Colleges Play Crucial Role in Military's Restructuring

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By KARIN FISCHER

Arnold, Md.

LaVonya Sanborn left the Army seven years ago, but although she is no longer taking orders, her future is still being shaped by military decisions.

Fort George G. Meade, a few miles from Ms. Sanborn's home here in suburban Maryland, is scheduled to gain 5,700 jobs as part of the Department of Defense's Base Realignment and Closure plan. In total, Anne Arundel County, home to the Army base, could add more than 10,000 direct and spinoff jobs, according to state estimates.

Ms. Sanborn hopes one of those positions can be hers. After years of security work that she describes as "decent but nothing stable," she enrolled in Anne Arundel Community College, where she is a semester away from earning a degree in homeland-security management. Ms. Sanborn, 31, hopes to find employment vetting job candidates for security clearances.

"The area is going to be flooded with this kind of work," she says.

Across the country, colleges like Anne Arundel are devising strategies and designing curricula to meet the demands created by the substantial troop shifts. They are adding degree and certificate programs and refashioning or expanding others, in areas as diverse as network security, procurement and contracting, and nursing.

The colleges are attempting to anticipate the midcareer training needs of military personnel and government contractors who are moving. They are trying to prepare local residents, like Ms. Sanborn, to fill positions vacated by defense workers who opt not to make the move. And in places where the armed forces are scaling down or pulling out completely, they are stepping in to teach workers new skills and counsel small businesses that have relied on a military clientele.

Vital Role

Those familiar with the base-realignment process, which is commonly known as BRAC, say colleges — in particular community colleges, with their experience in work-force education and their ability to build up programs quickly — will play a vital role.

"We need them there, working with the local community and with business to craft solutions," says Colleen Ryan, vice president for defense programs at the Dayton Development Coalition, a regional economic-development group in Ohio. Until July she was commander of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base there, which will become home to the service's new 711th Human Performance Wing, gaining 1,200 jobs. The colleges, she says, "can be responsive and agile and imaginative."

While college leaders say BRAC offers opportunities to create innovative programs, it also brings challenges. For one, colleges are being asked to admit more students and expand their course offerings just as their budgets are shrinking. With the economic downturn, many institutions, especially at the two-year level, are bracing for a wave of new students, further straining classroom capacity, as laid-off workers enroll to retool their skills.

What's more, many current defense workers have another year to decide whether to transfer, making it difficult to forecast the number of open jobs the military realignment will create.

"It's like one of those complicated 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles," Martha A. Smith, president of Anne Arundel Community College, says of the realignment. "You can only see the whole picture when it's finished."

Bracing for BRAC

The current round of closures and reassignments is the fifth such effort since 1988 by the Department of Defense to streamline the military infrastructure and make it more efficient. This round could save as much as $5-billion annually, defense officials say.

By the time the process is complete, in the fall of 2011, 25 military bases will be closed, while 24 others will remain open but with far fewer personnel. Dozens of other bases, however, including Fort Meade, will add 400 or more positions, and hundreds of smaller troop shifts will be made.

In affected communities, the planning began almost as soon as final BRAC decisions were announced, in late 2005. In southeastern North Carolina, where thousands of jobs have been lost because of textile-plant closures and the declining tobacco industry, elected officials, business leaders, and college chiefs started strategizing about how to use the arrival of the Army Forces Command headquarters at Fort Bragg to revive the battered local economy.

Calhoun Community College, in Decatur, Ala., undertook an 18-month review of its curriculum, reaching out to military officials at the nearby Redstone Arsenal and to local industry to identify any gaps, says Mary Yarbrough, vice president for instruction and student services. The college is also working closely with local universities and high schools to make sure their courses of study complement each other as well as to meet the impending growth at the base. "You really cannot have too many people at the table," Ms. Yarbrough says.

In Maryland, where Fort Meade is one of four military installations that will see an influx of BRAC-related jobs, Anne Arundel works with other members of the Fort Meade Alliance, a coalition of community leaders, to prepare for the arrival of the Defense Information Systems Agency from Northern Virginia. The agency provides information-technology and communications support to the military and serves as the communications link to soldiers in the field.

This is familiar territory for the community college, which has a record of sending its graduates on to the government agencies and military contractors that line the Baltimore-Washington corridor. Anne Arundel has several established programs in areas that track the needs of the incoming agency, such as information-systems security, which prepares students to guard against threats to computer networks.

In Bruce L. George's cyberforensics class, for example, students recently gave end-of-term presentations demonstrating how they had used software to ferret out data hidden on a floppy disk. While the exercise, designed by Mr. George, a veteran of the Air Force and the National Security Agency, is hypothetical — the students reassembled bits of data to show that a professor had given unfair grades — the skills are practical. In fact, Anne Arundel was the first community college to align its information-systems-security curriculum with standards used by the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency, says Kelly A. Koermer, director of the computer-technologies department.

Ms. Koermer is augmenting her department's offerings in other areas as well: Anne Arundel recently began a certificate program in database management, and she hopes to expand it to a two-year degree. After all, she points out, federal agencies "can't outsource national-security stuff."

Meeting Specific Needs

The coming expansions at Fort Meade have also have increased demand for homeland-security courses, says Tyrone Powers, a former FBI counterintelligence agent who directs Anne Arundel's Homeland Security and Criminal Justice Institute. A trim man whose classroom demeanor mixes the fervor and humor of a motivational speaker with the discipline of a drill sergeant, he says the base-realignment process led the college to "focus and move more expeditiously" to fashion its security-focused course work into a full-fledged degree program. In its first year, 2006, more than 85 students enrolled in the homeland-security-management program; the college had expected 25.

"It widened our eyes to what the needs were with BRAC," says Mr. Powers, noting that many of his students are career-changers, like Ms. Sanborn, the Army veteran. In many cases, he says, they already have undergraduate degrees and are looking for specific training, such as a new certificate in intelligence analytics, which provides a grounding in evaluating classified data.

Indeed, officials at Anne Arundel, where 24 percent of the 56,750 current students enroll in noncredit programs, say they expect much of the BRAC demand to be for midcareer training of military employees or for those who hope to work with the Defense Information Systems Agency. The community college is also one of seven in Maryland to jointly design a continuing-education program for developers and construction workers who want to build secure facilities.

Likewise at Wright-Patterson, already the largest employer in its southwestern Ohio region, where most of the new jobs will be high-level research positions. Sinclair Community College, in Dayton, is preparing to play a "big role" in offering industry certification and on-the-job training, especially in information technology, says Deborah L. Norris, vice president for work-force development and corporate services.

Across the country, however, the educational demands caused by the military shifts can differ widely, a reflection of the demographics of local communities and of the incoming troops.

The University of Texas at El Paso, for example, is seeing growth in its bachelor's-degree program in interdisciplinary studies, which allows soldiers who have repeatedly deployed and amassed a "shoebox" of unrelated credits to earn a single degree, says Dennis L. Soden, dean of the university college. The local Army base, Fort Bliss, is shifting from an officer-heavy air-defense center of 10,000 to become home to 30,000 combat troops, many of whom are close to traditional college age.

Colleges in communities facing the loss of military workers, too, are being called upon for help. Brookdale Community College, in New Jersey, is advising local businesses that will be hurt by the impending closure of Fort Monmouth. The college is devising short-term training programs to help former military employees make the transition into other professions, including computer networking, project management, and teaching, says Linda Milstein, vice president for outreach, business, and community development. The majority of the base's 5,500 workers are civilians, and many are expected to stay behind.

Southern Maine Community College will take over four buildings at the to-be-shuttered Brunswick Naval Air Station for a new campus to house programs in advanced manufacturing and composite materials. The expansion will allow the college to provide training to companies that local redevelopment officials hope to attract to the former military site, says James O. Ortiz, Southern Maine's president.

Coping With Unknowns

Still, educators agree that the response to BRAC can be more art than science. For one thing, although the numbers of new military positions are largely fixed, neither the colleges nor the defense agencies know precisely how many people will come with those jobs. When the Defense Information Systems Agency initially polled its employees, 52 percent said they would not transfer to Fort Meade, says Jack Penkoske, director of manpower, personnel, and security. In the latest survey, just 20 percent said they would not make the move. The change of heart may reflect the agency's efforts to encourage workers to relocate, he says.

The economic climate is another wild card: Poor job prospects may persuade those who would leave the military work force to reconsider their plans. On the other hand, a collapsing real-estate market in much of the country may make it difficult for reassigned workers to sell their homes.

"The problem of projections is that they are just that," says Ernst Roberts, executive assistant to the president at El Paso Community College. "You have to be flexible."

The recession is complicating matters in other ways. Enrollment at Fayetteville Technical Community College is up 6 percent this year, and the troop growth at Fort Bragg has yet to begin. At Southern Maine, Mr. Ortiz says this fall's enrollment growth was 11 percent, as unemployed and underemployed workers signed up for classes. Spring applications are up 20 percent. But at the same time that the president is seeking an estimated $4.1-million to renovate the former naval buildings to make them accessible and suitable for classroom use, he is grappling with a $686,000 midyear budget cut. "It's a double hit," he says.

Elsewhere college officials say they are trying to be creative as they take on more students. El Paso hopes to use revenue bonds to build a sixth campus, at Fort Bliss. Harford Community College, near Maryland's Aberdeen Proving Ground, will increase the number of online and hybrid courses it offers in response to the 9,550 jobs coming to the base. Cynthia S. Ross, president of Cameron University, says the Oklahoma institution will change its academic schedule this summer, extending class periods and adding Saturday sessions, to meet a projected influx at Fort Sill.

The new courses and extra instructors come, of course, with a price tag. In Maryland the state will provide an additional $10-million over the next three years to help its colleges meet BRAC-related needs. The first round of financing, announced in December, includes grants to start online courses in information security and a certificate program in strategic management. Some federal funds are also available.

But for now, most college officials say they are spending money today to enhance programs and expand staff, even though, as the troops move in waves through 2011, the height of demand may be a couple of years off. "We walk a very fine line on the budget," says Diana S. Natalicio, president of the University of Texas at El Paso. "Because of the lag, we're really just reallocating the funds that we have."

Filling the Pipeline

While most of the focus has been on BRAC's immediate impact, educators and military officials say colleges must also think about how to align their curricula to better meet the long-term needs of the defense industry.

Anne Arundel Community College is supplementing its offerings in science, technology, engineering, and math. It is also working with local schools to strengthen their course work and provide advanced training for teachers.

The college recently opened an educational center for those key fields at a shopping mall not far from Fort Meade. The new center was built in part with a $600,000 grant from the county. And to make sure that poor decisions by students don't keep otherwise-qualified graduates from new defense jobs, the college developed a program to teach students about government background checks.

"It's not a one-time thing," Kenneth McCreedy, who stepped down as commander of Fort Meade in July, says of BRAC. "You need to have a long-term approach, and colleges are a big part of that."