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.
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