How Green Was My Community College

As the commander-in-chief put the finishing touches on his state of the union address, the second lady did a warm-up act for him at his favorite think tank. “The president has proposed the biggest increase in spending on community colleges in 50 years,” Dr. Jill Biden told the audience at the Center for American Progress (CAP) on the morning before the chief executive gave his annual report.

Dr. Biden currently teaches at Northern Virginia Community College. “Community colleges will enable us to expand our green economy,” Dr. Biden told the appreciative audience. Other college presidents and educational analysts at the CAP event echoed this refrain after Dr. Biden’s exit from the proceedings.

For example, Demetra S. Nightingale, principal research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Policy Studies would like to see more “Green Jobs grants.” The U. S. Department of Labor already doles out hundreds of millions a year in such stipends.

“Educational institutions are increasingly viewing green jobs promotion as part of their social mandate to create a thriving, healthy society,” the minority staff of the U. S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee found last year. “Beyond providing courses of study and research on ways to eliminate global warming emissions, they are educating and preparing workers for new, reoriented, or emerging jobs in the clean energy economy.”

Indeed, in 2008 the National Council for Workforce Education, “an affiliate council of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC)” produced a report entitled, Going Green: The Vital Role of Community Colleges in Building a Sustainable Future and Green Workforce. On their end of the committee, the minority staffers at EPW don’t think this is a particularly bright idea.

“Some see green jobs as a cure-all for the Nation’s ills, transforming the environment and the economy, even heralding a new era of prosperity for underemployed urban and poor communities,” they note. “However, State and local governments are spending tens of millions of dollars to attract in some cases only a few hundred new green jobs.”

“Green jobs subsidies are costing over $100,000 per job in many cases.” Moreover, “Created green jobs often offer sub-par wages insufficient to support a family,” the staffers point out.

Given the current unemployment rate, their prognosis is a dire one. In light of the experiences of countries which have invested in green jobs, it is even worse.

The staffers reproduce a study by the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos on Spain’s experience.

“Comparing the amount capital the private sector employed per worker to the level of government subsidy per green job revealed that the private sector creates 2.2 jobs for every green job the government created,” the staffers report. “The study also compared the government green job subsidy to the productivity of its average worker to again find a 2.2 ratio.”

“Thus, on average, the subsidized green job destroys the resources required to create 2.2 jobs in the private economy,” the Spanish researchers found. Here’s what’s really scary: It’s already happening here and the ratio is even worse.

The EPW minority report relays what happened when when TPI Composites, a wind turbine facility, displaced Maytag as Newton, Iowa’s principal employer. “The Maytag factory closure ended 1,800 jobs, yet the TPI Composites opening replaced only 700 of those jobs,” the report shows. “The Maytag workers earned $20 an hour in addition to health benefits.”

“Newton TPI turbine workers will earn only $13 an hour,” the report relates. “Newton workers went from wages that could support a middle class family to wages not much higher than the federal poverty wage for a family of four.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.