Immigrants and Us: Is Public Education Ready?

By Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson

The flow of immigrants into New England -- on a strong upswing since the 1980s -- presents big opportunities and tough challenges.

An immediate positive: immigrants have helped to soften the blow of young people leaving the region; in the ‘90s Massachusetts and Rhode Island would actually have lost population without immigration. Many are skilled, university-trained, often coming into the U.S. on special H1-b visas, ready to fill critical spots in the region’s sophisticated economy.

But there’s a big challenge, too: the new immigration wave is spectacularly diverse. Ireland, Canada, and Eastern European dominated the early 20th century flood of migrants, notes Andrew Sum of Northeastern University. But today, it’s generally small percentages, from diverse places such as Brazil, Ecuador, China, Haiti, India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Italy... a seemingly endless list. Immense numbers of Hispanics are now found in cities like Lawrence, Asians in nearby Lowell. Drive down the streets of Framingham and read the signs in Portuguese.

Many of the new immigrants are poor and uneducated. Surveys suggest as many as one in three does not speak English well. Adult literacy programs are under enormous pressure to meet this need, but long and growing waiting lists are reported. In Massachusetts, basic adult education courses are so stressed and underfunded they can accept less than half the applicants who come to them. For basic English language courses waiting times range from six months to two years. Similar situations are noted across the region.

And what of the immigrant children? The school dropout rate among them is so high in Rhode Island, one foundation official suggested, that it ought to invite legal action. Many kids are reportedly “pushed out of school,” literally set up for later problems with the law. Their college-going rate is extraordinarily low.

Problems with immigrant integration aren’t, of course, peculiar to New England. But the implications for New England’s workforce are especially acute. The region has lots of college degree-holders-- but they’re clustered at the older end of the work force. High living costs force many people, especially young families, to leave the region. A serious, potentially out-of-control worker shortage is in prospect.

That’s why Kip Bergstrom, executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Policy Council, insists there’s no choice: “We must make knowledge workers of immigrants.” And, he adds, give a hand to today’s large numbers of native New Englanders with low literacy skills.

The remedial effort can’t start too soon, he suggests, by giving guidance and hope to kids in school so they don’t end up hating math and technology, get past 8th grade algebra (the bedrock of future math and science competence), and learn about the bright career chances that await them if they’ll make the effort in the school years.

But assume low-income kids do finish high school -- what then? Across America, community colleges are the critical stepping stone for many young people whose families (immigrant or not) were not college-goers.

Some community colleges, in New England, are performing miracles. It’s tough, for example, not to admire Springfield Technical Community College -- expert, as one observer put it, in such transitions as “turning Puerto Rican kids into laser technicians.” The institution just radiates a solid pragmatism with its gentle fortress structure and student-led, student-staffed incubator businesses operating streetside.

Dorsey Kendrick, the dynamic African-American who heads Gateway Community College in New Haven, is a another believer in using these institutions as a primary portal for young people otherwise not headed to college. Community colleges can be flexible about when and where and how people learn. “We should be able to make our institutions No-Excuses zones,” she says.

The quandary is that New England’s community colleges, a handful of truly bright exceptions notwithstanding, have rarely been planned out as a strategically placed system to support students and promote local economies. Nor have they gotten the state funding and resources received by their counterparts in other American regions.

There’s a facile explanation -- that New England, with its many private institutions, doesn’t put a priority on public higher education at any level. Compared to other states, New England’s per capita support for higher education scrapes the bottom of the barrel (even though on expenditures for students actually enrolled, its ranking is closer to average).

New England’s support for public education dropped dramatically in the economic downturn of the early 2000's. UMass Amherst Chancellor John Lombardi quips – not altogether in jest – that public universities have gone from being “state-supported to state-assisted to state-affiliated, sliding toward state-located.” If trends continue, he might add “state-impeded.”

But there’s no joking about the bottom line. If New Englanders fail to provide strong support for public higher education, from training programs in the community colleges to building bases of support for strong, cutting-edge sciences in the state universities, they’ll play a price: a regional economy headed downhill.

[Originally published December 2005]

Photo Credit:

ISO New England

The control room at ISO New England serves as an around-the-clock watchdog/coordinator of power flowing over the region’s 7,000 miles of electric transmission lines.