NORTH CAROLINA (WGHP) — It’s almost become a tradition: Every summer, the business analysts at CNBC rank all 50 states on which are the best for businesses, and each time, lately, North Carolina comes out on top.
Well, on top or very close. In three of the last five years, North Carolina was named #1 for businesses and in the other two, they were runners up – a streak no other state can match.
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Ask John Loyack, the North Carolina Community College’s Vice President of Economic Development, if he’s surprised by that and he’ll tell you, “Absolutely not,” says Loyack. “I think every year when we look at states all across the nation and see where they rank in terms of economic development, I’m always certain we’ll see North Carolina somewhere towards the top, regardless of what types of business we’re talking about. You could look at something like small business as an example: in May, we saw the largest number of new business startups in the state for years and years and years. And so this is a good place to do business, whether you’re starting a small coffee shop or whether you’re looking for 15,000 engineers to work at a major aerospace manufacturing facility.”
The state’s 58 community colleges have the widest charge of any of the higher education schools. Their number one product is still preparing students for a four-year university – most community college students get automatic admission to one of North Carolina’s 4-year schools with certain prerequisites. But close behind that is building programs that can be adapted for the training of people in any industry or for any company.
“We have to support everything that supports the business outside of (a business’s) facility as well,” says Loyack. “And so we’re the ones who are providing the teachers of tomorrow, the nurses of tomorrow, the EMTs, construction workers, in addition to all the highly trained engineers who may be getting their degrees at a four-year institution, but they’re coming back to Community College for continuing education opportunities as well.”
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And they do it at about half the cost of the traditional universities, which can be vital.
“Most students stop their studies at Community College, not because of the academics, because they run into nonacademic issues: their car breaks down, they lose their housing; they have food insecurity, I mean, and those are big societal challenges but we’re on the front edge of that,” says Tony Clarke, the president of Guilford Technical Community College.
Loyack points out that the word “community” may be the most important one in their name because, unlike campuses such as UNC Chapel Hill, which draw students from across the country and even the world, “The students go to community colleges, 80% of them going to stay in their communities. So we’re supporting the needs of the communities all across the state of North Carolina in the way that the universities are just not designed to do,” says Loyack.
Many people, though, still see community colleges as the only place to prepare a young person for a lucrative trade and GTCC’s Tony Clarke says North Carolina’s community college system still excels at that.
“I’ve just seen apprenticeship continue to grow and grow and leveraging that to serve employers and make sure they get the workforce that they need. I think we do that probably better than any other state,” says Clarke.
See more on this in this edition of The Buckley Report.
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