Low-Income Students Count on Finding Jobs. But the Pandemic Has Halted Their Job Training.

Danielle Jones was less than two months away, she thought, from a degree as a dental hygienist and a license to practice. A few more weeks of scraping tartar and calming jittery patients in Amarillo College’s dentistry clinic, and she’d be starting a career that would alleviate the financial stresses that have weighed heavily on the single mother of three.

Covid-19 seemed a distant threat in Amarillo, a rugged city in the Texas Panhandle, hundreds of miles from the state’s major population centers. Then, on March 21, the pandemic hit home. The clinic’s coordinator emailed that a few cases of the virus had cropped up locally, so the clinic was heeding government warnings and sending students home for at least 30 days.

As four weeks became six, Jones began to panic. She had planned her schedule carefully so that she’d complete the clinical hours required for her license by mid-April. Both licensing exams — one practice-based and one written — have been postponed, and her graduation, which had been scheduled for May 15, is now uncertain.

Jones, who has been living off financial aid and student loans, has enough money to last through May. “I don’t know when we’re graduating. I don’t know when we’re even coming back,” she said. “It just totally blindsided me. I didn’t have a backup plan.”

Coronavirus Hits Campus

As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.

• Here’s Our List of Colleges’ Reopening Models
• Why Is Gettysburg College Giving Up on ‘The Gettysburg Review’?
• Fall-Enrollment Trends in Distance Education: a Snapshot

As the coronavirus pandemic has forced nonessential businesses to close and colleges to shutter their campuses and clinics, students in the final stages of work-based training have been left in limbo. Many come from low-income families. Some programs can be completed in a year or less, which appeals to students with limited funds looking for a quick entry into a job. Those students were counting on jobs they assumed were just months away but now seem just out of reach.

Even as they retreat to their laptops to study YouTube tutorials and demonstrations hurriedly posted by their instructors, they’re wondering if they’ll be able to graduate without the clinical or work-based hours their professions require. Adding to the stress: With social-distancing rules in place, the testing sites that administer licensing exams are closing or cutting way back.

“It’s a cascading effect that has students wondering if the two-year program they signed up for is going to take a lot longer,” said David Altstadt, associate director at Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit organization that supports efforts to improve education and job outcomes for disadvantaged people.

Students also worry that if they have to take an incomplete because they can’t finish their work-based learning, they might drop below full-time status and lose financial aid. “Any kind of disruption can negatively affect their persistence,” Altstadt said. “And low-income students are facing a perfect storm today.”

Low-income students make up a large proportion of those training to be teachers, truck drivers, carpenters, and welders — many in community colleges or technical schools — as well as health-care workers like nurses, respiratory therapists, and medical assistants. All of those occupations require a minimum number of hours of on-the-job training.

Fifty-eight percent of students whose families are in the lowest quartile of income are enrolled in programs below the baccalaureate level, where much of the work-based training takes place. By comparison, about 41 percent of students in the highest income bracket enroll at that level, according to the National Clearinghouse Research Center. When training programs close, “it’s going to disproportionately affect lower-income and minority students,” said Michael Quinn, a senior analyst with Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

“The subbaccalaureate world generally has a higher proportion of low-income and minority students,” he said. Associate-degree and certificate programs “are not only quicker and more flexible, but there’s a clear attachment to the workplace.”

In normal times, students could practice their skills in college laboratories equipped with simulated patients whose hearts stop, or with semi-trailer trucks whose brakes are meant to seize up. While some colleges have tried to keep such labs open, with rules for safely spacing students and sterilizing equipment, most have shut them down.

Altstadt argues that students in health and safety fields who are missing out on job-based training should be allowed to use those labs as long as precautions are taken. Regulators in some states are doing just that. Last month the Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission issued such guidance after the governor suspended in-person instruction but permitted colleges flexibility for continuing certain labs or in-person classes.

A ‘Devastating’ Setback

The demand for flexibility has been particularly intense in nursing, which faced a looming work-force shortage even before the pandemic hit.

Last month Texas was among the states relaxing their rules for nursing licensure to allow seniors to use simulations for more than half of their required clinical hours.

In California, by contrast, it tooks weeks of pressure from nursing students and educators to get regulators to drop from 75 to 50 percent the proportion of clinical hours that must involve direct patient care.

That doesn’t go far enough, argues Sharon A. Goldfarb, dean of health sciences at the College of Marin, in Kentfield, Calif. She has 44 students to place and nowhere for them to go, she said. Hospitals across the state have suspended their training programs to protect both students and dwindling supplies of protective equipment, leaving about 9,000 students in their final semester of study up in the air.

The demand for nurses is expected to intensify as more nurses fall ill from Covid-19 or grow exhausted from long hours, Goldfarb said. The emotional toll is also intense. “You’re watching people die, and you know you could save them with the right manpower.”

Veronica Harms, a spokeswoman for the California Board of Registered Nursing, said in an email that the board was “aware of, and sympathetic to,” the students’ predicament, but that the board “considers that time spent in direct patient care better prepares a student for situations the student may face once licensed.” The board urged hospitals to reach out to colleges to invite students back in for continued training.

Nursing students in California are also being encouraged to join a new state health corps, although students say it’s not clear whether those hours would count for their clinical-service requirements.

“Some of my students are supporting themselves as massage therapists, dog walkers, and bartenders, and they’re out of work,” Goldfarb said. Some also have children to support, and the short-term financial stress is compounding their worries about delays in starting their nursing careers.

Jessica Young, in her final semester of nursing at Sonoma State University, was pulled from a preceptorship — in which she received one-on-one training from a supervising nurse in a local hospital’s intensive-care unit — just as she was starting to feel comfortable with her problem-solving and time-management skills. The setback was “devastating,” she said, arguing that simulations are helpful but don’t substitute for actual contact with patients and the personal oversight she was receiving.

While she’s eager to help support overworked nurses, she said, she shares the board’s concern. Without more exposure to patients, she worries, “part of me feels so nervous that I won’t be ready to take on that role.”

Help on the Way

Students training for jobs in career and technical fields like construction, auto repair, welding, and hospitality have also largely been sidelined. Even in fields deemed essential by their states, supervisors may be too busy to continue training students.

Jeffrey Benedict is scheduled to graduate in June from a two-year program in automotive technology at Columbia Basin College, in Pasco, Wash. When Gov. Jay Inslee issued a stay-at-home order last month, the college’s labs — where students learn how to refill air-conditioning compressors, check car batteries, and flush transmissions — closed along with most of the state’s businesses.

Benedict, a retired Army medic, has been tinkering with his family’s six vehicles while he waits for the college’s shop to reopen. But he misses the immediate feedback from his instructors when he tries out a new procedure in the lab. A typical day in the program includes three hours of classroom instruction followed by several hours of hands-on practice in the shop.

“You can read about it all day long,” Benedict said, but it’s not the same as getting under the hood.

Columbia Basin has seen a tripling in the number of applications from students needing emergency funds, according to the college’s president, Rebekah S. Woods. “Students who are enrolled in our career and technical programs and allied health programs are getting prepared to enter high-demand fields that pay family-sustaining wages,” she wrote in an email. “The delay in their ability to complete their education is keeping many of them in poverty.”

“Depending on how long this situation continues, it may put some of them so far behind financially, and with other needs of their family like transportation, child care, etc., some may not be able to recover quickly enough to resume their education within a reasonable time frame,” she wrote.

The college has kept its food pantry open and is lending laptops, providing internet hotspots to students, waiving fees for online courses, and offering money for child care, transportation, and other needs.

More help is on the way. The college just learned that it will receive $3.8 million from the $2-trillion coronavirus-relief package passed by Congress last month. Half of what the college gets can be used for emergency grants to students.

The Waiting Game

Rise, a student-led nonprofit that advocates for free college and college-affordability measures, is among the groups steering students toward emergency financial aid and public benefits.

One of its founders, Maxwell Lubin, is urging students to contact their colleges’ financial-aid offices to see if they might qualify for help under the relief package. He said students should also apply for unemployment insurance because of expanded eligibility guidelines during the crisis.

Nationally, the people who should be able to count on unemployment checks include the thousands of college apprentices who have been laid off by restaurants, construction sites, manufacturing plants, and hotels because their workplaces have closed or are no longer able to train student workers.

From 2008 to 2011 the United States lost 86,000 apprenticeships — a drop of more than 20 percent, Eric M. Seleznow, who oversees Jobs for the Future’s apprenticeship and work-based-learning efforts, wrote in a blog post. This time, he fears, it could be worse.

Forty percent of high-school students who went on to apprenticeships as of 2013 came from families that earned less than $35,000 annually, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Lower-income workers “are traditionally the first to go and the last to be rehired, but they’re also the most likely to drift off without support,” he said in an interview. Colleges should double down on supporting them with food, day care, and basic equipment like work boots when they’re able to resume training.

“The difference between this and 2008 is that when they lost their jobs before, they were gone and they tried to get jobs in other fields,” Seleznow said. “In this case, people are waiting for their jobs to come back. Everyone’s waiting for the restaurant or Disney World to reopen.”

Keeping students from giving up and dropping out is essential not only for them but also for colleges and local economies, Seleznow said.

The questions they face, he said, are: “What will the demand be six months from now — will we need more people to catch up? How do you strategically plan and prepare to help students and employers when we turn the corner on this thing?”