Welcome to Mile Markers, a bimonthly newsletter about rural higher education. I’m Nick Fouriezos, an Open Campus national reporter who grew up at the crossroads of suburban Atlanta and the foothills of Appalachia.

Today’s Roadmap

01: Postcards: Robots in these California fields.
02: Roadside Attractions: A tuition-free college initiative in Minnesota.

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01: Postcards

Community colleges across California's Central Valley are collaborating to tackle a critical challenge: How do you prepare thousands of farmworkers for a future where they are working alongside a bunch of Wall-Es?

At Merced College, the answer starts with meeting workers exactly where they are — a position that educators know is precarious.

"We know there will be thousands and thousands of farm workers who will lose their jobs if we don't do something about it," says Chris Vitelli, president of Merced College. The college is leading seven Central Valley community colleges in an ambitious effort to upskill the agricultural workforce — using $42 million in state and federal dollars.

“California is the breadbasket of the world. We feed the world. Yet the people who are working on these farms, we're not taking care of them,” Vitelli said.

The problem they’re tackling isn’t merely conceptual. Before launching their program, they partnered with local organizations to conduct what may be the largest survey of farmworkers ever completed in the United States.

They gathered more than 10,000 responses across four Central Valley counties, learning that most workers had an eighth-grade education or less, preferred to study from home after work hours, and had 1 to 5 dependents relying on them.

That information shaped a first-of-its-kind program that launched this fall, offered completely online through courses and videos in both English and Spanish, with only exams requiring students to be on campus.

The certificate is entirely competency-based: students advance by mastering specific skills at their own pace, rather than completing traditional coursework over a set period of time.

And perhaps most importantly: It's free for the students, as the state of California is investing heavily to create 8,400 job-ready agricultural workers throughout the Valley over the next four years.

"We had this perfect synergy," Vitelli says. "Industry needs workers trained in new technology. Workers need new skills to keep their jobs. And we have nearby research institutions, like University of California Merced, laser-focused on agricultural innovation."

Major agricultural employers including Harris Ranch, Blue Diamond, and The Wonderful Company helped design the core curriculum, and industry leaders are putting money behind it while agreeing to raise wages for workers who complete the certificate. Some are also offering faster tracks to supervisory roles.

And in addition to the virtual courses, the new AgTech Innovation Center will add a valuable in-person element for students, giving them the chance to practice with industry-leading meat, fruit, nut, and vegetable processing facilities — all of which will fuel a commercial kitchen and retail market that could also help stock the college’s food pantry.

State leaders support the initiative because they recognize that the changes coming to farming are dramatic, and will require an equivalent response from employers and educators as well.

Fields that once relied on manual labor are shifting to driverless sprayers and tractors. Robots equipped with GPS now shuttle produce from pickers to processing stations. Drones monitor crop health from above. Even basic irrigation systems have gone high-tech.

Aware of those realities, the certificate program starts with digital literacy fundamentals before advancing to specialized agricultural technology. Students can move as quickly or slowly as they need to, testing out of skills they've already mastered through years of hands-on experience.

The unified curriculum means seasonal workers can continue their studies as they move up and down the Valley following different harvests. That kind of flexibility is crucial because, as Vitelli notes, more than half of Merced's students are Hispanic and first-generation college students.

The program had to be built around farmworkers’ lives and needs, he says, or else it wouldn’t work. And colleges throughout rural California know they're racing against time: Agricultural leaders say the traditional farmworker role may barely exist in 10-15 years.

Rather than seeing technology as the enemy, these schools are betting that education can help ensure workers aren't left behind by the changes transforming California's fields.

"We serve a pretty unique student population," Vitelli says. "Because of that, we have to think about how we effectively serve these students and remove barriers to their success."

02: Roadside Attractions

• A workforce challenge: Rural Texans in Coastal Bend say they lack quality information about the skills they need to get good jobs, something I explored for our partner The Texas Tribune. In communities like Mathis, fewer than 10% of adults hold an associate’s degree or higher. That has consequences for the local economy and residents’ earning power. The demand for jobs like nursing and manufacturing has surged but few here have the credentials necessary to fill them, I wrote.

• Free tuition, living costs: Earlier this week, Open Campus and MinnPost published a a story about how more than 16,700 students are receiving free-tuition scholarships at Minnesota public colleges this year. Yet, some still face high living costs that create barriers. For students at St. Cloud’s Apollo High School for example, college decisions are based on whether they can live at home.

  • “Rural students often don’t have the option of staying close to home where they can live with family to reduce cost. Support for the full cost of higher education advances equitable access for rural students,” rural community strategist Jaci David, a senior director of programming at the Blandin Foundation, wrote in response to the story.

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