Published 11:37 a.m. ET: Students with concealed handgun licenses could soon carry guns on Texas college campuses.

More than a dozen state senators have signed on to Senate Bill 182, also known as the  “Campus Personal Protection Act."

The bill's primary author, Senator Brian Birdwell, said the bill is about preserving the 2nd Amendment.

“This affords CHL holders, one of the most lawful group of citizens in our state, to be able exercise that 2nd amendment right to go on to the campus of higher learning to be able defend themselves and protect their right to self-preservation, God forbid, some act of evil be perpetrated,” Birdwell said.

If passed, the bill would allow CHL holders to bring concealed weapons onto public universities. Private universities could choose to go gun-free.

“It does respect the private property rights of the private institutions, and they have the opportunities to opt-out of the requirements," Birdwell said. "So we do want to respect the private institutions private property rights."

The bill also gives some say to universities on where students can and cannot bring their concealed weapons.

“They are to establish some rules and some boundaries, sporting events for example, are separated out of there, so it provides quite a bit of local control for the local universities,” said State Senator Kelly Hancock.

Hancock said the bill would not just affect students.

"And really more what you’re talking about more with a CHL on a college campus is really you’re probably addressing more professors, university employees then you are actually students," Hancock said.

Birdwell said CHL holders living on-campus at public universities would have to secure the gun, according to university set rules.

NBC 5 reached out to several DFW area universities and colleges for an opinion about the bill.

“In keeping with state law, neither the University of North Texas, as one of the state’s public institutions, nor I in my position as the university president, may take a position supporting or opposing any specific State of Texas legislation,” UNT President V. Lane Rawlings said in a statement.

TCU’s chancellor also released a statement on the bill.

“"With respect to the proposed bill, TCU's biggest priority is keeping the campus safe. We accomplish that through our 24/7 TCU Police force, which has procedures in place dedicated to the protection of all members of our community. I believe that TCU, as a private institution, should be provided with a choice as to whether we would permit someone with a concealed weapon license to carry a weapon on campus," said TCU Chancellor Victor J. Boschini Jr.

In the past, the student congress at UTA passed a resolution against CHL holders bringing concealed guns to class.

The bill has been referred to the Criminal Justice Committee.

Randal Franzen was 53, unemployed and nearly broke when his brother, a tool designer at Boeing, mentioned that pilots for remotely piloted aircraft – more commonly known as drones – were in high demand. 

Franzen, a former professional skier and trucking company owner who had flown planes as a hobby, started calling manufacturers and found three schools that offer bachelor’s degrees for would-be feet-on-the-ground fliers: Kansas State University, the University of North Dakota and the private Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla. 

He landed at Kansas State, where he maintained a 4.0 grade point average for four years and accumulated $60,000 in student loan debt before graduating in 2011. It was a gamble, but one that paid off with an offer “well into the six figures” as a flight operator for a military contractor in Afghanistan.

Franzen, who dreams of one day piloting drones over forest fires in the U.S., believes he is at the forefront of a watershed moment in aviation, one in which manned flight takes a jumpseat to the remote-controlled variety.

Courtesy Randal Franzen

Randal Franzen went from being unemployed to earning a six-figure salary as a drone flight operator in Afghanistan.

While most jobs flying drones currently are military-related, universities and colleges expect that to change by 2015, when the Federal Aviation Administration is due to release regulations for unmanned aircraft in domestic airspace. Once those regulations are in place, the FAA predicts that 10,000 commercial drones will be operating in the U.S. within five years.

Although just three schools currently offer degrees in piloting unmanned aircraft, many others – including community colleges – offer training for remote pilots. And those numbers figure are set to increase, with some aviation industry analysts predicting drones will eventually come to dominate the U.S. skies in terms of jobs.   

At the moment, 358 public institutions – including 14 universities and colleges – have permits from the FAA to fly unmanned aircraft. Those permits became public last summer after the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act.

The government issues the permits mainly for research and border security. Police departments that have requested them to survey dense, high crime areas have been rejected.

Some of the schools that have permits have been flying unmanned aircrafts for decades; others, like Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, received theirs recently to start programs to train future drone pilots.

Alex Mirot, an assistant professor at Embry-Riddle who oversees the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Science program there, said this generation of students will pioneer how unmanned aircraft are used domestically, as the use of drones shifts from almost purely military to other applications.

“We make it clear from the beginning that we are civilian-focused,” said Mirot, a former Air Force pilot who remotely piloted Predator and Reaper drones used to target suspected terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere for four years from a base in Nevada.

“We want them to think about how to apply this military hardware to civilian applications.”

Among the possible applications: Monitoring livestock and oil pipelines, spotting animal poachers, tracking down criminals fleeing crime scenes and delivering packages for UPS and FedEx.

With U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan winding down, drone manufacturers also are eager to find new markets. AeroVironment, a California company that specializes in small, unmanned aircrafts for the military, recently unveiled the Qube, a drone designed for law enforcement surveillance.

The FAA hasn’t allowed police agencies to fly drones over populated areas – because of concerns about airspace safety, as drones have crashed or collided with one another abroad. But that hasn’t stopped some agencies from buying them in anticipation of their eventual approval. The Seattle Police Department, for example, has two small aircraft, which two officers occasionally fly around a warehouse for practice. For now, a police spokesman said, federal rules are too restrictive to use them outside. 

The domestic market is so nascent that there isn’t even agreement on what to call unmanned aircraft – “remotely piloted aircraft,” “unmanned aerial vehicles” – UAVs – or by the most mainstream term, “drones.” The latter makes many advocates bristle; they say the term confuses their aircraft with the dummy planes used for target practice – or with the controversial planes used to kill suspected terrorists abroad.

Industry attracting engineers and pilots
Students at Embry-Riddle train on flight simulators that closely resemble the Predator, an armed military drone with a 48-foot wingspan, because the FAA will not issue a drone license to a private institution.

Without guidance from the FAA, Embry-Riddle has struggled with how to create a robust program that will turn out employable graduates.

“As of now there aren’t rules on what an (unmanned aircraft) pilot qualification will be,” Mirot said. “You have to go to employer X and ask them, ‘What are you requiring?’ And that becomes the standard.”

The bachelor’s degree program also includes 13 credits in engineering, so students understand the plane’s whole system, Mirot said.

Embry-Riddle recently graduated its first student with a bachelor’s degree, but those who graduated earlier with minors in unmanned aircraft systems have fared well, Mirot said.

“I had a kid who deployed right away and he was making $140,000,” Mirot said. “That’s more than I ever made. Yeah, he’s going into Afghanistan, but he had no previous military experience or security clearance.”

Mirot said many of his students aspire to be airline pilots. But with salaries for commercial airline pilots starting as low as $17,000 in the first year, they plan to start in unmanned systems to pay off their loans, then maybe apply for an airline job, he said.

The University of North Dakota, which launched its unmanned aircraft systems operations major in 2009, has similar success stories. Professor Alan Palmer, a retired brigadier general of the North Dakota National Guard, said 15 of the program’s 23 graduates now work for General Atomics in San Diego, which makes the Predator and Reaper drones used in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Engineering and computer science students, too, are in demand by the drone industry. At least 50 universities in the U.S. have centers, academic programs or clubs for drone engineering or flying. Many of the engineering students work on projects making the drones “smarter” – that is building more sensitive sensors – and studying how the robots interact with humans.

George Huang, a professor at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, who builds drones the size of hummingbirds, said nearly all his 20 students work as researchers for the Air Force. This means they’re earning between $60,000 and $80,000 a year while still enrolled, instead of the $15,000 stipend that graduate students typically receive from their schools.

At the University of Colorado in Boulder, doctoral candidate Sibylle Walter said unmanned systems appeal to her because the results are immediate. In the past, she said, aerospace students typically ended up at Boeing or another big company and spent years working on one element of a project. Instead, she is working with her adviser to build a supersonic drone capable of flying up to 1,000 mph.

“The link between education and application is much more compact,” Walter said of the unmanned aircraft. “That translates to this new boom. You can build them inexpensively – you don’t need $100 million to build one.”

Ethical warfare?
Despite the promise of numerous civilian applications, drones continue to be controversial because of their role as weapons of war.

At Texas A&M University, which has an FAA permit to fly drones, computer science student Brittany Duncan is unusual among her peers: She’s a licensed pilot, a computer scientist and a woman. She probably could land a high-paying job for a military contractor, but she’s intent on staying in academia, studying robot-human relations, specifically how robots should approach victims of a natural disaster without scaring them.

John Brecher / NBC News

Doctoral candidate Brittany Duncan assembles an unmanned aerial vehicle in a lab at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.

On a recent hot, dusty morning, Duncan, 25, pulled a small aircraft from the back of a 4x4 pickup. Wearing black work boots and Dickies, she quickly assembled a remote-controlled aircraft that resembled a flying spider, then launched the aircraft – equipped with sensors and a video camera – over a pile of rubble to practice capturing footage.

At her side was Professor Robin Murphy, her adviser and a veteran of real-world unmanned aircraft operations, having flown over the World Trade Center after 9/11, the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the nuclear reactor in Fukushima, Japan, after the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster there (although she stayed in Tokyo). She believes drones could revolutionize public safety.

“I could show you a photo of firefighters from today, and it could be a photo of firefighters from 1944,” Murphy said. “They haven’t had a lot of boost in technology. [Unmanned aircraft] could be a real game-changer.”

Duncan knows there is resistance from communities where drones have been introduced. In Seattle, for example, the ACLU argued that drones could invade privacy. But as Duncan sees it, this makes her work even more relevant.

“That’s the most important thing to me – that people understand good can come from drones,” Duncan said. “Every technology is scary at first. Cars, when they went only 6 mph, people thought there would be a rash of people getting run over. Well, no, it’s going slow enough for you to get out of the way. And it’ll change your life.”

Duncan said she considers the implications of working on machines that are for now mostly used for war. Despite conflicting reports on civilian casualties in drone strikes, she’s convinced that unmanned aircraft offer a more-ethical battlefield alternative because they take the pilot’s “skin” out of the game. 

“If you’re flying a UH-60 Blackhawk Helicopter and look down and think someone has a surface-to-air missile, you’re going to shoot first and figure it out later because you’re a pilot and your life is in danger,” she said. But with drones, “(You) can afford to make sure that someone is a combatant before they engage – because you don’t have your life on the line. It takes your emotion out of the equation.”

While that debate continues, the Department of Defense is showing no loss of appetite for drones, despite the drawdown in Afghanistan. This year, it plans to spend $4.2 billion on various versions of the unmanned aircraft, 15 times more than it did in 2000.

For Professors Mirot and Palmer, that is evidence that their programs will stay relevant, no matter how the domestic deployment of drones plays out.

Looking ahead
There is an ironic twist to Randal Franzen’s move to climb aboard the cutting edge of aviation: When he went to Afghanistan, he learned that his assignment was to monitor surveillance video from a tethered balloon near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border – a military technology that – minus the cameras – dates to the Civil War.

From the base miles away, he monitored the rural area for Taliban activity, but mostly watched Afghans going about their daily lives. The retrained drone pilot said he found it fascinating.

“I grew up in Montana, swam in irrigation ditches, and they do the exact same thing – they’re just trying to make a living, raise some cattle and kids and do the exact same thing as everyone else,” Franzen said. There were moments that caught him by surprise – such as when he saw a man leading 10 camels through the desert while talking on a cellphone, walking several feet ahead of his wife, who was dressed in a full burqa.

Now home in Colorado, Franzen figures he’ll take at least one more far-flung military assignment as he waits for the domestic drone market to open. This time, though, he’d like to put his newfound remote flying skills to better use. 

“I had three offers yesterday to go back and do the same thing for three different companies,” he said. “I talked to them about flying. I’d rather pilot something. I’d like to go play with something cooler.”

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Mel Evans / AP file

The graduating class of 2012 at Princeton University after commencement ceremonies in Princeton, N.J., in June. How much are their degrees worth in earnings?

Joyce English was about to start studying toward an associate degree she hoped would lead to a job as a consultant to healthcare companies around Tacoma, Wash., where she lives.

Then she discovered a database created by the state’s workforce training agency estimating what she’d earn with that degree versus how much she could make in other jobs with other majors and degrees from colleges and universities across the state.

They paid more, she found.

“You obviously want something out of your education,” says English, who changed her mind and is now majoring in what she learned is the more lucrative field of business management at Pierce College. “You don’t want to go into something that’s going to pay you less than it cost to go to college.”

Efforts to disclose the earnings potential of degrees in specific majors from particular colleges and universities are picking up steam, promising to bring competitive pressure to bear on institutions by steering students away from programs with lower market value and colleges whose graduates fare poorly — and holding higher education directly accountable for the return on investments made by families and taxpayers.

“We’re on the cusp here of something really big,” says Grover “Russ” Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was an assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education during the George W. Bush administration.

Comparing schools, too
Wage information—by major, degree and institution — was made available for the first time this fall in Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia, which joined Florida and Washington. Colorado, Nevada and Texas are in the process of producing it, and a bill in Congress would require every college in the country to disclose the average annual earnings of its graduates.

The data already released reveal not only which majors pay more than others, but which universities’ graduates earn more and which earn less.

In Virginia, for instance, graduates of four-year nursing programs earn more than twice as much as liberal-arts majors, on average, and graduates of the University of Richmond make almost 72 percent more than graduates of Hollins University.

In Tennessee, majors in health professions make two and a half times what philosophy and religious-studies majors make, and graduates of the University of Memphis earn 13 percent more than graduates of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

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“I can imagine some hard questions being asked” by parents, students and legislators armed with knowledge like this, says Mark Schneider, a vice president at the American Institutes for Research and president of College Measures, which is helping states create such earnings databases.

Despite the appearance of choice, says Whitehurst, there’s historically been “no reliable information on which consumers can base a rational decision” about which college to attend. “But lots of students are making this decision largely for one reason, which is to improve their economic prospects. And not giving them that information has put all the power in the hands of the sellers instead of the consumers.”

In fact, nearly 90 percent of incoming freshmen say the main reason they enrolled in college was “to be able to get a better job,” UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute reports. “And probably 100 percent of their parents say that,” says Schneider.

State legislators and governors are also looking more closely at what they’re getting for the money they put into public higher education. “The question is, what are we getting out of that support?” says Tod Massa, director of policy research and data warehousing at the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, where it was the General Assembly that ordered the creation of that state’s earnings database.

Difficulty in making comparisons
The information has significant limitations. It can be hard to find and difficult to follow, for example. Proponents hope it will be picked up by private college-rankings services such as Barron’s and The Princeton Review and distributed more widely. It typically provides earnings of people only a year after they graduate, and it compares colleges that admit considerably different kinds of students who go on to work in places where living costs and wages vary.

The information is also based on such things as state unemployment insurance records, so it doesn’t take into account graduates who work for the federal government, join the military, move away or go on to graduate school. An analysis by the University of Virginia found that 22 percent of its degree recipients went on to graduate school and 43 percent left the state, meaning they weren’t being counted.

But the data could eventually put substantial pressure on colleges and universities whose poor rates of return cost them applicants and state support in favor of institutions with the best results.

“It’s the no-name comprehensives, the regional campuses, the third-tier not-for-profits — their business model is going to be held up and people are going to ask about it,” Schneider says. “ ‘Why are you charging me $40,000 a year? What’s the outcome at the end of the day? What am I getting for all this time and money?’ ”

Higher-education leaders complain that judging degrees based on prospective wages diverts students from the liberal arts and overemphasizes narrow skills and majors, not the broad knowledge they say employers really want, including the ability to problem-solve and communicate clearly.

“We are misleading students when we tell them over and over again that the major is the only thing that matters,” says Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. “And we’re making that even worse when we’re saying, ‘Pick a major that will make the most money for you.’ ”

Though she acknowledges that universities should be providing so-called “soft skills” to students regardless of what major they select, Schneider says that what she calls “major myopia” makes students “push back” against learning writing and math.

“Your college decision should be about becoming an educated person — giving yourself a resource that will increase in value your entire life, finding something you care deeply about, and developing the skills to go on learning what you need to learn,” she says. “We should not be telling them the only thing that matters is how much money they’ll be making a few years out. The more important message is, follow your passion.”

What's the return on investment?
But proponents of disclosing earnings say spiraling tuition is driving the demand for information about returns on families’ investments in a college education.

That’s the same force behind a contentious regulation proposed by the U.S. Department of Education called the “gainful employment” rule, which would disqualify from federal financial aid those programs in fields whose earnings aren’t enough to justify their students’ loan debt. The proposal has stalled by litigation brought by for-profit colleges and universities.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has introduced legislation that would require colleges to disclose the average annual earnings of their graduates, along with such things as average debt. “Students are entitled to know the value of their education before they go out and borrow tens of thousands of dollars from the banks and from the government” to pay for it, Wyden says. “Right now, consumers don’t have this information.”

Mark Schneider says that, given what colleges and universities charge, they shouldn’t object to being judged on graduates’ earnings.

“‘Leave us alone,’” he declares, mimicking what he says are the universities’ arguments. “‘Our students don’t get jobs, but it’s not my problem. They don’t graduate, but it’s not my problem.’ We’ve heard all these things. So I say, ‘Show me the return on investment. Show me what happens when you graduate. If you want to talk like that, then show me the outcome.’ ”

In Washington, Joyce English still sees many classmates start college not knowing whether there’s demand for the careers they want to pursue.

“That’s the crazy thing,” she says. “When you’re younger, you chase your dreams and sometimes you don’t look at the salary. That’s something you don’t even think about. But you need to make a living.”

This story, "New pressure on colleges to disclose grads' earnings," was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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The University of Iowa

The University of Iowa in Iowa City, which enrolls more than 30,000 students, has become the first public university to include questions pertaining to students' sexual orientation on it's applications for admissions.

The University of Iowa has become the first public university in the U.S. to include a question about students' sexual orientation in their application for admission.

As of Dec. 1, students applying to the university have the option of answering: "Do you identify with the LGBTQ community?" Students may also mark "transgender" instead of only male or female when noting their gender on their applications.

With the changes, the university became the first public university and second college in the U.S. to ask applicants such demographic questions. Elmhurst College, a private college in suburban Chicago, was the first U.S. college to include questions involving sexual orientation on its application last August. 

"LGBTQ students are important members of our campus community, and we want to provide them with an opportunity to identify themselves in order to be connected to resources and to build networking structures," the university’s chief diversity officer, Georgina Dodge, said in a press release. “What we’ve heard from students, especially LGBT students, is that they don’t find out about support services and organizations until they’ve been here for a year or two, unfortunately. This allows us to do some more personal outreach.”

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"This is a question whose time had come," added Michael Barron, Iowa admissions director. “We think this will cause them to look more closely at the university because we value that part of who they are. We want students to feel we are receptive to and sensitive to their lifestyle and their description of themselves.” 

The move was heralded by gay rights advocates.

It reflects “a growing paradigm shift in higher education to actively recognize out LGBT youth populations and to exercise greater responsibility for LGBT student safety, retention and academic success,” said Shane Windmeyer, executive director of Campus Pride, an organization that promotes creating a safer college experience for LGBT students, in a press release.

The questions will give the university, which enrolls more than 30,000 students, information to determine incoming students' needs, track retention rates, potential interest in campus programs, and to offer support resources, university officials said. The optional question appears in a section of other optional questions asking students about family connections to the university, parents' educational background, interest in ROTC programs, and interest in fraternities and sororities. 

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The admissions office will immediately email students who identify as LGBT with links to information on housing options and campus resources that may interest them, Barron said. 

Dodge said the applicants' responses would be stored confidentially in the university's records. She said that student groups who wanted to reach LGBT students, for instance, could ask the university to send them a mass email — but the recipients' identities would not be released. 

Dodge said that university administrators recognize that not everyone who is LGBT will choose to identify, but the university’s goal is “to create an environment where all personal identities are celebrated, and increased visibility is certainly one way to help eliminate stigma.”

According to school officials, the University of Iowa was the first U.S. public university to admit men and women on an equal basis, the first state university to officially recognize the LGBT community, and the first public university to offer insurance to employees’ domestic partners.

In 2009, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Iowa's marriage laws prohibiting same-sex marriage violated the state's constitution, making the state the first in the Midwest to allow gays and lesbians to wed. 

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Christopher Connell

Apprentice ironworkers from Local #86 with their instructors on a steel scaffolding where they learn their craft at Bates Technical College in Tacoma, Wash. The apprentices, who start at nearly $25 an hour, are among more than 200 the union is training as demand for them in the Seattle area picks up after a two-year lull. The apprentices earn college credit for the classes at Bates.

TACOMA, Wash. — Five-foot-two Jesica Bush exudes confidence, whether she’s scribbling notes in a 6:30 a.m. class at Bates Technical College here or wrestling 900-pound girders atop a mock two-story building.

With her blond ponytail tucked inside a brown hardhat, the 30-year-old is an apprentice with the ironworkers’ union, a job that starts at nearly $25 an hour and will lead her in three years to both a journeyman’s card and an associate degree.

Three years back, Bush sat in the state women’s prison in Purdy, finishing seven and a half years for an armed-robbery conviction. The former addict dropped out of school in seventh grade — “Me and school, we never saw eye to eye,” she says — was convicted of her first felony at 13, had a child at 15, and was sent to prison at 19.

But when it took her just six months to complete her GED in Purdy, the instructors asked her to be valedictorian at the graduation ceremony and to start thinking about college. When she got a chance to fight fires with a prison brigade instead of cleaning toilets, she jumped on it and made the discovery that “I loved hard work. I’d never worked a day in my life. You hike up the forest, you chain-saw trees all day. It’s hard — really hard — just like being an ironworker. But I loved coming back and being tired.”

Now Bush is one of 209 people learning the ironworking trade through apprenticeships like this one and others run by the Aerospace Joint Apprenticeship Committee, a state-funded partnership among community colleges, industry and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, at a time when skilled workers are needed by Boeing and the rest of the aerospace industry in Seattle and to help build a $4 billion replacement for the floating 520 Bridge over Lake Washington.

Christopher Connell

Jesica Bush, 30, who served 7½ years in prison for armed robbery, is now an Ironworkers Local #86 apprentice in Tacoma, Wash., making nearly $25 an hour and earning credits toward a community-college degree.

An age-old doorway into skilled trades and a middle-class life, the apprenticeship is making a comeback, rebounding after all but disappearing in recent decades in the face of a decline in union membership and dwindling demand for skilled labor. And as the economy changes, today’s apprenticeships combine the chance for workers not only to master skills while earning a paycheck but to get a college degree at the same time.

From the White House to executive suites, and from think tanks to such industry groups as the National Association of Manufacturers, there’s a push to link apprenticeships with conventional education, mostly at community colleges, and produce a better-educated workforce capable of filling the more than 3.6 million skilled jobs the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates remain vacant in industries such as manufacturing — even at a time when more than triple that number of Americans are looking for work.

Higher education, advocates say, can not only provide these newly minted workers with the critical-thinking skills they need for today’s jobs, but also leave them better prepared and more appealing to employers the next time things get tough.

“What works so well about apprenticeships is that workers can gain tailored skills for the workplace along with critical academic learning, all while they earn a paycheck,” says Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a champion of federal support for apprenticeship programs.

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What makes them a model, Murray said at a U.S. Department of Labor ceremony marking this year’s 75th anniversary of the National Apprenticeship Act, are those paychecks, plus the programs’ reliance on strong public and private partnerships and the combination of academic and on-the-job learning.

Machinists these days have to operate sophisticated, computer-numerical-controlled equipment like the $3 million Makino vertical machining center that Seattle apprentice Irwin Downes has learned to run at JWD Machine in Fife, Wash. The company sent Downes and two other apprentices to Ohio to learn how to run the super lathe, which can cut titanium parts on several axes at once under high heat and jet sprays. Now the three are teaching the factory’s other 42 machinists how to use the time-saving machine to make critical parts for the aerospace industry.

Downes, who is 24, also spends four hours in class one night a week at Bates Technical College. “I knew my feeds and speeds for cutting aluminum, but why is it that way?” says Downes, who previously worked in a Chinese fast-food restaurant for a year after high school. “At Bates, they break it down into a math formula and show us where the numbers come from.”

Christopher Connell

Ironworkers Union Local #86 instructor Kelly Graves readies a piece of equipment at the union's training center at Bates Technical College in Tacoma, Wash. The four-year apprenticeship now comes with the opportunity to earn an associate degree.

Across the country in Virginia, at the sprawling Newport News Shipyard on the waterfront near where the James River spills into Chesapeake Bay, applications to the apprenticeship program have skyrocketed from barely 540 a dozen years ago to a record 6,300 this year. New apprentices spend two full days each week in college classes, while earning more than $30,000 to start and upwards of $50,000 by their fourth year. They spend the rest of the week on the waterfront learning one of 17 trades and helping build and repair the nation’s aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines.

The best move on to advanced classes from which almost half will graduate with an associate degree from nearby Thomas Nelson Community College or Tidewater Community College, which teach some courses inside the shipyard gates and others back on their own campuses. The shipyard’s Apprentice School has its own 17-member faculty as well as nearly 70 craft instructors. Of those 6,300 applicants, it takes 260 new apprentices each year — making it more selective than Harvard, Yale or Princeton.

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The shipyard, owned by Huntington Ingalls Industries, also looks to the Apprentice School for future supervisors, managers and executives. Danny Hunley, who enrolled as an apprentice welder at age 19 in 1974 and is now vice president of operations, says that “human supply chain” is particularly reliant on the community colleges.

“We invest heavily in community colleges, not just for workforce development but for education of our employees,” says Hunley. “We rely on a lifetime of learning to prepare our people to create the product that we sell that no one else can.”

Hunley says he hopes that when the Apprentice School moves from its World War II-era brick building into a planned glass-and-steel showcase in downtown Newport News, it will even begin to offer bachelor’s degrees.

Malachi Underwood, 27, an apprentice in the foundry shop, came to the shipyard in 2010 after being laid off from a job making wheels for railroad freight cars. “The things you do in the classroom here relate to what you do every day on the job. They make them real life,” says Underwood, who was recently tapped to leave the foundry and become a nuclear test technician.

Christopher Connell

At the Newport News Shipbuilding Apprentice School in Virginia, new apprentices spend two full days in college classes each week while earning more than $30,000 a year. Director Everett Jordan, an alumnus (he was a shipfitter), says the college classes add "a critical dimension to our education here."

Everett Jordan, director of the Apprentice School and, like Hunley, an alumnus (he was a shipfitter), says the complex theory classes that apprentices take bring “a critical dimension to our education here.” Adds training manager David Tilman: “If you’re taking AC/DC theory as a freshman in college [elsewhere], you’re putting together little boards. When you’re doing it here, you’re putting together nuclear submarines.”

Conversely, employers say the instruction their apprentices get in college classes is broader than what new workers can learn on the job alone. The colleges typically work with local industry to design their classroom programs.

“Not only is the curriculum structured, but it helps the company build that apprentice’s skill in all facets,” says Jason Mohon, manufacturing director for JWD Machine. “Historically, if you were just an operator or a machinist out on the floor, you might find yourself spending years focusing on one task. This helps the company open their eyes and cross-train them.”

Christopher Connell

An Ironworkers Union Local #86 apprentice prepares to hoist a section of a steel beam to the second story of the building skeleton that students practice on at Bates Technical College in Tacoma, Wash.

The same is true of the 6:30 a.m.-to-3:30 p.m. classes that the ironworker apprentices take in Tacoma, which occupy one month each year during their four-year apprenticeships. At the job sites where they spend the other 11 months, much of the trainees’ time may be spent carrying or tying rebar, or doing other hard, physical labor, rather than the more complicated work of following codes and blueprints.

In Germany, apprenticeships mean job security

Some foremen and journeymen “have no problem explaining things so the apprentices build up knowledge as they go, but some do not,” says instructor Kelly Graves. He tells the apprentices that if they want to be superintendents, they’ll need college degrees. “The more education you have, the better off you are,” he says.

Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire and the state legislature came up with $3 million to create the aerospace apprenticeship program in 2008, at a time of near-panic among employers about the aging of their skilled workers. Half of Boeing engineers are eligible to retire by 2015, and two-thirds of the company’s entire workforce is within a decade of retirement age.

Yet employers have their work cut out to convince a new generation to enter these trades, says Laura Hopkins, the program’s executive director. For them, the promise of a college degree can be an inducement.

More on the World of Work

“In this day and age, if I’m trying to recruit young people, we have to have a college degree attached,” Hopkins says. “We have to convince their counselors and teachers and parents as well that this is a good career opportunity for them and that if the economy shifts and their industry goes down, they can move on to something else with that college degree.”

If apprentices have a college degree and work as machinists for a while but then decide they want to go into engineering, “they now have the opportunity to do that without starting from square zero,” says Hopkins, herself a former Boeing aircraft mechanic and dean at South Seattle Community College. “The more pathways we create for folks to go into these different careers, the better it is for everybody.”

Back at Bates, Jesica Bush is convinced she’s found the right calling. She wants to become a construction supervisor eventually and instruct apprentices herself.

“I’m a bossy person. I envision me running something sooner or later,” Bates says. “I grew up in prison. That’s where I got educated. I had to learn, and I’m still learning. I am driven — and I refuse to lose again.”

This story, "Economic reality marries age-old idea — apprenticeships — with college," was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University. It’s one of a series of reports about workforce development and higher education.

The Hechinger Report

Students in a real-time virtual classroom run by the company 2U, which is part of the new Semester Online initiative.

The race to capture a potentially vast market for college courses provided online has taken another big step with the announcement Thursday by 10 top universities that they’ll offer such classes for college credit — something earlier collaborations have struggled to do.

Semester Online envisions not huge, 100,000-student online courses such as those already being offered by MIT and Stanford, but a return to traditional-sized college classes of 12 to 15 students with live student-professor interactions — just delivered online instead of in person. And rather than making the courses available for free to anyone, it will likely have admission standards and charge tuition, according to the university provosts who have helped set it up.

The concept creates a sudden and significant divide about how best to educate online, just as America’s top universities try to get in on an anticipated boom in online learning.

“The biggest selling point is that it isn’t really new,” says Rogan Kersh, provost of Wake Forest University, one of Semester Online’s member schools. “It still feels like an extension of what we do now — the traditional university course that we already know works well, as opposed to a Wild West [where] all bets are off [and it’s] every student for him- or herself.”

Courses will be taught by university faculty following the same curricula used in conventional courses and with conventional techniques such as class discussions, using technology that allows students and professors to see and talk with one another in real time. Students will be graded on their work by faculty and earn college credit if they get passing grades.

Other collaborations have promised to figure out a way to offer credit or other kinds of credentials for large-scale online courses, called massive open online courses, or MOOCs — something that would threaten what has until now been a tightly held monopoly among traditional universities.

EdX, launched by MIT and Harvard earlier this year, plans to use private companies that will charge a fee to test students at examination centers around the world. Coursera, which includes Princeton, Columbia and Stanford, has proposed letting students take assessments online — and monitoring them as they do so via webcam.

On Tuesday, the American Council on Education said it would review a small number of Coursera classes, and may recommend that universities provide credit for them. Even if it does, however, such a recommendation would not be binding.

Semester Online, on the other hand, planned “from the very beginning” to offer credit, says Ed Macias, provost of Washington University in St. Louis, another member school. “That’s built into our model.”

The initiative also includes Brandeis, Duke, Emory, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Rochester, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Vanderbilt. More universities may be added by the time the first courses are offered next fall, organizers say.

Although they were reluctant to say their model is a repudiation of MOOCs, several provosts of these institutions described it as a logical evolution of online higher education.

The earliest online courses were provided “for credit by schools you [had] never heard of,” such as the now-ubiquitous University of Phoenix, says Jim Dean, dean of the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC-Chapel Hill. “Then the MOOCs were about courses from schools you’ve heard of, but not for credit. Now you’re seeing courses for credit by schools you’ve heard of.”

Kersh said the scale of the wholesale model is larger than many faculty are comfortable with, while Semester Online classes will be a manageable size.

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• Q&A: Students teaching their teachers how to use technology
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• Student advising plays key role in college success — just as it’s being cut

MOOCs “are sexy and exciting because they’re new and different, but as a teacher, I’ve taught classes, and, to me, large means 200, not two million,” Kersh said. “We want to deliver the kind of highest-quality educational experience that the United States has been the world leader in—and to abandon that for the sake of a massive global experience feels like something special has been lost.”

Still, a few universities are hedging their bets. Duke, Emory and Vanderbilt are members of both Semester Online and Coursera.

One thing the new collaboration has in common with earlier ones is that the details have yet to be fleshed out. The 10 universities will work with a for-profit company called 2U, which helps provide the infrastructure and support universities need to offer online courses. But the cost to students and the way that revenues will be split among participating schools, among other things, are still being negotiated, according to Macias.

“We thought it would be good to announce what we’re doing so people could hear about it,” he says.

A 2U spokesman, Chance Patterson, says tuition will likely be equal to what the universities charge for brick-and-mortar classes.

This story, "New online venture promises small classes and college credit," was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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Courtesy of Arizona State University

Arizona State University introduced eAdvisor in 2008. The software helps students to pick majors and to stay on track toward graduation.

TEMPE, Arizona – Devon Mills pulls out his smartphone at a Starbucks on the Arizona State University campus and maps out how long it will take him to finish his undergraduate degree.

Just exactly the right amount of time, his phone tells him.

In spite of double-majoring in political science and justice studies with a minor in sustainability, serving as president of the college council and vice president of the Residence Hall Association, working as a page in the state Senate, and cramming for the Law School Admission Test, Mills is on schedule to become one of the distinct minority of American university and college students who actually receive their four-year bachelor’s degrees in four years.

“I can see the goal in sight,” he says, serenely scrolling through an online color-coded plan that shows him the requirements he’s finished and the ones he still needs to fulfill before graduating in 2014.

While academics are debating whether students can effectively learn online, the program Mills is using harnesses technology to provide something else that is surprisingly essential to success in college: advising that can help prevent an education from slipping off track.

“The research clearly shows that when a student is more engaged on a campus they are more likely to remain enrolled and persist to graduation,” says Charlie Nutt, executive director of the National Academic Advising Association, or NACADA. “Academic advising is the key mechanism, and on many campuses the only mechanism, through which students have a person they're connected with.”

But just when it seems to be needed most, face-to-face advising is getting harder for students to find as the number of advisers shrinks and caseloads soar because of budget cuts and enrollment increases.

U.S. universities had, on average, one adviser for every 367 students last year, down from one for every 282 in 2003, according to a survey by NACADA and the college-admissions testing company ACT. Though more students than ever work to pay tuition and expenses, advisers are seldom available at night or on weekends. And waits for appointments during business hours can stretch for weeks.

Piling up unneeded credits
As a result, many students flounder through college, changing majors, piling up and paying for credits they don’t need, and taking more time than they planned to graduate.

On average, students rack up 136.5 credits toward bachelor’s degrees that require only 120, the advocacy organization Complete College America reports. One of every three switches majors, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. And the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics says that fewer than one in four students at public universities, and around a third at private ones, graduate within four years.

“There’s too much wandering around,” says Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “It makes sense that if you know where you’re going, you’re more likely to get there.”

The picture is even worse at community colleges, whose students are particularly likely to struggle. Academic counselors at community colleges typically handle 1,000 students each, according to MDRC, a nonprofit research organization. In some cash-strapped California community colleges, the ratio is as high as one to 1,700.

Half of community-college students don’t even know advising is available to them, says Davis Jenkins, a researcher at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. The one-third of them who finish their two-year programs within even three years take, on average, 80 credits toward associate degrees they could have gotten with just 60, according to Complete College America.

“We have a situation of almost completion by accident rather than completion by design,” says Jenkins.

The problem has grown more urgent as the type of student changes. More students today are older than traditional age, or the first in their families to go to college, or they attend part time while working or raising children of their own.

That makes navigating the bureaucracy of higher education even harder than it already was. Arizona State, for instance, offers 250 majors, and 3,071 undergraduate courses – many with prerequisites that, in turn, have their own prerequisites.

Even 18-year-olds who come from college-going families are so overscheduled by helicopter parents in their earlier grades that they struggle when they’re set free in college. 

“They have to learn to manage time,” says Nutt, who is also a professor of education at Kansas State University. “An adviser is essential to that.”

Turning to technology
In focus groups, students say they just want someone to tell them what to do, says Shanna Jaggars, also of the Community College Research Center.

Or if not someone, at least something.

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Arizona State’s eAdvisor, which was launched in 2008, puts the information students need online, night and day, and follows their progress as a live adviser would.

“We’ve waited too long to use technology in this way,” says the university’s president, Michael Crow.

Students start by entering their interests, search engine-style – “I like to work with people,” for example, or, “I would like to do something with music” – and eAdvisor helps them pick a major. Each then gets a “major map,” which charts a trail through the complicated combination of requirements. If a student wanders off the trail by failing to finish a required course or threatening to fall below a certain grade-point average, eAdvisor tells him so, in big red letters, and sends him off to see a face-to-face adviser.

The results have been dramatic. The proportion of freshmen who don’t return for sophomore year has fallen from 24 percent to 16 percent, much lower than the national average, and 42 percent graduate in four years – up from less than 26 percent in 1997, and almost double the proportion at public universities nationwide.

“It’s about looking at universities from the perspective of the students,” says Elizabeth Phillips, the provost, who first introduced a form of eAdvisor when she worked at the University of Florida and brought it with her to Arizona State.

Human advisers are expensive, error prone and soft, says Phillips, whose academic field is psychology. Part of advising, she says, is taking the hard line of “telling a kid they’re not going to be what they thought they were going to be.” There are still real-life advisers at Arizona State. But eAdvisor frees them from the drudgery of scheduling courses. “By the time you go in to see your face-to-face adviser, you can focus on strategy and life issues,” Crow says.

The eAdvisor system helps in other ways, too. Since students are planning their courses in advance, it helps the university provide the right number of seats. Not being able to get into required courses is another reason students take so long to graduate at other universities. At Arizona State, administrators say and students confirm, it almost never happens.

The system tracks whether students do well in the kinds of subjects that are essential to careers they want. If they want to major in psychology, for instance, it makes them take statistics first – and if they don’t do well, suggests that they consider other majors. If they’re in danger of failing, it freezes their ability to continue until they meet with an in-person counselor.

There are other ways the university is using technology to track its students – and, for that matter, its advisors. Phillips gets a report if an adviser gives too many overrides, for example, waiving prerequisites or restrictions on class sizes. The system also captures information from the financial-aid and residence-hall offices, the campus police department, and judicial boards about financial or behavior problems students might be running into.

“Now we’re a machine, to provide the kids exactly what they need,” says Phillips.

There are some shortcomings. Meant to be simple to use, eAdvisor seems at first glance almost indecipherable.

“When I first looked through it, I was a little confused,” says Steven Denke, a senior electrical-engineering major in the honors college who had to take five different technical electives, plus the university’s core requirements, and transfer credits from advanced-placement and dual-enrollment courses that he passed in high school. “It was daunting at first, just looking at the major map.”

Phillips says the university is working on making eAdvisor more user friendly. Adds Crow: “What we have is a very early precursor of where this is going to go.”

Christina Arregoces, a junior majoring in English and creative writing, likes being able to monitor her progress at any time.

“I’m one of those people who double-checks everything,” Arregoces says. “It’s nice to have a map so you know what you’re doing and what you need to do.”

Too dependent on technology?
Not everyone is ready for technology to supplant advisers, however.

“Technology cannot replace one-to-one advising with a person,” Nutt says. “It’s enhancing that. It’s a bad idea to depend only on the technology and not the interaction, but also a bad idea to depend only on the interaction and not on the technology.”

Still, Phillips says she’s inundated by requests for information about eAdvisor from her counterparts at other universities, which are struggling to provide advising.

“We’re seeing universities and colleges becoming more focused on advising,” Nutt says. “But the advising they end up with may not look at all what advising looked like five years ago.”

Some schools are testing so-called group advising, in which an adviser meets with groups of students with identical academic and career goals.

“Instead of saying the same thing to, say, 40 nursing students 40 times a day, they meet as groups and say it once to 40 people in a room,” Nutt says.

A few universities promote advising weeks. And Beloit College in Wisconsin cancels all of its classes one day each semester so students can meet with their advisers.

“A lot of students come in because of social expectations or because it’s the next step toward a career, and not always with a clear sense of their own motivations for being there,” says Natalie Gummer, Beloit’s co-director of first- and second-year programs.

“We’re trying to help them prepare to move from a liberal-arts education into the job market,” Gummer says. “And it helps to keep them on track.”

This story, "Student advising plays key role in college success – just as it's being cut," was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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