Evaluation of the Southwest Tennessee Community College Solutions TAACCCT Grant: Final Report
Author: Pearson, Juliana
Date: 2017-09-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Community Colleges,Grants,Manufacturing Industry,Job Training,Labor Force Development,Training,Program Effectiveness,Veterans,Dislocated Workers,Credentials,Employers,Participation,Marketing,Recruitment,Prior Learning,Academic Persistence,Two Year College Students

Southwest Tennessee Community College (Southwest) received a Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant from the U.S. Department of Labor in 2013 to fund the Southwest Solutions program (Solutions). The goal of Solutions is to prepare, credential, and place veterans, dislocated workers, and unemployed or underemployed individuals in high-skill occupations within the manufacturing process control industry. The college received the Solutions grant through the third round of TAACCCT funding. Industrial process control technology professionals are responsible for planning, analyzing, and controlling manufacturing production processes. The Solutions program awards a series of stacked and latticed credentials to students interested in or already employed in the field. Solutions includes a scale-up of Industrial Readiness Training (IRT), a manufacturing workforce readiness course, as well as a for-credit technical certificate and an associate of applied science (AAS) degree at Southwest in industrial process control technology (IPCT). Solutions also supported short-term training at manufacturing sites and at Southwest through the Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Internal Auditor Training. CNA Education served as the third-party evaluator for the Solutions program. The evaluation focused on program implementation and students' academic outcomes. The implementation evaluation used a qualitative case-study approach to gather feedback on the implementation of the program. CNA answered questions using data collected from multiple sources, including interviews with grant staff and employer partners, surveys of students who participated in IRT and short-term training, and an analysis of program documents. The original design of the impact evaluation was to use a quasi-experimental approach to assess the effect of the for-credit IPCT certificate and AAS degree programs on students' education and employment outcomes. This design was not feasible given that the for-credit programs were not approved until the spring of 2016. There have been few participants in IPCT courses and no completers of certificates or AAS degrees. In addition, the college did not provide comparison group data for the for-credit participants. Given these limitations, the report includes descriptive statistics about Solutions participants and their academic outcomes. It summarizes the demographics of all students touched by the Solutions grant. These students include IRT participants, participants in other grant-funded, short-term training (Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt and ISO Internal Auditor Training), and students enrolled in courses in another forcredit program, Advanced Integrated Industrial Technology (AIIT). Grant staff members anticipated that some AIIT courses would also count toward the for-credit programs in IPCT. In addition, AIIT students used equipment funded by the Solutions grant in their courses. Therefore, the AIIT students included in the report were counted as grant participants. Outcome data for IRT participants include program completion rates and changes in scores on pre- and post-WorkKeys assessments. Finally, the report examines patterns of credits earned and year-to-year persistence among AIIT enrollees.