Alaska program entices male dropouts back to school

SARA MINOGUE

In Alaska just as in Nunavut, there is concern that not enough men are going on to higher education after high school. But a new program that brings construction training directly to communities has seen up to 90 per cent male enrolment, and has given many young men a new chance to get back into school.

Jerry Trainor is the man behind the program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus.

“I can attribute that young men in all the villages where we’ve done this program are very successful, their attendance rate is phenomenally high, and they just don’t drop out,” Trainor said from his office in Fairbanks.

That’s a much different scene than what Trainor saw as a college instructor in Idaho, where many students dropped out and went back home discouraged. Trainor attributes the program’s success to the fact that students don’t have to leave home to enroll.

A typical student is a young man, aged 21 to 30, who has perhaps dropped out of school and has little incentive or opportunity to go back. Some women have also joined the program.

The instructors are all retired or semi-retired construction workers, who get a week-long teachers course and then take great pride in passing on their knowledge in the communities.

The class starts out learning residential carpentry, electrical and plumbing – essentially getting the skills to build their own house, or to be very competent construction workers.

Most of the class time is spent on a community construction project, typically a garage used to store snowmobiles used in search and rescues. Students also learn skills by going around the community and fixing broken doors, replacing windows, or leveling houses whose foundations have shifted.

They also spend some time in the classroom learning safety, how to use hand tools, basic blueprint reading and some math. All of the courses are based on national construction industry standard courses that apply everywhere in the U.S.

Students can earn a certificate from the University of Alaska Fairbanks after just one year – which consists of two intensive six- to eight-week programs that are held in early spring and later fall. The timing is intended to take place outside of the normal construction season, and at times when students don’t need to be hunting or fishing.

After the following year, they can earn their associates degree in applied science. Those credits can later be rolled into a bachelors degree of technology, if students choose to continue studying at the university. In that sense, the program is not unlike Nunavut’s municipal training program, which offers hamlet workers on the job training in their communities through Nunavut Arctic College, and allows students to pursue their own studies with those credits already under their belt.

Though the Alaska program has been running for almost five years now, it’s only been one year since students could earn their degrees through the university.

“I do anticipate that within four to five years we will have people graduating with a bachelor’s degree,” Trainor said.

But the program has a more immediate payoff.

Before the program started, local hiring on construction projects across the Bering Strait region was “just barely 14 per cent,” Trainor said.

After the two and a half years of the program, Trainor found the local hire rate went up to 76 per cent.

The tiny town of Gullivan on Alaska’s north coast, with a population of less than 200 people, was a spectacular success. After completing the training, Trainor contacted a construction company that held a contract to build a new school in the community, and offered a list of names of qualified workers.

He later received a thank-you letter from the contractor, who informed him that local hires had completed 29,700 hours of labour on the new school, compared to just 8,000 hours of outside labour.

In total, about 15 local employees earned $1,250,000 in wages.

In addition, the contractor saved money by not having to provide accommodation or food for an outside crew.

“This is the first program I’ve seen that is succeeding in getting large numbers of young native men into the university,” said Judith Kleinfeld, a psychology professor at the University who has studied gender imbalance at that school.

She believes the program is a success mainly because students aren’t leaving their homes and families to go to school, and because the instructors have real world experience they can pass on to students.

One problem on construction sites, she said, is that new employees are often offended when they are yelled at. Instructors who are experienced in construction can explain to the students that foremen don’t always yell because they are mad, but because they have seen grisly accidents they don’t want to be repeated, or sometimes because they are deaf from years around heavy machinery.

The program has already worked in 15 villages with populations between 100 and 600 people. Trainor hopes to reach 30 villages by the time the grant money that is funding the course runs out. At that time, he expects the program will be wrapped into the university’s core funding.

The University of Alaska works much like Nunavut Arctic College – with three separate university campuses and smaller centers scattered around the state. The university offers full-blown academic courses as well as certificate and diploma programs.

Trainor is now expanding the program to the Interior Aleutians region.