A classic country/rock tune sums up the view of education common in much of Appalachia:
And a rich girl wants to flirt;
A rich boy goes to college
And a poor boy goes to work...
Well, maybe in the past. But work has gotten scarce in some portions of Appalachia. In the southern parts of West Virginia, in East Kentucky and in that portion of Virginia along the Kentucky border, official unemployment (the number of unemployed people actively looking for work) is 10-25% and real unemployment (the number of people who would work if they could find jobs, but who have given up looking at the moment) is much higher.
The biggest jobs squeeze in the 1980s and 90s has been in coal. Two things have happened. First, the trend to replace human labor with machinery in the coal industry has continued. Second, the coal industry itself has moved: the heart of America's coal industry is now in Utah or Wyoming, not West Virginia or Kentucky anymore.
The economic culture of the region was shaped by coal - the average worker got hired to a job he thought would last for life and was trained on the job. Now those jobs are gone. And for the first time in this century, people in Appalachia are being required to get their training before they get their job. People are being required to have some kind of training or education if they want to get hired. And economic development is itself being slowed by the level of education prevalant in Appalachia's rural communities: businesses don't want to risk establishing themselves in an area and then finding out that they can't get workers with the level or type of training and education they need.
The solution to the problem is increased education. Major universities make an essential contribution to the role played by education in the region's economic development. And mostly church-related private colleges play a unique role in the region. But it is the local community colleges and technical schools which serve as the backbone of education in the region.
One organization working to increase the level of education in Appalachia is Community Colleges of Appalachia (CCA), a consortium of mostly state-run schools in the Appalachian region. The organization is chaired currently by Dr. Eldon Miller, president of West Virginia University at Parkersburg. CCA works with the Appalachian Regional Commission to promote college education in some of the region's most economically distressed counties. One of CCA's goals is to attract students who do not have a family history of attending college.
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