COMING TO AMERICA

From terminology to résumé pointers, Cooper Union's job-oriented retraining program helps immigrant engineers build their American dreams.

IT'S EARLY EVENING IN MANHATTAN, but as the rest of the city heads to the nearest trendy watering hole, a dozen Russian engineers quietly gather in an Mast Village classroom for a different kind of power meal. There, they will spend the next two hours chewing over blueprints and struggling to digest the details of safety codes and construction contracts.

How do bid forms (00 41 00) differ from stipulated sums (00 72 13)? Should porta-potties count as temporary utilities or construction facilities? Such are the nuts and bolts of Building Cost Estimating, one of more than 20 free immigrant retraining courses offered by Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Guest instructor Arkadiy Lyansky can relate to the bewilderment of his scientist-students, whose duties back home never involved bids, let alone 150 trade unions and estimates for every phase and plan. Thirteen years ago, Lyansky, a former chief engineer of Gomel in Belarus, USSR, was newly arrived in the United States, on welfare and equally at sea in the world of American commercial engineering. So tonight he laces his lesson on cost estimators-those experts who translate design specifications into tons of cement and the dollars to pour it-with examples from his own successful practice. Among them: the $1 billion transformation of Midtown's landmark Farley Post Office into the world's largest transportation hub. "You come to class," Lyansky assures his fellow émigrés in heavily accented English, "I promise, you find a job."

The American dream-formally known as the Immigrant Engineer Re-Training Program-began simply enough with the Bnai Zion Foundation, one of the nation's oldest Jewish philanthropies, seeking to help former Soviet engineers and scientists find work. Student turnout for Bnai Zion's job skills classes soon outstripped the available space, so in 1991, the organization turned to Cooper Union's Albert Nerken School of Engineering for courses, instructors, and classrooms. The ensuing collaboration between Bnai Zion and Cooper Union allowed the former to focus on outreach, career counseling, and English workshops, while the school further developed the course offerings.

Propelled by word of mouth, library fliers, and Russian-language radio ads, demand for the short, narrowly targeted classes continues to swell. So far, more than 3,000 students have gone through the program, which is funded totally by outside foundations. And half have gone on to professional positions. While few end up "making a mint," says Larissa Akerman, the former chemical engineer from Moscow in charge of Bnai Zion's effort, it sure beats the dole. Students entering the program in 2002 typically earned about $9,000 a year; after training, the average salary jumped to $25,000.

"It's the most satisfying program I've ever been involved with," says Cooper Union's engineering school dean, Eleanor Baum, who saw her own immigrant father struggle to find work in America. "With a little bit of help and a push in the right direction, you change people's lives."

The secret: small, hands-on classes with occupation-specific content, be it Java programming or licensing-test preparation. "The university is quite clear that this is not continuing education, not a degree program," says program director Fred Fontaine. "It's vocational education." The program's unabashed focus on employment is what truly distinguishes it from traditional adult education. Since students can't afford to spend two years pursuing a degree, the emphasis is on quick, intense courses that closely track market demand. During the dot-com heyday, Web design and programming classes dominated the curriculum; today, it's courses in Linux administration, quality control, and hospital safety codes. Next under consideration: computer-network security and cryptography. Ira N. Pierce, a Cooper Union graduate and former highway engineer-turned inventor who teaches the cost-estimating and construction course, sums up the program's goal: "Our function here is to get them a job."

COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT

JOB TRAINING may seem a departure from academia's usual script, but it's entirely consistent with Cooper Union's long history of activism and community outreach. After all, this is the school that, over the years, provided a public platform for abolitionists, feminists, and U.S. presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton, helping to catalyze such social icons as the Red Cross and the NAACP. Founded in 1859 by self-taught industrialist and Jell-O inventor Peter Cooper as a world-class polytechnic institute for talented underprivileged kids, Cooper Union pioneered the concept of continuing education, offering free night courses for working-class men and women. Early offerings included training in the nascent fields of photography, "type-writing," and shorthand.

"Civic responsibility was very much a core value that [Cooper] wanted to inculcate into the institution," explains the school's current president, George Campbell Jr. "We have tried to maintain the fundamental attitude of that mission." Campbell also notes that "the invisible profession of engineering" has been a traditional route to upward mobility for many disadvantaged and immigrant families.