Behind the Century-Old Vocational College Leaning into Work-Based Learning

The Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology (FC Tech), launched over a century ago out of the estate of Benjamin Franklin, recently had a ribbon-cutting ceremony on its brand-new campus in Roxbury in Boston. As covered recently in the Boston Globe, only six years ago, the school was seeking just to see its mission survive through a merger with the Wentworth Institute of Technology.. But after a big donation of $12.5 million from Bill and Joyce Cummings, the school has preserved its independence and grown.

In this episode, Danny Curtis spoke with the institution’s president, Aisha Francis, about how FC Tech is innovating to prepare the next generation of technical professionals through robust work-based learning opportunities. Aisha shared her personal background in education, the institution’s history, and how FC Tech’s mission has remained focused on broadening access to high-quality technical and trade education. In particular, subscribers will be interested in the discussion around the development and expansion of co-op and apprenticeship models that enable students to gain practical experience and earn income without increasing their time to degree in this two-year, full-time model.

Danny Curtis

Welcome to the Future of Education. I’m Danny Curtis and you are joining the show where we are dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential and live lives of purpose. And to help us think through that, today I am delighted to be joined by Dr. Aisha Francis, President of the Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology, a college in Boston, educating students who aspire to advance themselves in the technical fields. I have had the pleasure of working with Aisha on FC Tech’s work around dual enrollment and industry alignment in the past and through that experience have gotten an up close look at the mission-driven innovation that they’re doing on their campus. And so I’m so excited to have her today to share about how they’re serving students through work-based learning. And Aisha, especially appreciate you carving out the time to join us because I know that this is a very busy time of year.

So yeah, just thank you so much for being here.

Aisha Francis

Well, thank you, thank you for having me and I’m really happy to be in conversation with you today.

Danny Curtis

Awesome. Well, let’s jump right in. So by way of introduction and just because I think it’s always so interesting to hear about college presidents’ paths to the role, I’d love if you could share more about your own pathway to becoming FC Tech’s president and how that path has sort of shaped your leadership in your time in that role.

Aisha’s Journey to Education Leadership

Aisha Francis

Well, that’s a wonderful question. It gives me an opportunity to reflect and share on my early childhood. I am someone who is from Nashville, Tennessee originally and I come from a family where a lot of people, people were educators and a lot of family members were in medicine, specifically in nursing. And I think I’m an example of this adage of if you can see it, you can be it. And I initially wanted to follow in my grandmother’s footsteps. She was a nurse. And then chemistry hit me really hard in the head and I thought maybe there’s some other things that will allow me to lead from my strengths.

And education seemed like a wonderful pursuit. And so from an early age I wanted to be in the education field. That desire evolved and I pursued English literature in college and went on to earn a doctorate. Earned my doctorate in English literature, all in Nashville and did all of my education there really cheerful by this extended family network of folks who were all kinds of teachers, paraprofessionals in preschools, and head start to administrators with master’s degrees. So when I finished that process, I did teach in the academy for a brief period of time and had been exposed to a lot of nonprofit work in various contexts from high school forward. And so I wanted to pivot into a nontraditional academic career. Did not realize that would lead me eventually to presidency, but the skill sets that I wanted to lean on were communications, making complex ideas and theories more clear in order to advance access to education, grant writing, which is a skill I picked up as a graduate student, initially for myself to fund my own education and then thought I can apply this to many mission based organizations that I care about. And then third, I was looking for more practical application of theories and approaches and ideas that I was learning and teaching in the classroom and decided that nonprofit leadership and administrative oversight would get me there.

Along the way, it turns out that I sort of supported a lot of current and former college presidents in various roles in the nonprofit sector. And that’s what initially exposed me to the work and the varied portfolio of college presidency. So fast forward, I finished a career in fundraising and development and I wanted to work in higher administration, continue that work, but from another perch. I became chief of staff at this college and then from the chief of staff position became president in the summer of 2020.

Danny Curtis

Sounds like a really strong foundation of a lot of education and educators exposure across various fields. And I’m sure all comes to bear in this role at FC Tech. So I appreciate you sharing that context. I’m also curious sort of about FC Tech’s story leading up to you as well, especially since I know that this is an institution that has career connectedness baked into its foundation and from its very interesting founding story. And so I think it provides a useful context for some of the conversation around work based learning. And so we’d love to hear more about FC Tech’s history and sort of how it’s evolved over time.

The Mission of Franklin Cummings Tech

Aisha Francis

Well, I was very intrigued by the opportunity to work at a tech and trade college that is accredited by the same national accreditor who oversees Harvard, BU, BC and a range of institutions throughout New England, not just in the greater Boston area. And that choice to be an accredited institution I think is an important distinction for our college. The mission of Franklin Cummings Tech is to deliver transformative tech and trade education that leads to economic advancement. And we are an access college, a broad access college, meaning we are test agnostic and we don’t have a minimum GPA. Our goal is to really broaden access to education for as many folks as possible, in particular tech and trade education. And that’s because our mission, our charter dates to 1790 to the codicil of the will of Benjamin Franklin, who left what many people consider the first estate gift in the Americas. And it was £1,000 that he left to the city of Boston for two purposes. To provide a fund, a revolving loan fund that was managed by an office in the city so that people who wanted to pursue a trade could borrow money to do that and they wouldn’t have to go into debt to be apprenticed.

The secondary purpose was for people who already had a trade, to borrow money from the same fund so that they could establish their own business. And Franklin was very clear that his largesse was created not only because he had a skill, but because he employed that skill to found a business. And so even today we’ve kept the connection to applicable trade education at the center of our mission. We are a special focused institution in terms of the majors we offer. We have 10 majors, we can get into that a little later. But we’re looking specifically for areas of education that will allow someone to get a very good paying job without a bachelor’s degree necessarily. So sub bachelor degree education certificates and associate degrees. So that’s who we are.

It’s a bit of our connection to one of the founding fathers and how we have lived out this mission in the 21st century in a new building here in Roxbury in the center of Boston.

Danny Curtis

Very cool that you know, you have such a strong connection to potentially America’s most famous apprentice. And I’d imagine maybe the industries have, have changed. I can’t imagine there was much H Vac back then, but it sounds like the mission has remained consistent over time. I’d love to kind of double click on the new campus that you brought up at the end there, just briefly because that feels like a big milestone in this history of FC Tech.

Aisha Francis

It is a huge milestone. Something that for the eight years I’ve worked here has been on the horizon and now you know, we’re here. We’ve made it. This building is a LEED Gold certified building. It’s really sustainable, transparent, purpose built for us, for our students, faculty and the majors that we offer. And the move from our former location was really just a little over a mile, but it puts us much closer to a lot of our students. Half of our students are from Boston and half are from other places. But the students who are from Boston do tend to reside in Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan, Hyde Park.

We’re in Roxbury here. So it’s a shorter commute for a lot of them. And it gave us a chance to think anew about how form follows function, how we design a building that is really industrial in look and feel so that the classrooms, our surroundings can be used as a teaching tool. So we’re happy to be here. This is about 70,000 square foot building on a little bit more than an acre, built to the zero lot line with a ton of windows so that people walking by can see robotics happening, they can see opticianry classes taking place, they can see our automotive repair shop in action. And so we’re thrilled that this has come to pass.

Danny Curtis

Wow. Really exciting times. And I understand you, you all are doing the ribbon cutting for that coming up this week. So very impressed by that and can’t wait to see it with my own eyes next time I’m back in Boston.

Aisha Francis

So happy to have you anytime. And welcome anyone who’s listening to come and take a look at 21st century career technical education in action here.

Danny Curtis

Awesome. Well, I appreciate you building that context and bringing us to the present day at FC Tech. And I’m really interested to hear more about some of these new forms of work-based learning that you all are building out at the college. Could you talk me through sort of the range of programming that you all are providing in WBL?

Expanding Access and Outcomes through Co-Ops

Aisha Francis

Yes. And so I think to start I want to share a bit about who our students are, who do we serve and what are our, what we call key three outcomes that we’re looking at. Because work-based learning is built in service of our students and in service of those outcomes. So our students are, majority of them identify as men of color. We are an institution that is really full-time focused. The vast majority of our students are enrolled full time, which makes us different than a community college. We are an independent technical institution, so we are not a public college. And the other thing that I think is important to share is most of our students are first generation and very low income.

And so you put all of those factors together and we know that a lot of our students are working. The challenge we were having is not a lot of their work was connected to H Vac and refrigeration, to practical electricity, to construction management. So they were working jobs that allowed them to attend college full time, which is helpful and it put money in their pockets which they needed, but it was not connected to what they were learning. And so the question we had is if we want to continue to see our Key 3 outcomes increase and those are our graduation rate, which is 52%. That’s about twice the national average graduation rate for two-year colleges. Our job placement rate is annually between 80 and 85%. And then our earnings, we want those earnings to go up for our students. Right now the average student is coming from a household income where they’re earning less than 40,000 and they’re graduating.

That individual is graduating in a role that will pay them on average about 58,000. So we know that we’re having a good impact on economic advancement, but we want to see that starting salary increase even more. So what does that require? Requires not a sort of mandate or request to work fewer hours. We know that’s not practical for a lot of folks who are low income and paying for the investment of education. But we also of course know that work based learning, co-ops, paid internships are invaluable to the education experience. And a small portion of our students were pursuing those opportunities because they could not fit them into a full time college schedule with 25 to 40 hours of work on top of that and their family obligations. So we spent about a year, a year and a half really designing a co-op model that did not add time to degree. We know in the higher education space that co-ops are powerful tools for learning.

They also tend to be designed to make a four-year college program take five years. But of course you’re graduating with a year and a half of work experience. And so we needed to tweak that model. We are now a co-op College. About 30% of our students are pursuing co-ops. Our goal is to have that at the 75% level in two years. It is primarily for our associate degree students, which is more than half of our students. And the idea is to have more aligned work experience with our students being able to apply what they’re learning in their co-op.

So that makes the work that they are doing more interesting and makes the classroom learning they’re doing more interesting. And to all of our co-op placements agree to a $20 an hour compensation and to an assessment so that we are checking in on a weekly basis with those students. And the ideas that the experience that our students are amassing will lead to better job placement rates even stronger than the 80 to 85% we have and higher starting salaries. So it’s all interwoven. The way that we are strengthening our work based learning offerings is really interwoven with better ways to serve our students and make sure they know about the return on investment and they’re experiencing that and better outcomes in terms of those key three outcomes that I described.

Danny Curtis

Yeah, I really appreciate two pieces that you highlighted there. First it is just around the role of earn and learn and breeding access to educational opportunities. I think so often the conversation centers around career outcomes which post grad career outcomes and obviously that is a huge part of the equation and so important. But also just the ability to earn while you learn for many is a prerequisite to actually accessing the education in the first place. And I think sometimes that gets lost in the conversation and then part and parcel with that. It’s a reality for an increasing number of students in America that they will be working whether it’s through earn and learn or just through a part time role that’s disconnected from their career aspirations. And so aligning that part time work that’s already happening one way or another to their larger career outcomes and to the learning that’s happening in the classroom is so important. So I really appreciate you highlighting those points.

One question that I have in following up with that is you mentioned that the co-op model is not increasing the time to degree as it does in some other programs. Could you talk us through how that works, how you’re able to identify those synergies and get students to graduate on a regular time schedule?

Aisha Francis

Absolutely. Well, we are really looking at course replacement in some cases, so we are giving credit for the learning that is happening in the co-op. In other cases students are using the summer between their first year and second year if they need to take another course. And then third, we in some program models, actually rearranged the order of the way that courses are laid out so that students could really take advantage of learning the subject matter from your major first and then taking their general education aspects in a different order so that we could really accomplish our goal of creating co op programs that don’t take three years for a two year associate degree.

Danny Curtis

Love to hear that you are making use of those vacation periods to help students move on their path and graduate on time. From my understanding, the co-op model is a really exciting new innovation in work based learning at FC Tech, but it is not the only program type that you all offer. Could you speak to the range of the variety of different programs that you all have?

Expanding Work-Based Learning Opportunities

Aisha Francis

Yes, and so I alluded to the fact that work-based learning was important as a career-connected institution. We have long had students who pursued internships and externships as well as co-ops, but not in the volume that we have now. We also have apprenticeships, so we offer apprenticeship degrees which merge the apprenticeship, the federal oversight of apprenticeships with the degree seeking process and a few of our majors. And so what this looks like is we have an assessment that is done in concert with our faculty to really have faculty understand who is eligible and in a good place, which students in our associate programs are eligible and in a good place for what type of work based learning experience. We are also a project-based learning college. And so project-based learning still offers and we consider that form of WBL because the projects that for instance in our cybersecurity program, some of those students are in a project based learning environment where they spent the summer assessing vulnerability and CyberSecurity risk for 45 small businesses in partnership with the city of Boston. That is very much a work based learning experience. But they were doing that in the context of a course.

So those are project-based learning experiences that we also consider an outgrowth of work based learning. So you know, it has a lot to do with the students’ readiness for uptake based on their own schedule and what they want to do, how they want to really grab hold of their education in various ways. The apprenticeship and co-ops, it’s not one versus the other. They are both very fulfilling work based learning opportunities. Honestly has more to do with the company on the other end. Some companies are very well set up and positioned, particularly in automotive, for instance. They understand apprenticeships.

That’s already a registered apprenticeship. They already have a federally registered apprenticeship in play. So we didn’t have to create one with going through the O*Net process and all of that. And so you know how the industries that we are partnering with are set up. It really factors into what we offer, whether we offer apprenticeships, co-ops or both in a major. And then the other piece of that puzzle is who the student is and where they stand in terms of what they can take on. Because it is quite a big responsibility to have 20 hours, 25 hours of your week, be in a job site, at a work site that is related to your major, but also is really a long term interview for a potential employer. And some students would prefer to go through a more traditional career placement process.

A Suite of WBL Opportunities

Danny Curtis

Yeah, yeah. The range feels so important to have that sort of spectrum of options to match the readiness of students, as you said, maybe not every student is able or ready to tackle on a full, full blown apprenticeship, but might benefit from project based learning or an internship. And likewise on the employer side, maybe not every employer is ready to fully engage at, you know, the starting level. It’s maybe something to evolve into, but great to have that spectrum of options to have everyone engage at the level that they’re ready to engage with it. One sticking point that seems to be a real challenge for colleges in developing these types of, of apprenticeship and work based learning experiences is employer engagement in terms of matching up on the same schedules, aligning on learning outcomes, et cetera. And so I’m curious what has been, in your view, the keys to success in engaging with employers and successfully co designing and delivering these programs?

Aisha Francis

Yes, well, I’m glad you asked because it’s quite involved work, very detail oriented work I would say we built on the foundation of an active business advisory councils. And every major has a group of employers who are in the field who advise us and meet twice a year. They are advising us on the curriculum. What elements should we keep, what are they seeing in the field? So we had that in place, had a good group of people for every major. We also had a division formerly called Strategic Partnerships that I wanted to retool and you know, we’ve been grappling with as an institution, you know, how do you engage and meet the needs of employers as an audience. Right. As a service, we are providing the talent force for these employers and in relatively short order, some of our programs are, you know, really eight months and then we have other programs that are two years.

And so the strategic partnerships division was here. We really wanted to take it to the next level. So we added a senior leadership team member in charge of innovation and looking at what are some of the wish list items that we had. We had not quite been able to figure out the best way to apply these models at this institution for the students that attend. And one that stuck out and stood out rather was co-op. So we really did need to hire for the innovation role. That was important. And then once we got here, I think it’s giving that leader whose name is Michael Goldstein, giving Michael the tools that he needed to take some time and really assess how co-op would work, knowing that we would try some things that didn’t work.

So that cohort one, if you will, the very first guinea pigs who were wonderful. There were about 25 of those students and maybe 18 of them saw the co-op through. But that was a really important group, that pilot group who worked alongside the institution, the pioneer employers and those first students who helped us build proof of concept with a nascent team. Fast forward to today and this is only two years later, but that team has five people, the co-op and career team. We actually merged our career services department with co op because we figured that one of the outcomes, we want half of our students to be landing their job placement opportunities through co op. And if that’s the case, then this is really hand in glove with career services. It’s not separate. So that team is now called the career and co-op team.

And three years ago I’m not sure we would have known that we would get here. So we have to start off with a goal. 75% of students participating in co-op and half of those co-op experiences leading to a job offer. And we also are pushing ourselves to have something closer to 90% job placement and $65,000 average earnings. So all of those things, you have to have ambitious goals, got to have the right team and a good listening ear in terms of how we work with our corporate partners.

FC Tech’s Enrollment Growth

Danny Curtis

Yeah, I know that just serving students and keeping things running out of college is enough work on its own. And so I’d imagine having the dedicated personnel to be innovating and thinking through that next chapter, as well as the dedicated personnel to be engaging externally with employers is probably a huge help in keeping things running and continuing to evolve. You mentioned your big goal for work based learning and engaging with co ops and I want to circle back to that in a second. But first I want to focus on the progress that you all have already made as an institution. I know that over the past few years your enrollment has grown significantly. And when we talk about these types of innovative programs and I see those types of enrollment growth numbers, I naturally sort of draw that causal line. But I’d love to hear from you. What do you see as those drivers of the enrollment growth at FC Tech and potentially what role do these types of innovations play in that?

Aisha Francis

Yes, well, I think the transformation into a co-op college is really important and it has been and continues to be something that we are becoming known for. But our enrollment growth actually started before we made that commitment to invest in co-ops. And what we did, we took the horrible experience of the pandemic to assess, as we were among many colleges that needed to really tighten our belts. We went through a very difficult reduction in force, but we did that with an eye towards what the marketplace was already demonstrating throughout this public health crisis. What were the most resilient roles? If you remember, there were massive layoffs, you know, a lot of industries that retrenched. However, in the tech and trade areas of operation and maintenance, we were already seeing even in the middle of 2020, that, you know, building operations, building maintenance, H Vac, auto repair. These were resilient careers where there were not as many layoffs. In fact, you really needed these, what were now termed essential workers, and broadening of that term to include operations, maintenance, and trade staff beyond the typical emergency services, health workers, and service workers.

So, you know, that was a very moment, you know, kind of an existential moment for this institution is who are we going to be? How do we retain our relevance in a very rapidly changing world? And in order to make this, you know, kind of decision that, and feel that we have the integrity to continue to ask students to invest in this institution, we wanted to make sure that those were the majors that we had, were ones where we felt very confident that we could prepare students for the workforce of today and the workplace of today. So all of that to say we reduced our majors, reduced our offerings by almost half, that’s a very difficult process to go through. Those are real jobs that were lost. And it also allowed us to focus, to do what we knew we were going to be able to excel at. And I think because of that shift, you know, we really led from our strengths. And we almost, the very next year in 2021, started seeing amazing growth in more of our majors. So we had kind of uneven growth.

We had 20 majors and maybe three where there was a strong demand, and the rest really languished. And now we offer 10 majors. We’ve got wait lists for four of them, really good, strong demand for others. And that for us was the game changer. It’s really matching, thinking of ourselves as an institution that has two audiences. We serve an audience of students and their families. We also serve this audience of employers. And if we’re going to be a workforce or intermediary as an institution, we have to offer opportunities in education, in fields that are in high demand.

And so because we did that, we were able to really meet the student demand side as well. And I think it was that perfect combination. And so now we have twice as many students. We served almost 1200 students last year, as opposed to 500, 550 during the pandemic. And that’s been organic growth because we’re meeting a need that the market has displayed. Seeing that need and meeting that need is really important work, and that’s what we’ve been able to do.

Scaling Co-Ops

Danny Curtis

Yeah, well, listeners of this podcast will be very familiar with one of Michael’s strongly held beliefs that, you know, one of the keys to success for colleges is focusing on what you do really well and nailing that, investing resources in those areas and it sounds like that’s exactly what you all have done here. Looking to the future, now, as we wrap up our conversation and circling back to your mention of your 75% goal of engagement in the co-op programming, I’m curious as you look forward, what do you think it will take to reach those goals?

Aisha Francis

Well, it’s going to take more companies so we’ve got to, we are actively scouring the market for more companies that are eager to have paid co-ops or eager to start apprenticeships. We’re also asking the 100 or so companies where we have paid place folks in work based learning opportunities if they would take more students. So if you’ve hosted three, can you take five? And then I think the third piece is we need the testimonials. So in May we have a whole suite of students who are graduating and some of whom are anticipating their job offers from their co-op matches in a few months. And once we have more of those students, more of those stories, then you know, success begets success. So the word gets out. So those are the elements that I think we’re really counting on. And you know what, I’m going to add a fourth one which is the customer service aspect.

Aisha Francis

So we have to be very attuned to the student needs and also to the needs of our other customer. Who are those employers who are putting a lot of time and effort into building a co-op that is meaningful and that is on time and effort that we respect and we want to meet those employers where they are. Some of them are very sophisticated and large places, you know, enterprise mobility, some of our large general contractors here, Delbrook, JKS and places like that who have done co-ops before. That’s the point I’m getting at. So some of them have large, you know, sophisticated HR enterprises and they, they have done this and then there are small and mid sized companies that haven’t and so we want to give all of them the same customer service experience from the standpoint of FC Tech faculty and the staff of the, the career and co op team.

Danny Curtis

Well, as you said it, success begets success and success also begets scale. And I’m sure that more and more students will be flocking to this as well as employers. And I’m looking forward to watching as you all continue to support students and innovate on work based learning and just really appreciate the work that you do and really appreciate you carving up the time to do with me here today.

Aisha Francis

Oh, thank you, thank you for your interest, and we hope that this episode does pique the interest of others. We’re always happy to be a demonstration college. We have this open source playbook and would love that to be helpful in other institutions who want to proliferate this type of model.

Danny Curtis

And it seems like they have a lot to learn from you guys. So really appreciate that openness and all your sharing.

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