What they need are more technician-level workers with two or three years of college, she said. Maricopa officials have hosted numerous foreign delegations in recent years, including groups from the Dominican Republic, Jordan, Mexico, Morocco, Palestine, South Africa, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia. But Brown says that students in some countries have shunned community colleges at first because the big thing is to get your professional license. Parents want their children to become an engineer or doctor not a technician. Sometimes these schools can be viewed as second-class, she said.
People have to come around to the political and economic realities.
Not everyone can be a doctor. Then they realize the benefits of being a medical technician the salary and the job security. Jacqueline E. Woods, the community college liaison for the U.S. Department of Education, said, Not a week goes by that I am not contacted by officials from some country asking for information about our community colleges. Woods, who went to South Africa last year to help establish a network of two-year colleges, says she has also been contacted by education officials from Brazil, China, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Mozambique, Russia and Taiwan. We are getting more and more visits from other countries, both industrialized and developing countries, because they see that they have large numbers of adults who don t have a college education and they need a large number of skilled workers, she said.