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SPEAKER: We're going to check in with Bob Collins now, who's finished the first leg of his college tour. Bob writes the news cut blog at minnesotapublicradio.org. And he's visiting one Minnesota college a week for the next couple of months to ask students how the economic downturn is affecting them. Welcome, Bob.

BOB COLLINS: Thanks for having me, Steven.

SPEAKER: Yesterday, you went to Century College in White Bear Lake. Tell us about the school and its student body.

BOB COLLINS: Century is one of the MNSCU schools. It's a community college. And they describe it as the second chance school. So many of their students have been out in the workforce, still relatively young, and now, are going back for some other sort of training.

SPEAKER: And I would imagine, with the tough economic times and all of the layoffs we're hearing about, you ran into quite a few of those students looking for a second chance.

BOB COLLINS: Almost exclusively, everybody I talked to up there, and I spent 4.5 hours talking to folks, were people who had other jobs, low-end jobs, and either were laid off some time ago, or realized that they were on a dead end street and are now looking for a better path.

SPEAKER: Any other common themes expressed by the students you talked to?

BOB COLLINS: There was a sense of optimism. I call it kind of a desperate optimism, if that makes any sense to you. They all think the national economy is in the tank, is going to be in the tank for quite some time, and yet, they think that they personally are going to be better a year from now, two years from now, three years from now. That was almost exclusively a theme, which I find interesting, because the economy is made up of these people.

Terrence McBride, he's from Inver Grove Heights. He was working in an auto dealership service department. He was doing oil changes and such when he realized the future didn't look so great for him because there were some firings there. He now has a six-month-old daughter. He said he wanted more job security, so he decided to go back to school to become an information technology professional while working full-time.

TERRENCE MCBRIDE: How difficult is it? Not hard enough to keep me from doing it, because I think it's easy to find an excuse not to do anything, and probably harder to find the willpower to overcome those obstacles. But I'm a firm believer that if something is really important to you, there's nothing that can stop you from getting it.

So I had to give up the entertainment in my life. I don't go to movies. We don't go out to eat. I don't rent movies on demand. I don't do any of that stuff. I study and I go to work. But in the long run, I am relatively sure that it's going to pay off.

BOB COLLINS: I've written about all these folks, by the way, on the News Cut blog, Steven, and Terrence in particular there provides almost a how-to on how to do this if you're one of these people who's in a situation like his. And then, I also talked to Lucy Enbal. She's from Osceola, Wisconsin.

She's been in the situation for a while now that many people are just now finding themselves into. She worked at Andersen Windows in Bayport until she was laid off, I think, it was in 2007. She's finishing her general coursework, and then, she's going to get into the nursing program.

LUCY ENBAL: At 32 years of age, thinking that Andersen's was going to be the promised land, in some ways, yeah, but in other ways, it was almost a blessing, because now, I get to finish and get my degree and move on with life. Because otherwise, I'd be a manufacturer until I was 60, 65, and, yeah, I wasn't looking forward to that.

BOB COLLINS: And she's one of these folks who doesn't expect the economy to get better for 5 to 10 years. But she says she's still going to pursue this particular dream in her life, she told me, even if she has to live in a cardboard box. But it was a woman named Elaine Burns of Minneapolis, though, who gave me the biggest shock when she sat down.

She had two small children with her, as you're going to hear. She's taking a class in Spanish, and then, she's going to be in the nursing program. And as with everyone else I talked to, I asked her, what's your outlook? And she said, what's my outlook? I want to get out of here.

And I said, you mean out of Minnesota? She said, out of this country. And she said her family feels abandoned mostly by the health care system. And as we ended the conversation, she described a typical day in which her husband is spending 10 to 12 hours a day between classes and a little bit more doing research, and she's trying to get her education, and you get a real sense here of her struggle.

ELAINE BURNS: I go to school in the evenings, and online classes, and sometimes, it'll be midnight and I'm sitting up doing the paper or homework, just trying to get it in that drop box before 12:00 PM, and I'm like, we can't do this. There's no way we can do this for four more years.

It's too much. It's too stressful. It's not going to work. But then, other days, you just think about when it's over, what it's going to be like when it's over. It's like, no, it'll work. And I know it will.

It will work. People do it. There are people at this school that are doing way more than we're doing, single moms and people with sick parents to take care of, two jobs, more than two kids. So I know it can be done.

BOB COLLINS: She's like many of the people I talked to up there, Steven. They are willing, and more than willing, actually, to sacrifice now-- they're barely keeping afloat-- just so they can try to stay afloat later. Nobody's talking about the big dream, and big houses, and that sort of comfortable life, for that matter. They're simply talking about sacrificing now to be able to survive later.

SPEAKER: Where are you on your way to next in your school, college tour?

BOB COLLINS: Well, in an example of wonderful timing, I'm going up to Ely, the land of 20 and 30 below weather in January, to visit at Vermilion Community College in Ely. Which is more of a natural resources-geared school. It's one of the few, by the way, community colleges that has dormitories. It's not a commuter school. And many of the kids, I think, most of the kids, from what I told, I was told are from the suburbs of the Twin Cities.