Addressing Rural Industry and Student Needs through the Manufacturing of a Community College and University Partnership in Mechatronics and Robotics Systems

Meeting the employment needs of regional industries can be difficult in any environment, but doing so in rural locales represents an especially challenging, yet critically important, mission. Community colleges are generally well-suited to the task of producing graduates with the necessary skill sets for entering the workforce and meeting this demand, but rural institutions face a major barrier in the form of insufficient resources to purchase equipment, hire qualified staff, and provide facilities to support multifarious academic and technical programs. Additional challenges such as a lack of enrollment, student demographic homogeneity, and geographic isolation also disproportionately impact rural higher education. Faced with these challenges in 2014, Bay de Noc Community College developed an innovative partnership with a regional university to leverage economies of scale through the sharing of talent, resources, and even students, in order to address local workforce needs in the area of Mechatronics and Robotics Systems. This partnership has resulted in a stackable degree program that provides students with multiple exit points, the development of non-credit workshops for other educational faculty and incumbent workers, and even the creation of robotic simulation software. Now, three years after the advent of this partnership, Bay de Noc Community College and Michigan Technological University are able to share their model of collaboration with other rural and urban communities to demonstrate how effective partnering between the two-year and fouryear levels of higher education can alleviate many of the challenges that afflict community colleges, especially those from a rural environment. Co-developing curriculum, working with the same equipment, utilizing elective options effectively, and creating clear articulation agreements have all proven to be successful strategies for creating stackable credentials that cross institutional barriers. Furthermore, the work of these institutions has led to insights surrounding future improvements that can be implemented, such as by creating student-level partnerships that completely break down geographic, demographic, and philosophical barriers between community colleges and universities. This paper provides an overview of this partnership, a description of the successful strategies that should be scaled up elsewhere, and a researched discussion of how student-level partnerships may be the next big step for rural community colleges. The Challenges of Rural Education Providing postsecondary educational opportunities within a rural context presents numerous distinct challenges that educational institutions must address. Even defining the concept of rural can be inconsistent and challenging. The United States Census Bureau defines an urbanized area as being one of 50,000 or more people, while an urban cluster is an area of at least 2,500 people and less than 50,000 people1. By process of elimination, rural areas would include all areas not contained within either an urban area or an urban cluster, although further distinctions of fringe, distant, and remote rural environments are often made2. Regardless of its exact definition, persistent poverty within these communities has been an ongoing problem, with approximately 15% of rural counties having poverty rates of greater than 20% in each decennial since 19803. These high poverty rates then lower property values, which in turn lowers millage revenues for colleges and exacerbates the inadequacy of the resources already in short supply4. Rural contexts also typically contain different types of industries than more urban environments, and within those industries exist a different set of expectations for the skill sets of entering workers5. Given the smaller size of these employers, employees often find themselves in less-specialized job roles, forcing them to have a broader knowledge base than is typical in more urban settings. Colleges in rural contexts also tend to have lower enrollments and fewer resources at their disposal, making it difficult to offer the full array of programs needed to meet these diverse industry needs. Failing to respond to regional employment needs is unacceptable, however, since no other educational institutions are locally available to fill this training gap. Furthermore, the ability of employers to recruit employees to the region is hampered not only by their geographic isolation, but also by their inability to pay employees as much as they might earn in urban locales. The local community college is often therefore faced with a nearly impossible task. They are the only source for practical education and workforce training, yet they do not have the resources needed to meet the diverse regional demands of the employment market. Such a situation was encountered at Bay de Noc Community College (Bay College) in Escanaba, MI when the Dean for Business and Technology, Mark Kinney, began meeting with local employers to discuss their human resources needs. Whereas one employer needed one or two people with electrical skills, another employer needed one or two people with knowledge of fluid power systems. Still others needed blueprint reading, machine tool skills, knowledge of industrial motors, understanding of process control techniques, robotics and automation abilities, or a wide variety of other skill sets. Because Bay College supports a student population of just 1,700 during the typical fall semester and has a similarly limited set of financial resources available, creating a separate academic program to address each of these skill sets was impossible. For many years, these demands simply went unmet, creating a desperation among local industries to find affordable talent and putting tremendous pressure on the college to find a solution. Fortunately, such a solution presented itself when Kinney visited Michigan Technological University (Michigan Tech) in the fall of 2013, meeting with Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering Technology, Aleksandr Sergeyev. As Sergeyev provided a tour of the university’s facilities, the two began to craft a vision for a program that was broad enough to cover the diverse needs of regional employers, customizable enough for students to tailor their educational experience to the requirements of a specific industry or employer, and stackable in a way that allowed students to receive as little or as much education as they required. Furthermore, this educational pathway would represent a partnership between the community college and the university in an unprecedented sharing of curriculum, equipment, and knowledge. The two institutions soon pursued a grant through the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Technological Education fund and, in 2014, received funding for their project. Now, three years later, the Mechatronics and Robotics Systems program at Bay College is one of the fastest growing programs on campus with new opportunities being discovered each day for student employment and educational partnering. The remainder of this paper describes the ways in which this program was designed, the results that have been realized thus far, and a description of several unexpected benefits that make replicating such a partnership at other rural community colleges a strong recommendation. An Overview of the Program The final grant award for the proposed project between Bay College and Michigan Tech totaled $702,324, much of which was dedicated towards personnel costs for designing curriculum, creating an articulation agreement between the institutions, and developing robotic simulation software that could be used both within the classroom and beyond. Money was also reserved for stipends to be paid to participants in non-credit workshops that the institutions committed to develop, for travel to conferences and meetings, and for instructor professional development. In order to truly align the curriculum and provide a seamless transfer experience for students, however, the institutions also decided that Bay College should possess and use the same robotics equipment as Michigan Tech. Approximately $100,000 was therefore allocated towards the purchase of three FANUC LR Mate 200iD robots, with roughly another $25,000 for add-on options like battery packages and pill sorting packages. Much to the benefit of Bay College, an additional three robots were later able to be purchased due to a successful Community College Skilled Trades Equipment Program grant application through the State of Michigan, thus outfitting their Mechatronics and Robotics Systems lab with a total of six robotic stations. A stackable credentials model was then used for the program’s curriculum, consisting of a oneyear certificate, a two-year associate degree, and a four-year bachelor degree. The Mechatronics certificate consists of 24 contact hours and features three required courses and three elective options. This is an important design element, as the elective options give students the ability to customize their program to the specific requirements of whatever employer or industry they are targeting. For example, during an initial advisory board meeting for the program, numerous employers expressed that the inclusion of a then-required Blueprint Reading course was unnecessary. Soon after the course was removed from the program, however, other employers provided contradictory feedback that the inclusion of a course in blueprint reading would greatly enhance the certificate. This particular course is now included as an elective option, but the larger lesson learned was to keep the certificate somewhat customizable to help meet the diverse needs of area employers. A copy of the certificate program course list is included as Figure 1. Figure 1: Course Overview of the Mechatronics Certificate The associate degree program is a two-year degree comprised of 60 contact hours. Keeping with the tenets of the stackable cr