On a recent Monday evening in Michigan, about 40 miles north of Flint, a group of community-college students built and rebuilt hydraulic circuits. The 14 men in the night class — they were all men, most of them bearded and baseball-capped, still in their boots and uniforms from their factory jobs earlier that day — worked in pairs at specialized training boards. They plugged in hoses, opened valves, hit start on motorized pumps that shot pressurized fluid through the components, their hands turning silver and shimmery from the hydraulic oil. The students were early-career skilled laborers at some of the area’s largest employers, at Dow, Nexteer Automotive, Hemlock Semiconductor. These companies needed to develop and retain a skilled work force, so they paid employees to take this class and ones like it, at a community college called Delta just outside Saginaw. The students wanted to advance professionally, to rise from apprentice machinists and pipe fitters to full journeymen in their trades.
“When they get finished, they’ll get promoted,” the instructor, Robert Luna Jr., who also installed and repaired machinery as a millwright at Dow, told me. “They’ll get raises. So everyone’s motivated to do well.” Luna grew up in the area, and he attended Delta College himself; his children went to Delta as well, before transferring to four-year state universities to complete their bachelor’s degrees. By Delta’s estimate, in the three counties it serves, one out of every eight people between the ages of 17 and 70 has taken classes at the college.
As his night students looked on, Luna emphasized what he considered the most important part of his lesson on hydraulic circuits: how to troubleshoot a failing one. “When we get called, it’s not when it’s working,” he said. “We get called when there’s something wrong.” Hydraulic circuits run forklifts and steering systems and also the heavy machinery that filters chemicals or stamps metal car parts. The students began adding to a checklist of reasons a circuit might malfunction. A bad seal. A faulty relief valve. Overheated fluid. “What’s another one? Don’t let me down,” Luna encouraged, calling on a student with his head down who worked at Michigan Sugar, which turned locally grown sugar beets into a significant portion of the country’s sugar supply.
“A plugged filter,” someone else shouted, before the other student could answer.
“Soon you’re going to get pretty fast, pretty efficient,” Luna assured the group. “You’re going to have this system down. You’ll know exactly what to look for.”
Since January, the Trump administration has waged war on the nation’s wealthiest and most prestigious universities, freezing billions of dollars in research grants to Harvard and blasting away at Columbia’s institutional autonomy. But collateral damage from these attacks has engulfed schools of all types, including the country’s 1,100 community colleges, which educate about 6.4 million undergraduates each year — roughly 40 percent of the national total and more than twice as many as are enrolled at every highly selective college and university in the country combined.