What California Students Miss Before They Reach the Workforce | Panel

Many California parents, they send their kids to schools and then from there, they're gonna send them to universities and this is the traditional way of getting your education and hopefully your kids can get the jobs later. But things are changing. With AI, a lot of careers are changing. At the same time, the cost of universities have gone up significantly in California and many kids end up in a lot of debt. In some cases, they don't even finish the degrees Today, we sit down with April Barnes and Brian Dozer. They will share that there is a better way for our education system to prepare kids and students for their future careers and jobs. Youth employment rate right now is the lowest it's ever been. We're seeing a big gap in what they're able to do because they're not getting that training. The time to discover that I don't want to do this job is in high school, not when you're at a college paying $20,000 to $30,000 a semester or more. What does it take to roll this out across the state? I'm Siamak. Welcome to California Insider. April, Brian, it's great to have you on. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having us. We want to talk to you about education and getting students ready for their careers. We are hearing a lot of employers are saying students are not ready, especially out of high school, even half the ones that are coming out of college are not ready. And we are spending so much effort and money on education and there seems to be a gap. What are you guys seeing out there? The business community is not wrong in saying the students aren't ready, but part of the problem is this generation of youth does not work, and I mean it all. So they don't have afterschool jobs, they don't have summer jobs, they have no work experience. Most of us worked before we were 18. This is a generation that doesn't. Some of them don't have work experience until after they're finished college. That's six, seven years of training that they're not getting. So they are coming out less engaged, less understanding, less ready to work because no one's taught them how. And that is a pitch that we are really looking at is industry does need to help a little and come to the table and say, okay, how am I going to train this future workforce? Now, Brian, what do you think? Oh, I agree. We get students with great technical skills, great theory skills, but they don't know how to be employees. And so how do we fix that? Now, April, you mentioned the students are not getting the jobs. Is it, they're not getting those summer jobs? Because a lot of people before, you would go a few years of like in the summers, you would do those, like whatever it was, waiting. So the waiting tables, the working at McDonald's, those things, they're not hiring youth because some of those industries are now paying $20 an hour. That goes to someone that can work full time. That goes to someone that has more availability than a 16 year old has limited hours. Sometimes they're after school, even if it's during the summer, it's a limited schedule. So wouldn't you pay someone that can be there all day than a youth? And a lot of times because now they play travel softball or baseball or they're playing sports in the summer and they're doing these things, they don't have as much time. You know, I've talked to parents that tell me, well, my kid's job is to be a student. Well, that's great, but that's not helping them for their future work. And so the youth employment rate right now is the lowest it's ever been, tracked across the country because they just are not getting those jobs. I'm from the East Coast, so they shovel snow, like things like that, that it's just, it's different. They don't have those availabilities. So they're not getting the experience because no matter what, if you're working at the gap, it's teaching you customer service. It's teaching you responsibility. It's teaching you how to show up, how to work, how to dress, all of those things are skills that you put in your pocket and you take to your next job. If you're working in retail or not, they're not getting that training. And so we're seeing a big gap in what they're able to do because they're not getting that training. In addition to some of the things that April said, the fact that the expectations for students who want to go to a four-year are so much greater. When I went to a four-year, I worked all summer. I was in marching band, and then I went to college. I didn't have to worry about taking AP classes or starting a, or building a resume, right? So that I could get into the college of my choice. Our UC campus in Irvine, they had, what, 140,000 applicants last year. So the pressure for students to build that resume, to get into their four-year college of choice, and we can talk, we could also spend another day talking about whether four years is the right choice for everyone. And I'm not an anti-four-year person. My daughter went to four-year, but the pressure is on those students from society, from their peers, from their counselors, from their schools, from their parents, to get into that university. And so, are you really going to stop doing that work during the summer? Our summer internship or career exploration experiences are packed. Like, we turn students away from it. And that didn't used to be the case. There are so many students who are staying on point and maintaining that academic approach during the summer, rather than shifting into, it's summer, I'm going to have a job and I'm going to spend some time doing maybe some more fun things. I've even seen in school programs where the student, because it's not gonna help their grade point average, won't do the summer internship because it could hurt them. So getting the work experience is actually bad for their school life. And so, when they have to choose that the work could actually hurt my availability to get into college, that's a really bad option. But I've seen it. I've seen where they come in and say, will this help or could it hurt me? And it could hurt them, so they just don't do it. And so, when it's so reliant on that GPA and the classes you take to get into that four year that you need to be in, it's detrimental to what they're trying to do. And if I can add on to that, we see that in the classes that we offer. And again, I'm an accredited institution. Everything that I teach comes with its credit bearing, right, so you're not wasting time. But once upon a time, we didn't have, you know, University of California, Cal State, A through G approval for all of our classes, and so students wouldn't take it because it wouldn't count toward their admission into a four year. We now have 100% of our classes are UC A through G approved. So it ceased to be an issue. My current issue is that students are looking for that GPA bump by making it a 5.0 class instead of a 4.0 class, and that I can't do. I can't decide unilaterally that I'm going to offer a class that's a 5.0, even if it's an advanced class. And so, we still have some issues around that with students more interested in their GPA and what will get them to that goal at the end than really about what might be best for them long term for their career. Because they want to get into the university, right? And getting into the university, there's a lot of thought about that university degree will give you more money when you graduate. But then there is also the other side of it where there's the cost and the dropout. There's a large cost. There's a large attrition rate. So the students that drop out is, it's almost 80% that do not finish, do not finish. So you've pushed all these kids all into this program that maybe they didn't fit in, maybe they didn't belong in, maybe they didn't want to be in, and now they're there and they don't really know what they want to do, then they leave. And now they're put with sometimes a significant amount of debt without the piece of paper, or even sometimes they get the piece of paper, but they got it in a, I have an English degree, so I'm going to say that right out, is you have an English degree, and then what are you going to do with it? If you didn't take internships, if you have no job training, it's very hard to do something with it because no one wants to hire you because you have zero experience. The piece of paper is not as necessary as people think it is. And I think that has some, that's been a 20 year, go to college, go to college, that's the only way you're going to get a good job. That's not true. And we've joked that, you know, I went to four year, I have a master's, I'm working on a doctorate. I'm very into the education system, but it doesn't mean it's for everyone. And it doesn't mean it's for every career. Are you seeing students thinking like that? It's like, there's no other options for me. I got to go to college. And then after I go to college, hopefully I find a job. Yes. We do student exit surveys at the end of each year. And frankly, those numbers haven't budged over the last four and a half years that I've been at Coastline RLP. Roughly two thirds of our students say that their next step is four year. What we don't have is proof that that's what they really did. Because I think, you know, if we were able to really dig into it, we would find that that may have been their goal, but that's not where they ended up. You know, some of them end up pivoting into community college, which, you know, and you mentioned this earlier when we were doing our discussion. We have an amazing community college system in the state of California and in Orange County. We have nine fantastic community colleges that offer a great education and really just opportunities that too few students and their parents really know about. So some of them go there and then they end up going into transferring into a four year or straight into the workforce. We offer courses, you know, such as certified nurse assistant that you can get your certification at the end of the course and go straight into the workforce. And we have a number of students that do that. At high school? Straight from high school, right? We teach that class three times a year, summer, fall, and spring. I was just at our spring pinning ceremony where we bring all the new CNAs in and we give them a little pin and we have some of the students speak. And one of them talked about that that was her day one on her CNA job. She had just gotten her certification. She was 18 years old, had just graduated from high school. This was in July. She had just started working on the job and she was making $30 an hour. And we know that $30 an hour is barely subsistence in Orange County, but it is a job that is going to open doors for her. She's going to learn some of those employability skills and she can then take that and perhaps go to one of our community college nursing programs while she's working as a CNA, right? And so for some students, it is an economic necessity that they get right into the workforce. And so, you know, we look at it and we say, all right, and we started using this term and it came from a student, what's next? Every student's next is different from every other student's, right? And so what we want to do, and I think Vitalink does a lot of the same things, help students figure out what is next for them, regardless of what that is. We're agnostic. If your what's next is four year, great, fantastic, right? But it's not the solution for every single student today. And what about the culture? Is this a culture? Because when I moved here, I'm from Iran, and one of the things I noticed is that when I would talk to elder people, they would tell me they worked and they did a serving job and they were so proud of doing the work and it didn't matter what it was. Has that changed in the new generation? Has the work lost its value? So it's funny. So I don't think so. What I've noticed is every generation thinks the one behind them is useless and entitled. Honestly, the boomers said it about the Gen Xers, the Gen X say it about the millennials, the millennials say it about Gen Z. Everyone thinks the younger generation is useless, they can't do anything, they can't learn. It's just not true. Millennials are now some of the hardest working people that you could meet, but 10, 15 years ago, everyone thought the millennials were just a total lost cause. It's just not the case, it's just different. And so they're gonna take some time and they're gonna learn what they're good at and they're still going to come to it. I do think what the pandemic has given us is something that we have never seen, that we still don't really know what that future is gonna look like for that particular group of students that was completely online, completely separated from their peers. I think that is hindering more than we really anticipated. That is a population of youth that are very uncomfortable with their peers, that are not used to being with others, that that's the generation of, well, I can just work from home, right? I don't need to go out and talk to people. And so I think that's where a lot of our programs come in is trying to engage them in a way with their, socially and with their peers softly. So that we can get them back into where they should be. But I think we have not really seen the fallout completely of what that's gonna look like because that generation is just now getting into the workforce. I mean, some of them were in elementary school. So we're really not seeing what that's really gonna look like. But it's amazing to me to see the disconnect of just being away from everyone for a few years. But in general, you think you see that people still have that drive? Oh, absolutely. Brian mentioned that his internship program is busting. And it seems we have 150 kids apply every year that wanna do internships. They are hungry to learn and want the opportunity. So there are a lot of youth that are, they wanna know, they want to do better. They want that someone's gotta teach them. And it's not education's job. It's industry side. You know, the amount of industries that come to me and say, my workforce is aging out. I'm about to lose about 40 to 50% of my workforce that are all the upper, you know, C-suite people, but you haven't built up the middle to replace them. Well, guess what? Now you're gonna have to start building up that middle. And they're coming from high school and college right now. How do we get them into those workforces? And that's a big thing with Vitalink is our mission is career exploration. I know that that 16 year old has no idea what they wanna do. I don't expect them to, but can I help them figure out what they like, what they think they would be good at, and then show them what that looks like so that they can really see, oh, I could see myself working here. What do I have to do to do that? And that's when they find his classes and go, oh, I can be an EMT. Great, I will sign up for that class. But if they don't know that job exists, how would they ever know that they're gonna wanna do it? But most school programs don't have this, right? Where in a sense, you're told to think about your career, think about where you're going next, and what are the options, what are the opportunities, and what even jobs look like? What does it take to work in a place? You might wanna be a software engineer. You have heard the name, you know the pay is high, or you wanna be a CEO. You've heard that being a CEO pays well, gets the respect, but what does it take? And do you like to do that? Right, and I think that's a very valuable lesson for students to learn. I tell parents a lot, the time to discover that I don't want to do this job is in high school, when the costs of risk, of taking that risk, are low to nothing. Not when you're at a college paying 20 to $30,000 a semester or more, and after a year or two years, figure out this isn't something I want to do. And I'll give you a great case in point. We had one of our students of the year a few years ago, thought he wanted to be a doctor. And so he came to one of our medical classes. It's called Emergency Medical Response. It's a precursor to taking our EMT class and becoming an EMT. First night in class, he heard, you will see dead bodies in medicine. And he had not put two and two together. What, I'm going to see a dead body? Nope, peace out, I'm done. He did not come back for day two. He decided that what he wanted to do instead was to look at dental because his mother worked in the dental field. His mother said, sure, go ahead, do that, and you're going to learn that this is something you don't want to do. So she actually wanted him to do it so that he wouldn't do it. He fell in love. He's now at UCSB and he's pre-dental. So he found out what he didn't want to do and he found out what he did want to do. But by and large, our education system is not set up to really try and help students understand what are all of the different options out there. And part of that is because there's so much that we already require that they take during a day. And there's more that's added by the legislature, it seems, every year. There's a new thing coming to learn financial skills. And so, you know, where's that going to go? We're getting to the point where there's very little time left in the day, in a school day, for students to do something that isn't already required. And what we see in our classes is that the level of enjoyment that they get, especially post-pandemic, because they're not getting this kind of social interaction and teamwork and collaboration in their traditional classroom settings. What we see when I walk into a classroom, it's a completely different, I think, environment than what we're used to seeing. And we are starting to see more and more students who are interested in it. You know, if you look at the 30 school districts across Orange County, they're in declining enrollment. Career technical education enrollment over the last five years is up, I want to say, 10 or 12%. Same thing for my institution. I have four districts. In total, they are declining in enrollment. We had our largest enrollment ever for the fall. And one of the things I also like to say, you know, I'm going to go back to your original question, which is, is it generational? When I talk to people who say kids these days, that tells me they haven't seen kids these days. Because if you walk into the classroom and you see what I see, it is absolutely amazing. It's one of the things I love most about my job, that ability to just walk into a classroom and observe. Because it is truly incredible what's going on in today's classrooms. And the drive of kids, once they find something that they love and that they really want to do, they are all in on it. So do you show them the traits in your classes? How does it work? Do you show them? So it depends on the class, right? So we have a few classes that we call careers in. So we have careers in artificial intelligence, careers in mental health. That is an entry or an intro class where they're going to learn about the different aspects of the field, but also some of the jobs that are available in it. Some of the classes that we take are going to be very specific in training for a very specific job, right? If you're taking emergency medical technician, EMT, you are taking that so that you can learn about that. We actually put them on ambulances and they go out on ride-alongs on ambulances. And so they can learn if I do want to do this or I don't want to do this. What does it take to do this job? What does it take, right? Because let's face it. And I've had parents complain that EMT is too hard for their kid. I'm sorry. Your kid is going to have somebody's life in their hands. It has to be hard, right? And so I want them to see that. You need to know that before you sit for the national registry and then actually get a job on an ambulance as an EMT. We need them to really understand that. So there's a little bit of both. Some that is really more around career exploration. What I will say is her organization is more focused on career exploration. Mine is going to be more focused on providing the actual training for an actual job or pathway, right? And also certifications, certificates, internships, things like that. And then using that to actually then go get real experience in an internship. So the career exploration piece, we've actually started going younger. And so that's, so yes, we say by high school, they should have some work experience. They should, so in order to get there, they need to know what they kind of like and maybe want to study and want to see even a little younger. So we actually, we've done a lot of middle school students, but the last two years, we've even started in elementary school. And again, I'm not trying to say that this third grader is going to figure out what they want to do for the rest of their life, but they're going to at least understand what jobs are out there and what does it take to maybe do that job. So that we do a lot of things that we call career exhibits, where it's a play-based activity, where they get to fly a drone and hear about being a drone pilot. They get to play with a robot and hear about what a robotic arm does in a manufacturing industry, do CPR and learn about being an EMT. So we talk to them about those things as they're a little bit younger so that they can just start to go, oh, well, I have no interest in blood, so no over there, but I really like Photoshop and playing with cameras. So that's kind of cool. What jobs are in that? Automotive, like I work on my dad's car. This is really cool. What could that be? And so just to start to see what they might like so that when they get to middle school and high school, they can take some of those classes and try it out. So that again, their trial and error before they go, oh, I'm gonna be an EMT and I'm gonna get certified and I'm ready. Let's figure out kind of what you might like. Another thing that we work really closely with our education partners and the county and the state, what does the labor market look like in our region? Are we training a ton of people in what we said, coding when AI is taking that over? Like, is that really the best thing to be training right now? Or is it construction because just Anaheim alone is gonna have 30 years of construction on OC Vibe and Disneyland. There's a ton of construction jobs happening just in Anaheim and in our whole county, there's a million. So there's, where are the jobs? Where are they gonna get hired? What should we be looking at? And so we do a lot of that backend as well to try and see what's the next thing. And we say that to our elementary students, the job that they have might not exist yet. There's something that they're gonna do that we have no idea. Like who knew that drone pilot was gonna be a job 10 years ago? Nobody. Here it is. Here we have tons of drone pilots. We have a college that's getting a bachelor's degree just in drone pilots. So there's tons of those things. So there's a lot of cool jobs that aren't even here yet, but let's figure out what you like. So to April's point, we need to be flexible in our education system and educational institutions are bureaucracies and they change very slow, right? And so that's where organizations like April's can come in. And then mine comes in as well because we create the actual classes that are the follow-on from what's happening in the labor market. My most two recent classes that we created were an additional construction pathway at one of our high schools that we're going to build out over the next couple of years and cosmetology. For me, for an institution like mine, regional occupational programs were created in California EdCode to be the flexibility for a school district, right? So if a school comes to me or a district comes to me and says, you know, I think we have too much digital media arts. We're starting to see artificial intelligence impact the creative side of digital media. So we think that maybe we need to have fewer classes in that but what we are seeing is also, we're hearing from a lot of students that they want cosmetology and then we can look at the labor market data and say, you know what, cosmetology jobs, there are many openings, right? There's a real need in the labor market for that and no one's really providing the training until post-secondary. So we can say, okay, well, we'll get rid of these two classes over here and we'll add to cosmetology over there. You can't do that in a traditional school district because of union contracts and it's rigid and it takes a long time to do that. I can actually do that in a matter of from one year to the next and in fact, that's what we did and last year we launched cosmetology, this year we're doing advanced cosmetology. So we're going to ultimately end up with a full pathway which is two classes and then those classes are going to count as hours toward their certification once they come out of high school and move into the workforce. Now, is there certain jobs that are overlooked that people may not know that they exist and they don't want to get into them but there's good opportunities there? Yeah, absolutely. So water is the one that I've been banging my head against for years. You know, I've had a lot of discussions with the water districts. During the pandemic, they saw just hundreds and hundreds of longtime employees decide that it was time to retire and they're actually still struggling to fill those jobs. But when students and parents hear water, they think sewer. They don't hear all of the other amazing jobs just like any other company. There's water engineers and these are jobs with pensions with actually really healthy tuition reimbursement plans so that you could go back and get more education. So you could get these out of high school or with an associate degree. We've started doing internships with them. And so I tried to launch water for a long time. Ultimately, I have to have labor market need and student interest. We didn't really have the student interest so we rebranded it as Climate Sustainability and voila, all of a sudden it took off. Green energy, it's a green energy. And we were fortunate. Green energy and climate sustainability are really important to the state of California and so they actually had some funding that was available and we went out and we got funding for classes through 2029 in climate sustainability. Which is really water. You're doing water. Which there's a water component to it, right? There's more to it than that but there is absolutely a water component to it. We have some amazing water districts in this area that are really fantastic partners but we get to build it out over time because it's state funding, right? And because it takes a while to build that interest. And the first year we only had a few students who were interested in taking the classes. Now the classes are full. We've launched the advanced class and I think it's going to be one of those classes that's going to stay around for a long time. So this path, in a sense what you're doing here is you instead of the student going, getting a degree all the way, getting the debt and then figuring out where should they apply and then maybe they find a water agency to apply to when they are 22 or later on in their career. You position them to get into the water agency when they're 18, 19 and then build a career there and maybe get their degree while they're at the agency. Right. Learn which part of the agency they may want to work in if they want to work in it, right? Again, if they don't want to, right? Now that's a valuable lesson as well, right? But they have their foot in the door. They've learned some of those professional skills and they've seen these opportunities and it is somewhere that they can stay and start working entry level, right? And then work their way up through these agencies. And they might be able to get their, most of the time they would be able to get their degrees while they're in this. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, one of the things I've seen from some of the water districts is that they have, because they're public agencies, they have very healthy tuition reimbursement plans which allows people to go back to school. Let's say you start out as a field technician or something along those lines, entry level in water, and you decide that you want to be a water engineer. Isn't it a benefit for them to hold on to someone that they've already trained and then train them up into something else by paying for some of their college? And I think that's a model that can work. And I've seen good companies to work for. They take that approach. So you're getting paid in a sense to go to college. Absolutely. Yeah. One of my board members tells this, I love this story. She's in the hospital with her husband who's having, I think, knee replacement or something like that. And she's talking to the certified nurse assistant who's helping. And it turns out that this certified nurse assistant was one of our former students. And she says to her, oh, are you planning on, are you using this to go into nursing? Tell me a little bit about your story. She said, no, I'm going to law school. But I'm using this as my work to pay to go to law school. So today, in today's world, it's incumbent upon a student to understand everywhere that they can go to get some specialized training to make more than they would make in just a retail or a fast food job while they go to school for something else. And we see this time after time after time. So you could get the $30 an hour or more just getting out of high school because you took the classes that were necessary for that to get you ready for that. And one of the ways we do the career exploration as well is we do industry tours. So again, if you don't know the job exists, you don't know that person, what does it look like? So getting students out of the classroom and into the industry site so they can see it. So they can see, oh, this is what it looks like to be on a manufacturing floor. This is what it looks like to work with an engineer. We had a student that was interning this year with an architect and he actually got hired. He's an 18-year-old high school student that got a job because the architect, again, same thing, where the industry thought they're never gonna be able to do it, he's a high school student. Couldn't believe the focus that he had and the education that he already had before he got to him. This kid's great, I'm gonna hire him right now. And so I think that's part of when you mentioned earlier what is the workforce is kind of saying about this industry is that they haven't seen these kids and these students are really very bright and want to learn. And is it a lot of effort? Because a lot of companies are thinking, is it a lot of effort to get interns in? It's less than you think it's going to be. So what we've seen from our intern hosts that have bit the bullet and said, okay, I'll take on a high school student even though they're afraid is, oh, wow, these kids are better than I thought. One of our cybersecurity partners has now done it for three years. He started with two students the first year and he thought, okay, I'll give them something to do. I don't know what they're gonna do. This summer he took five and he said, okay, I wrote a curriculum because they can't work on actual client data. They're high school students, but he builds out a whole curriculum for them to learn. They get certifications while they're there. It's a great program. But he thought, okay, I have six weeks with them. This will take them six weeks. They were done in eight days. So, hmm, okay, they're better even than I thought and I knew they were gonna be good. And so the other thing that our industry partners have seen is yes, it takes a little bit of time off of the employee that you have that kind of trains the youth, but that employee actually feels better about their job and their employee morale goes up because now they're excited to teach someone about what they do. No one's ever asked them about their job. So someone's asking them, what do you do? How do you do that? What is it? And they get more energized about what they do so that it actually helps feed them wanting to stay at that business. So it helps their retention. It helps all these things that the industry partner didn't think about coming in. They just thought, oh, I'm gonna have to take time out of my life to teach this kid, when it actually helps the whole company feel better engaged, better connected. They get to teach these kids and it's not so daunting. So I think that- And it's also giving back to the community. Absolutely. You're like, hey, I just helped this kid learn this and they walk out of that with certifications and sometimes like an architect with a job. And they just, it's getting industry to see that it's not gonna take that much of your time. You don't have to sit with them 12 hours a day and watch what they're doing. And just assign them and they can run with it. You can actually give them a project and they're gonna work on it. And I always say that it's actually better to bring in two interns because they can work together. We have some companies that will have a college intern program, which is great, but have that college intern monitor and mentor the high school intern. They can learn together. And the college intern knows a little bit more and they can work. So there's a lot of ways that you can get those, that youth that is currently not working, that work experience. Our internship is a little bit different because ours are credit-bearing. Yours are certified. Because it's part of the class. What we tell our internship sites is you're not alone in this. Our teacher is required every three weeks to come around and check in with the business manager, owner, whatever, to make sure that the interns are doing what they, they're showing up on time, they're doing the work and that there aren't any issues. Because then if there are, that now becomes a teachable moment in the classroom. Because we don't just send students out to an internship and say, come back at the end of the semester. No, they come back. They have teaching hours within those semesters. And in the case of our animal healthcare, they come back into the classroom one day a week and talk about, so at my clinic this week, I learned this. Or I was at, I was down on the coast with an animal rescue, with a marine animal rescue program. And this week I got to put an IV line into a pelican's foot. Like, you know, and I was really scared about it. So what did you learn from it? You know, it's, I mean, it's absolutely amazing. And I go out and watch what the students do on the internships as well. And I'll just double down on the, you know, kids these days, you haven't seen kids these days, right? In terms of your programs, what you're doing here in the Orange County community, how much of state schools have that, these kind of programs? So in my world, we call it career technical education. And that's where, that's the space she lives in as well, but we're kind of covering different pieces of it, right? Because we have to have accreditation because everything that we do is credit bearing. But we work a lot with Vitalink. And when she's talking about the career exploration exhibit days, we have a contract. They talk to probably 12 to 14,000 middle schoolers at our schools every year. I mean, it's a great, it's, and I will say this about Orange County. Orange County is very collaborative and very organized in its approach to CTE. I think Orange County is actually an outlier. There is career technical education across the entire state. This year, the career technical education incentive grant was $450 million. It's a competitive grant cycle. There's another 150 million. So this year, there's $600 million that's out there. What that does is it allows a school district or a regional occupational program like us to get the funding to run these classes and probably more importantly, to buy industry standard equipment. When students get on an ambulance, they need to know what's on the ambulance. So I have to buy it for my classroom. That's not cheap equipment, it really isn't. But it does exist across the state. However, there aren't as many regional occupational programs. I think there's less than 40 left in the state of California. And this goes back to some changes in the way funding was done back in the Jerry Brown days when he was governor. But organizations like us, what we offer to our school districts is the ability to launch, again, be that flexibility, but also launch classes that a single school district may not have enough demand in to fill, right? So I offer one animal healthcare class for all four districts, and we have about 30 students. You couldn't have five sections of animal healthcare at a high school every day. So you couldn't hire a full-time teacher to teach that. It just doesn't make any sense. So there are many more opportunities out there when you have a robust organization like mine. And by the way, there are three organizations just like mine in Orange County. And we just work with different school districts. And so that is something that is available across the state. So essentially people can take those skills to other jobs in the future. Absolutely. What does it take to roll this out across the state? You mentioned they're available, but is it money? It really does come down to money because a lot of times, as I mentioned, launching a new, I'll just give you construction as an example. We know that there is vast need for more construction training in the state of California and in Orange County. That can start in high school, right? Our estimate is that it is, that for us to launch a single construction pathway at a high school, and there are multiple classes, so you start with very entry level and then you have level two, three, and four, right? Over the four years. To launch that full thing could cost us as much as half a million dollars. To launch an automotive, and there's a real need for automotive technicians, to launch an automotive pathway is about two and a half million dollars because of the equipment. So it can be, it's very equipment heavy in terms of the cost. And so a lot of times it just comes down to, do we have the funding? But the students that will come out of those classes, they're going to get a lot more money when they get the first job. Well, they're going to get into their job quicker. Cosmetology is a little bit different because you have to have a certain number of hours, practicum hours, before you can get your license. But what this does is it makes it sure, it expedites it, right? Just like many of the classes that we offer. And you know the field you're getting into, there's demand for it. You know that you're getting into something, that the job is ready. There's a job ready. So across the state, seeing industry come into play a little bit more. And if there's an ROP in their community, go and talk to them because you can host an intern. You can host a tour. You can do all these things that we do. But industry needs to go to them and say, hey, you know what? My workforce is retiring. I need help. You know, I was brought out to speak at the Association of Woodworkers Society in Vegas because they are an aging population and wood shop isn't in school anymore. So no kids are learning how to work with wood. And so no one's going into woodworking. Okay, well then woodworkers need to come into, start talking to the construction classrooms, start talking to the engineering classrooms so that they can know that your job exists. Construction is such a need in our community. The construction union tells me the average age of entry for the construction union is 27. That means that they stumbled around trying to figure out something else before they finally went in to become a union contractor. How do we get them in there sooner? But they could be at 18. Exactly. And that's, but because we have that stigma of, nope, that's not for my kid, or that's not a good enough job, we've got to get over that. And we did a little bit during the pandemic where there was, you know, jobs that are mandatory and things that we need. And we still need to kind of get over that stigma of working with your hands is somehow not a good enough job. Especially with AI now, a lot of the knowledge work is changing. Exactly, so. You know, I'm hearing from parents and we're seeing anecdotal evidence that that's changing the trajectory for many students. You know, there's a real concern across the United States about the number of universities that are going to go out of business. And not state universities, the UCs and the Indianas where I went, they're not going anywhere. But, you know, small institutions, maybe private institutions, nonprofit institutions that have been around for hundreds of years are shutting their doors. And some main, you know, some big institutions are actually hurting as well. I just saw University of Oregon had to do a, has a $65 million shortfall when it's shutting down some of their dorms because they don't have enough kids to fill it. And so what that does is that shows a shifting demand. And I don't know, remember the numbers exactly off the top of my head, but what we have seen over the last five years is the number of students who've expressed that they want to go into a four-year has fallen by almost half. And so what are they looking at instead? They are looking at the programs that we have, right? They are looking at community college first and then deciding, all right, now that I've got my associate's degree, what are my options from here, right? Rather than going straight into a four-year. And so it's incumbent upon organizations like ours and business and our civic leaders to really be talking a lot more about this and saying, all right, what does the future of work look like? Where do we need to be putting our resources? And so, and we have seen more money, again, come into career technical education, but you could double it and, you know, you could give me double the grant funding and I could actually expand to spend it and increase the impact on it. And I would argue that a dollar spent on something like that is one of the best investments because of what we see, the trajectory that we see, the impact that it has on our students. You mentioned community college and we talked a little bit about it, but I do want to emphasize, especially in the state of California, again, I'm from the East Coast, so it's different. What they have done with the community college system in the state is astounding. There are dorms, there are sports teams, it is a college life. So if you're thinking, oh no, I want to get the college experience, Orange Coast College has dorms, OCC has dorms, every single community college has some kind of sports team. There's basketball, football, soccer, water polo, all of those things that you still get the college experience without having to go to a four-year. It's not a requirement. Without the expense of it. But the other thing that I mentor our students on is if your goal is UCLA, if your goal is UCI, going as a transfer is a lot easier. It is almost guaranteed that you will be, because hey, guess what? Remember those 80% of students that were dropping out? Well, yes, 140,000 students apply at UCI, but by the time they get to their junior year, 80% of them drop out. There's openings. There's openings for you now as a transfer student. So that dream school that you may get declined from senior year, you get an in junior year after your AA. So it's a lot easier. So you still get the piece of paper. You still get that degree that says you went to UCI, but you didn't have to pay all of it and you got there a little easier. So really understanding the community college system in your own area, there's some phenomenal partners right here in your own backyard. Now, April, Brian, it was great to have this discussion with you. Hopefully you come back and tell us how things will be shifting. I'm sure your program will probably grow from here. Thank you so much for being on California Insider. Thank you for having us. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Tell us what you think about this discussion and tell us about your experience. Did you end up doing what you were thinking you would do as a kid when you were going to school or you were getting your college degree? Make sure to email us at ciamacacaliforniasider.com or comment. We read all of your emails and comment. I'm Ciaman Korami. This is California Insider. We'll see you next time.