James Jacobs, president of Macomb Community College and chair of CCRC’s advisory board, was cited in the August 20, 2009 The New York Times supplement on continuing education. In an article titled, “More White-Collar Workers Turn to Community Colleges,” reporter Steven Greenhouse writes about white-collar workers--including individuals with master’s degrees--who take advantage of “the low-cost courses and local campuses” of community colleges across the nation.

“In today’s economy, degrees matter, but degrees matter even more with certain skill subsets,” said James B. Jacobs, president of Macomb Community College in Michigan. “Sometimes people with an engineering degree come to a community college, and what they may be lacking is three or four courses in information technology. They might want to use certain computer languages. Our continuing education courses provide the necessary skills for which someone will then get a job.”

“Continuing education used to be personal enrichment, primarily, but it has moved steadily toward work force development,” Mr. Jacobs said. “People would go to classes to learn to cook Chinese food to impress their friends and relatives or to learn interior decorating. Those courses have been transformed and have become areas for a lot of people coming out of white-collar jobs.

“They now take culinary programs to help open a restaurant,” he continued. “They learn not just how to cook, but how to buy and how to run a restaurant.”

--Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/education/20COMMUN.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=macomb%20community%20college&st=cse (registration may be required).