Students pursue green degrees

November 28, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Many find jobs lag in sector

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

NEOSHO, Mo.

With the nation investing billions of dollars in clean energy, it stands to reason that tiny Crowder College should be quite popular these days.

After all, this is a place that’s been educating students about alternative energy for more than three decades. The school offers degree tracks in solar, wind and biofuels. It offers courses both locally and through its online program.

Yet fewer than 60 students are pursuing green degrees from the school. That’s not terribly surprising, considering that jobs in this sector have been slow to materialize. It’s a market, instructors say, that depends heavily on using government incentives to get companies to invest in green endeavors. And that’s just not happening right now.

“Frankly, with these market conditions, it’s turned out to be very hard to make a living in this industry,” said Daniel Boyt, whose uncle founded Crowder’s alternative energy program in the 1970s. Boyt studied wind technology at Crowder and returned last year as a full-time instructor.

It’s not that the government hasn’t tried, at least on the money side of the equation, with the Obama administration setting aside $25 billion in stimulus money for clean energy.

So far, the investment hasn’t yielded the kinds of results the administration had hoped for.

But it has spurred fresh interest on the part of colleges and universities eager to get in on the green action.

“It wasn’t too long ago that we couldn’t get anyone’s attention,” said Alan Marble, Crowder’s president. “Now everyone’s got the fever.”

The community college near the Ozark Mountains with 5,200 students seems an unlikely place to serve as the state’s go-to school for all things green. Many schools around the state have their own green-flavored programs. But in 1992, Crowder was designated by the Legislature as the state’s renewable energy education center. Later this year, school leaders hope to break ground on a $7 million home for its Missouri Alternative and Renewable Energy Technology Center.

The squat school — the tallest building is three stories — sits on a sprawling campus of nearly 600 acres, including land set aside for grazing livestock. Here and there are reminders of the school’s military heritage — in the 1940s, it was a U.S. Army base, Camp Crowder. The National Guard still maintains a base adjacent to campus.

But in the late 1970s, an instructor named Art Boyt started pushing the school toward its current position as a bastion of renewable energy education.

In 1984, Crowder joined the ranks of schools battling for solar-car supremacy — its first car is now at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich. — in an annual cross-country race. In 2002 and 2005, Crowder took part in the Solar Decathlon, a contest of student-built solar-powered houses. In that first year, the school finished sixth, but also captured the people’s choice award — based on voting by the touring public — with 20 percent of the vote.

“Second place got 4 percent. So it’s not like it was even close,” said Amy Rand, associate dean of program development and educational support.

It’s clear the tiny school from Neosho takes pride in those battles. They held their own against teams of students from big name schools such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas and Carnegie Mellon Institute.

The school still races solar bikes, but has been sitting out the bigger competitions because of rising costs. Administrators say they’d rather focus on campus programs.

Part of that focus, however, includes the realization that jobs still haven’t caught up with the supply of graduates. To counter that, Crowder employs a job-hedging system, in which each of the green degrees teaches something extra. A student who studies wind turbines, for example, also learns about general industrial maintenance.

“It’s not our purpose to train people and take their money,” said Marble, Crowder’s president. “It’s about getting people ready to go to work.”

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics only recently started tracking the sector, figuring the nation had around 2.2 million green jobs. The bureau has not yet offered forecasts on expected growth from the sector.

Economic experts, however, aren’t optimistic.

The problem, some say, is that the U.S. lags in green industries compared with Europe and other parts of the world. And it’s still cheaper to use traditional energy sources — though most expect that to change.

“Over time, we know that energy prices have gone up and down. But they are more likely to go up,” said Jack Strauss, an economics professor at St. Louis University. “I would think the jobs are coming.”

Strauss and others say help for the sector could come in the form the carbon tax that’s been pushed for years as a way to reduce carbon emissions by making traditional fuel sources more expensive.

The $25 billion set aside by the Obama administration two years ago has, thus far, produced little in terms of job growth.

“It’s happening. But it’s happening at a very slow and methodical pace,” said Rico Kolster, a Kansas City-based lawyer on Bryan Cave’s energy industry team.

Kolster said efforts have been hampered by the higher costs of alternative energy. He said businesses also are leery of incentive dollars, which they fear will come with regulatory strings such as increased scrutiny, mandatory federal contracting guidelines and minority business requirements. At the same time, smaller start-ups eager to grab the federal money often lack the resources and expertise needed to secure the funds.

And it’s not even clear that new jobs will do anything more than put back to work those people who’ve been idled by the move away from coal-powered plants and other traditional power sources.