Early next year, five community colleges in southwestern Virginia will open a new training facility—a learning center that combines a classroom, a computer lab, and a machine shop. The center is designed to give a new meaning to the phrase "commuter college." Although it will attract students from a 7,500-square-mile area, none of them will commute to classes; instead, this high-tech classroom—a mobile learning unit housed in a 48-foot semitrailer—will commute to them.

Funded in part by the Appalachian Regional Commission, the mobile learning unit is an outreach arm of the Manufacturing Technology Center (MTC), established by a consortium of five community colleges that serve Virginia's Appalachian counties. It will bring training facilities into the parking lots of small manufacturers at hundreds of out-of-the-way locations, and up to the doorsteps of some 50 rural high schools.

The Manufacturing Technology Center itself has been operational since early 1995 and is similar in concept to the Bevill Center for Advanced Manufacturing Technology at Gadsden State Community College in Alabama. In addition to offering specialized skills training and demonstrations of technologies critical to manufacturing competitiveness, the center's staff provides direct consultation on manufacturing technology applications and environmental engineering. Currently the staff assists about 50 per year of the area's roughly 775 manufacturing firms.

"We're overloaded right now," says John "Jay" Tice IV, the MTC's director. "We don't have resources now to meet demand."

Like the Bevill Center in Gadsden, the MTC is part of an Asynchronous Learning Network demonstration project designed to overcome both distance and scheduling barriers to training. Four plants in southwestern Virginia are already participating in this project, on a pilot basis.

The MTC's fixed facilities are located primarily on the campus of Wytheville Community College (WCC). That decision reflects two factors: Wytheville's relatively central location in the 17-county region served by the schools, and the leadership of WCC's president, William F. Snyder, in bringing the center into existence. In fact, to understand how community colleges and their presidents both reflect and shape their parts of rural Appalachia, it's worth a closer look at WCC and at Snyder.

WCC's primary service area is distinctly rural: fewer than 100,000 people live in the four counties of Bland, Carroll, Grayson, and Wythe; the city of Galax (on the border between Carroll and Grayson Counties); and the eastern part of Smyth County. Wytheville itself, population around 8,200, is the largest town in the area.

There are only 4 four-year colleges in all of Appalachian Virginia, and the two larger ones—Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and Radford University—are near its eastern edge. None are in the WCC service area. WCC opened its doors in 1963 as a two-year branch of Virginia Polytechnic and that year enrolled just over 100 students. Today its enrollment is well over 4,000. It offers degree and certificate programs in more than two dozen fields, from computer engineering to police science.

Changing with Communities

"We have to change with community needs," Snyder says. "I spend a lot of time in community activities, with community leaders and ordinary citizens, to get a feel for the changes that are occurring and how to translate that into programs and activities that the college participates in or conducts."

That requires a capacity to add programs quickly and, sometimes, to phase them out ruthlessly. Snyder and his senior administrators pay close attention to indicators of how well WCC is meeting community needs, and in conversation refer to measures resembling those used by for-profit firms.

Take, for example, "capture rate," meaning a school's enrollment as a percentage of the population in its service area. (A business firm would call this "market penetration.") Among Virginia's 23 community colleges, WCC ranks fifth, remarkable when you consider the area's rugged terrain and historically low participation rate in higher education.

WCC ranks second among Virginia community colleges in securing federal and private funding. (The private-sector analogy might be generating revenue to fund expansion.) Commenting on Snyder's aggressiveness in fund-raising, William M. Dixon Jr., WCC's dean of financial and administrative services, says, "When Dr. Snyder starts talking about some new program, I may say, 'That would be a pain to administer.' His attitude is, 'If there's a benefit to our students, we'll endure the pain.'"

Or, finally, consider the return rate of first-time students (an indicator of what a business would call "customer satisfaction").

A 1993 study conducted by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia found that WCC ranked first among the state's community colleges. The study also reported that the 23 institutions in the Virginia Community College System had an average retention rate of 52 percent; WCC's retention rate was 70 percent.

If that kind of success were a crime, there would be ample circumstantial and eyewitness evidence implicating Snyder, but you'll never get a confession out of him.

"Bill doesn't like to accept credit on his own," remarks G. Edward Hughes, the president of Hazard (Kentucky) Community College who also serves as vice-chairman of the Community Colleges of Appalachia consortium. "He will always defer to someone: 'Well, I have a good staff. . . . I have an excellent coordinator. . . .' Of course, you and I both know that he's there patting that coordinator on the back, making them feel that they can jump higher and run faster than they ever could. Bill's kind of quiet and it just sort of gets done, and you sometimes look back and wonder, 'Hmm-m-m? How'd that happen?'"

Snyder, in a reference to his childhood on a North Carolina farm, compares his job to "sieving creek sand." "It'd have clods of clay, pieces of wood, pieces of stone," he says. "We'd build a box with a certain size wire and throw sand at it. What went through was usable. I generally have that image in mind every day. We try to consider the activities we should undertake by whether they fall through the sieve of our mission. This helps keep me focused."

That means focusing on the goal, not on the obstacles.

For example, a few years ago, when WCC was asked to open classes in nearby communities, it ran up against a barrier: state statutory restrictions against "branch campuses" of community colleges. Snyder and officials in Smyth County and in the city of Galax conferred. Today WCC offers classes in facilities that are owned by local entities. The arrangement, it should be noted, meets both the letter and the spirit of the statute: WCC has no capital investment in the centers, and the centers could be closed in short order if the communities involved ever ceased to be persuaded of their value.

Tapping Local Support

Rising tuition is a perennial obstacle to serving the students that schools like WCC exist to serve. Community colleges rarely have endowments, and in Virginia state regulations once made their creation difficult. But Snyder saw no barrier to a private foundation analogous to the "Friends of . . ." groups that in many cities support zoos, symphonies, and the theater. In 1981, the year after he assumed the WCC presidency, he founded the Wytheville Community College Educational Foundation. Of course, that concept works only when potential contributors value an institution. For WCC it worked. The foundation has raised a total of $2.7 million, primarily from businesses and manufacturers. Most of that money has gone for student scholarships, instructional equipment and materials, and support of an honors program.

"We believe that our students deserve the best," says Snyder. "What makes my job rewarding is when you get away from all the paperwork. You have tangible outcomes. You have stories of success, facilities with up-to-date equipment. And you have cards and letters from students who say, 'Wytheville Community College gave me my start, and I'm proud of it.' "

Snyder acknowledges that he didn't originally see the Manufacturing Technology Center as a five-college institution. He'd been reading about such centers and envisioned one in WCC's immediate service area. After discussions with manufacturers and elected leaders (notably, he says, Congressman Rick Boucher, whom he describes as a key supporter of the MTC), "I realized that to get sufficient resources and sufficient cooperation, it had to be a regional effort." In April 1993, Snyder and the presidents of four other Appalachian Virginia community colleges (Mountain Empire, New River, Southwest Virginia, and Virginia Highlands) signed a memorandum of agreement in support of the MTC. A grant from ARC for a feasibility study provided the first tangible outside support; subsequent major funding sources include the Commonwealth of Virginia, Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology, the National Science Foundation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and ARC.

Naturally, Snyder continued to work for new resources in his own backyard. In August of this year WCC broke ground for a Learning Resource Center, to be completed by 1998. It will house two electronic classrooms and a library (to contain, among other things, a special local history collection), all open to the entire community. That design reflects the dual role that community colleges play: in economic development, by opening up communication channels both within and beyond the Region, and in community development, by fostering civic and cultural renewal.

What's in WCC's foreseeable future?

"I don't think we will see additional building or further on-campus expansion," Snyder says. "We'll see growth in the organization, but it'll be distributed growth, either electronically or physically.

"We'll still be committed to our core values and mission," he continues. "We'll be in more distance education. We'll be in more community service kinds of activities and economic development than we are now, although that seems hard to imagine. Our service region will come to look to WCC as their on-ramp for any kind of learning experience. We're going to do the job we have... better."

Fred D. Baldwin is a freelance writer based in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.