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Inside Higher Ed
The Microcredential Generation
Andrew McDonough wears a neon-yellow jacket and a sturdy pair of dusty brown boots, a hard hat by his side on the ground. The 18-year-old and his classmates lean back in padded metal dining room chairs, listening to their instructor as a cool wind rustles the trees around them on a summer afternoon.
Their classroom is a little unusual. In fact, it’s not a room at all. The students are out on a forested logging site in the Kennebec Valley, a rural area of Maine. Neat piles of logs sit in the distance. A whiteboard hangs off of a truck. Heavy machines, which from afar look like large metal creatures, are waiting to be used.
McDonough is enrolled in Northern Maine Community College’s mechanized logging operations and forest trucking program.
