goat meat, goat meat!”

“Eggs, rice, eggs, rice!”

“Scrap, household scrap!”

With more emphasis on song than lyric, they are the marketing jingles of itinerant fruit vendors, sellers of roasted duck, and stooped men who have mastered the art of resuscitating blunt kitchen knives. Like the familiar whine of cicadas in August, their garbled calls are the soundtrack of the Beijing summer, and many residents look forward to the return of the hawkers’ glutinous rice cakes, mismatched crockery and pet grasshoppers that sing.

Even more numerous than the hawkers are the recyclers, sun-scorched migrants from the countryside who survive by collecting yesterday’s newspapers, spent computers or tattered cotton blankets that will be spun into next winter’s comforters.

“If you can’t yell loudly, you’ll starve,” said Chen Lin, 37, a bony, animated man who earns about $5 a day salvaging dead appliances and anything else containing metal.

“No one really knows what I’m yelling,” he said, “but they remember my song and this brings them out of their house.”

The singing hawkers and recyclers are reminders of the days when Beijing was a thickly populated maze of hutongs, or alleys, that crept outward from the grandiose imperial quarters occupied by China’s emperors and the officials and artisans who served them.

Cao Huiping, 45, a taxi driver whose childhood compound was stuffed with 17 unrelated families, recalls when vendors filled the air with a cacophony of competing tunes.

“One minute it would be someone selling sugar, then as soon as their song faded it would be the flour dealer, then the fabric salesman,” said Mr. Cao, whose home has since been replaced by an upscale mall. “Now I live in a building where people don’t even know each other and everyone shops at the supermarket.”

Gated apartment complexes are the hawker’s enemy. So, too, are the air-conditioners that drown out sales calls and keep residents inside.

The city authorities are no friends of the street vendors either. Stringent laws and urban management officials, known as chengguan, keep them on the run with fines and harassment. “The best time to be out is lunchtime, when the chengguan are on break,” said Meng Xiandong, 54, a vendor of dried sweet potatoes, as he nervously scanned the crowds.

A good place to get a taste of old Beijing is Qianmen, a poor but colorful quarter south of Tiananmen Square that is a jumble of twisting hutongs and ramshackle houses. On most days, one can find peddlers selling meticulously skinned pineapples, a man offering two kinds of honey — plain and medicinal — and an ornery cobbler who can resole a pair of shoes in as much time as it takes to down a steaming bowl of hand-shaved noodles.

Cradling a brass teapot and watching over three pairs of caged lovebirds, Wu Xiulong, 76, sat in front of the doorway of his courtyard and reminisced about the vendors whose arrival he used to await as a child: the bean-cake man, the corncob seller, the baker who produced the flakiest flatbread. “Oh, back then they were baked on both sides, so crunchy, with sesame seeds,” he said. “It was so delicious. Now they’re all gone.”

Zhao Cai, a 66-year-old knife sharpener, is one of the old-timers who can still be found wandering around with a beaten-up toolbox that doubles as a bench. His call is bracing but melodious, although once he sets to work on a blade, the noise of grindstone on metal brings out the old women with their beloved worn-out cleavers.

“I hate stainless steel,” he said as he pedaled the grindstone. “No one makes knives like they used to.”

Unsentimental and gruff, his accent betraying his hometown in China’s far northeast, Mr. Zhao has been plying his trade for more than 30 years.

“When you’re good at sharpening knives, you get to know everyone,” he said.

How good is he? Customers sometimes foolishly test his handiwork by touching the sharpened edge. “I’ve had ladies draw blood and swear they didn’t feel a thing,” he said.

As he spoke, there was a loud crash behind him, followed by a choking plume of dust. Workers in orange vests were tearing signs off nearby buildings, part of a government campaign to make the neighborhood more attractive to tourists who like a bit less visual chaos in their Old Beijing experience. “I don’t recognize some of the streets around here anymore,” he said before fleeing the advance of the demolition crew.

One man who needs no vocal announcement is Li Hailun, a grasshopper salesman whose wares, hundreds of wingless insects imprisoned in round, woven enclosures, produce a deafening, high-pitched symphony. From July to October, Mr. Li, 28, bikes around the city with his chirping quarry, each of which sells for 50 cents to a dollar, depending on the quality of the song and the gullibility of the buyer. Add a dollar if the critter comes in a graceful wooden cage.

Much of Mr. Li’s village, about a two-hour drive from the capital, is engaged in the grasshopper trade: women weave the cages, boys catch the insects and the men pedal them to nostalgic city dwellers. When sales lag, he heads to the gates of the nearest children’s hospital. Subtracting the occasional fine for vending without a license, Mr. Li pockets $200 a week, a tidy sum for a sorghum farmer biding his time between planting and harvest.

The bugs draw a crowd wherever Mr. Li goes. On a recent day, passers-by debated whether to feed them carrots, scallions or rice. A woman said that toddlers raised alongside a trilling insect were not easily startled by noise.

“When the grasshopper guy comes out, you know summer has arrived,” said a man who was seeking to replace the one, tethered to his rear-view mirror, that was on its last legs.

Mr. Li, ever the salesman, added his own poetic pitch. He declared that the Chinese had been raising grasshoppers for hundreds of years. Even Qianlong, a Qing dynasty emperor, was a connoisseur of the fighting variety.

“Everyone loves grasshoppers,” Mr. Li said. “When they sing, you can’t help but feel happy.”

Xiyun Yang contributed research.

Jul 21, 2009

Can Community Colleges Save the U.S. Economy?

by Laura Fitzpatrick / Austin

Community colleges are deeply unsexy. This fact tends to make even the biggest advocates of these two-year schools — which educate nearly half of U.S. undergraduates — sound defensive, almost a tad whiny. "We don't have the bands. We don't have the football teams that everybody wants to boost," says Stephen Kinslow, president of Texas' Austin Community College (ACC). "Most people don't understand community colleges very well at all." And by "most people," he means the graduates of fancy four-year schools who get elected and set budget priorities.

Many politicians and their well-heeled constituents may be under the impression that a community college — as described in a promo for NBC's upcoming comedy Community — is a "loser college for remedial teens, 20-something dropouts, middle-aged divorcées and old people keeping their minds active as they circle the drain of eternity." But there's at least one Ivy Leaguer who is trying to help Americans get past the stereotypes and start thinking about community college not as a dumping ground but as one of the best tools the U.S. has to dig itself out of the current economic hole. His name: Barack Obama. (See pictures of Barack Obama's college years.)

The President hasn't forgotten about the 30 or so community colleges he visited during the 2008 campaign. These institutions are our nation's trade schools, training 59% of our new nurses as well as cranking out wind-farm technicians and video-game designers — jobs that, despite ballooning unemployment overall, abound for adequately skilled workers. Community-college graduates earn up to 30% more than high school grads, a boon that helps state and local governments reap a 16% return on every dollar they invest in community colleges. But our failure to improve graduation rates at these schools is a big part of the achievement gap between the U.S. and other countries. As unfilled jobs continue to head overseas, Obama points to the "national-security implication" of the widening gap. Closing it, according to an April report from McKinsey & Co., would have added as much as $2.3 trillion, or 16%, to our 2008 GDP.

Those lost jobs are why Education Secretary Arne Duncan declared in March that two-year schools "will play a big role in getting America back on its feet again." Obama tapped two former community-college officials for top posts in the Education Department and in May announced a p.r. campaign — headed by Jill Biden, the Vice President's wife and a longtime community-college professor — to raise awareness about the power of these schools to train new and laid-off workers. (See pictures of the college dorm's evolution.)

But as record numbers of students clamor to enroll, community colleges are struggling with shrinking resources or, at best, trying to maintain the status quo. Even the school where Biden teaches, Northern Virginia Community College, has lost more than 10% of its funding in the past two years and has let go of dozens of full-time professors as it braces for more possible cutbacks. Elsewhere, state budget cuts have led to enrollment caps at some community colleges. And if there aren't enough seats in classrooms, students can't get certificates or degrees, and skilled jobs remain unfilled. In short, as the Center for American Progress concluded in a February report, "America's future economic success may well depend on how we invest in two-year institutions."

Getting Students Ready to Work
The 1,200 community colleges in the U.S. are especially suited to helping students adapt to a changing labor market. While four-year universities have the financial resources to lure top professors and students, they are by nature slow-moving. Community colleges, on the other hand, are smaller and able to tack quickly in changing winds. They often partner with local businesses and can gin up continuing-education courses midsemester in response to industry needs, getting students in and out and ready to work — fast.

See TIME's special report on paying for college.

See 10 perfect jobs for the recession -- and after.

For example, when Austin's semiconductor industry started tanking in 2000, ACC quickly stripped down its chip-development courses and soon repurposed clean rooms for emerging green technologies. These days, it generally takes about six months of weekend classes to get qualified to be a solar installer, a job that can pay up to $16 an hour. But starting in August, a compressed weekday program — catering to the recently unemployed — will allow students to cram the same courses into just two months. To earn an associate degree focusing on renewable energy — enough prep for a job as a solar-installation-team leader, which can pay up to $28 an hour — an ACC student has to take a total of 69 credit hours of courses, including solar photovoltaic systems, programming, physics, algebra, English composition and lab work. Average cost per credit hour for most students at ACC: $54.

Meanwhile, the building that houses ACC's renewable-energy program is chockablock with bulletin boards touting jobs. A city ordinance that kicked in on June 1 requires presale energy audits for many commercial buildings, apartment complexes and single-family homes, creating the need for more trained inspectors. Also, one of the nation's largest solar-power plants is slated to be completed next year a mere 20 miles from Austin's downtown. (See 10 ways your job will change.)

Of course, the future of the labor market is hard to predict. Hence a 2008 Labor Department study that found federal job-training programs may produce "small" benefits at best. But the outlook is promising so far at ACC: members of its Renewable Energy Students Association routinely field calls from prospective employers. "I'm well aware of how much money is going to be available from this education," says Duane Nembhard, 34, who dropped out of college but found his way to ACC last year.

To make that money, however, students like Nembhard need to get their degrees — and the statistics are disheartening. Only 31% of community-college students who set out to get a degree complete it within six years, whereas 58% of students at four-year schools graduate within that time frame. Students from middle-class or wealthy families are nearly five times more likely to earn a college degree as their poorer peers are. In 2007, 66% of white Americans ages 25 to 29 had completed at least some college, compared with 50% of African Americans and 34% of Hispanics.

While the U.S. ranks a respectable second (after Norway) in producing adult workers with bachelor's degrees, it has slipped to ninth in producing working-age "sub-bachelor's" degree holders, which is one reason Obama is working on a plan to help every American get at least one year of college or vocational training. "If you're going to increase the population that has some college, it isn't going to be among upper-middle-class white people," says Thomas Bailey, director of Columbia University's Community College Research Center. "Community colleges will have to play a central role."

That is, if they have enough resources to handle all the students. Chronically cash-starved, two-year schools pull in an average of just 30% of the federal funding per student allocated to state universities — though they educate nearly the same number of undergraduates. (Even after you account for the academic research that goes on at four-year schools, experts say community colleges still get shafted.) Two-year schools have been growing faster than four-year institutions, with the number of students they educate increasing more than sevenfold since 1963, compared with a near tripling at four-year schools. Yet federal funding has held virtually steady over the past 20 years for community colleges, while four-year schools' funding has increased.

See how Americans are spending now.

See pictures of college mascots.

Saving Cash, Living at Home
Community colleges are used to doing more with less. But this recession has led to record enrollment surges at many two-year schools, in part because of the influx of laid-off workers but also because more members of the middle class are looking to save money on the first couple of years of their children's higher education. Among them is Bruce Anderson, an Austin attorney who has lost nearly a third of his savings since the recession began and doesn't want to sideline his kid while waiting for the market to come back. His son Tyler will start at ACC this fall and, as long as he lives at home, will save the family about 90% of the annual tab at a four-year residential college. "He can get his basic core courses out of the way at ACC and then do his focus for his major at a four-year institution," Anderson says. (See pictures of a college for Native Americans.)

But as more students like Tyler enroll, classes are maxing out. Community colleges, which pride themselves on being open to all, rarely cap enrollment outright, as state universities in places like Arizona and California will do this fall. Miami Dade College, the country's largest community college, admitted on May 28 that state budget cuts will force it to forgo adding hundreds of class sections. As many as 5,000 students will be unable to enroll, and 30,000 may be unable to take the classes they need in order to graduate. In California, where Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger remains a champion of community colleges, having studied at one, as many as 200,000 would-be students may get squeezed out of higher education next year.

Taken together, skyrocketing enrollment and shrinking budgets could mean that just as record numbers of students seek out a community college, earning a degree from one may be harder than ever. Says Melissa Roderick, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies school transitions: "This group of kids will pay a high economic price if we don't step up as a nation."

What would stepping up look like? For starters, Congress needs to double the federal funding for these schools, according to a May report from the Brookings Institution. But, the report argues, to truly "transform our community colleges into engines of opportunity and prosperity," funding needs to be tied to performance in areas like degree completion — a model some states, including Indiana and Ohio, are already trying. The City University of New York has rigged up an experimental program that requires its community-college students to take intensive remedial courses if they aren't prepared to do college-level work. Begun in 2007 with the goal of getting at least half of the study's 1,000 participants to graduate from college in three years, it's showing initial signs of success. Other colleges are redoubling their retention efforts. And last fall, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced up to $500 million in grants, aiming to double college-completion rates by 2025. As Sara Goldrick-Rab, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and co-author of the Brookings report, puts it, "Money speaks louder than anything."

Ultimately, community-college administrators hope their schools will emerge stronger from the downturn as it highlights their potential for juicing the economy. "In some ways, the terrible nature of the economic recession will actually help people understand [community college]," says Kinslow. "People are going to be forced into looking at it more carefully."