A massive influx of federal workers expected to fill thousands of defense and contracting jobs in the state will be exempt from University System of Maryland residency requirements, the Board of Regents announced Friday.
The change means that an expected 40,000 new employees and their families expected to arrive as part of the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure process will pay significantly lower tuition – about $12,000 less per school year in College Park – than those classified as out-of-state students.
Approved last year by the Defense Department, BRAC will relocate several thousand overseas troops and close several current U.S. military stations, moving jobs to places such as nearby Fort Meade in Anne Arundel County and Aberdeen Proving Ground in Harford County. Fort Belvoir in Fairfax County, Va., will also be affected.
The decision to suspend residency requirements signals a commitment to provide highly qualified professional employees with higher education opportunities, said Irwin Goldstein, the regents’ vice chancellor for academic affairs. The move could also mean a shift toward a highly technical state workforce – an idea he said aligns with university President Dan Mote’s goal of boosting the state’s economy by graduating students with science, math and engineering degrees.
“It’s a very positive event for Maryland’s economic landscape,” said Daraius Irani, an adjunct economics instructor at Towson University who led a study of BRAC’s effects on the state. “All these new jobs coming into Maryland will leverage on the fact that the state has great higher-education institutions. The high caliber of students at our best universities … are the brightest students in the nation at some degree, and they’ll be able to fill the positions.”
A large number of jobs will focus on engineering, computer science, management and logistics, and will capitalize on the talents of current students and the technological progress of the state, Irani added. And with the influx of families, new jobs in teaching, retail and development will open up as well.
College graduates entering the government jobs can expect starting salaries between $60,000 and $70,000, Irani said. And the slack in population growth due to baby-boomer retirements, coupled with Maryland’s tight job market, will ensure that college students get hired, he said.
“There’s a very good labor market for the college graduate” over the next few years, Irani said. “With the right degree and the right skills, the world is your oyster.”
Despite the thousands of civilian jobs expected to converge on the state, university Career Center spokesman Christopher Irwin said his department is not aware of the specific jobs set to inundate the area, and the center is not offering students specialized training or advice on pursuing those jobs.
“The University Career Center works very hard to equip people for any and all jobs,” Irwin said. “This is just another opportunity. Our efforts are very general.”
Irwin said the center has not directly corresponded with base officials about the new jobs and said the center does not keep track of the number of students interested in government or military careers.
Students lacking knowledge about the application process for federal contracting and defense jobs could be problematic, Irani said, since it is imperative students receive security clearance to work on the bases. The process is an arduous one, he said, and can take up to 18 months and cost contractors thousands of dollars.
While the Defense Department ultimately controls the speed of the process, Irani said proper training and guidance by universities and coordination with employers can make students more likely to get these security clearances – and more likely to get the job.
“There’s a lot of downtime on the bench with the security clearance, and employers don’t want to spend time with people on bench,” Irani said. “So students with security clearance are very valuable.”
Regents working with families affected by BRAC isn’t new. Goldstein said that, about 10 years ago, when several divisions of the Patuxent River Naval Air Station Complex were relocated to Newport, R.I., regents offered a similar residency exemption to new base workers.
He expects, however, that the most recent BRAC round will have a greater impact on the state’s job market than the Patuxent effort. “The size of this transfer of employees is really quite large,” he said. “This one will have a more dramatic effect from the amount of jobs that it will bring to the state.”
University Provost Bill Destler said that the university is not expecting a significant enrollment increase from the base realignment. Rather, the realignment will result in about 500 more students applying to the university and, if anything, will make the application process more competitive, he said.
“We’re really limited on housing and classroom space, and we’re not in the plans to have a substantial enrollment increase,” Destler said. “I think what this really means is we’ll have more sons and daughters of new residents applying, and it may be more competitive than it is now.”
Contact reporter Raquel Christie at christiedbk@gmail.com
