ECTC's tuition to rise 6.5 percent

‘Master'pieces

Loretta Hyden exhibits art at Big Sandy Community and Technical College Art Gallery

Panelists Promote Institutional Research

The Next Big Thing

The News-Enterprise
March 13, 2005

ECTC's tuition to rise 6.5 percent

Elizabethtown Community and Technical College students will face a 6.5 percent tuition hike for the 2005-06 school year. The hike is the smallest increase set in three years.

The Kentucky Community and Technical College System set the in-state tuition rate at $98 per credit hour for the coming school year Friday. This year, students paid $92 per credit hour — a rate more than 16 percent higher than the prior year.

"This increase allows us to maintain the quality education and programming that is expected of KCTCS with minimal financial burden to our students," student regent Cynthia Osborne said in a press release.

The decision followed the General Assembly's passage of the 2005 state budget that will pump an additional $45 million into Kentucky's colleges and universities. KCTCS is expected to receive about $12.6 million in additional base funding and an additional $1 million for enrollment growth.

"With all the budget cuts over the past few years, this is really the first year we're getting funding to accommodate our growth in enrollment," said KCTCS spokesman Brendan Lehane.

The college system will remain the most economical in the state. Last year, the second most economical state school, Eastern Kentucky University, charged $158 per credit hour.

The increase brings tuition to $1,176 a semester for a full-time student at ECTC.

Kentucky New Era
March 12, 2005

‘Master'pieces
Exhibit features works of Christian County youth

Zolka Enkhtugs stood at an angle against the gallery wall beside the crayon drawing he created in a few minutes at Holiday Elementary school.

The third-grader grinned as his father positioned the camera in front of him and his drawing hanging on the wall and pushed the button to capture the image.

The family hugged as they perused the rest of the artwork on display at the Hopkinsville Community College auditorium gallery during the "Young Masters" artists' reception last week.

"It's a great thing to represent my school," Enkhtugs said.

This annual exhibit includes about 240 works of art by elementary, middle and high school students from public, private and home schools throughout Christian County, said Carol Barta, executive director of the Pennyroyal Arts Council.

Art teachers selected up to 15 pieces from each school to hang in the exhibit. A variety of pencil drawings, watercolors, collages and photography are included.

"The Young Masters exhibit affords a wonderful opportunity to see the creative accomplishments of Christian County students," Barta said. "The exhibit has created many comments by high school and Hopkinsville Community College students who are amazed and pleased by the abilities of our young people."

Enkhtugs said his sketch tells the mythical story about a jar that shouldn't be touched. The picture shows the jar enclosed in a glass box and locked away from the world in a secure, abandoned room.

"It's just frozen there," said the 9-year-old son of Yarinpil Enkhtugs and Tuya Sukhbaatar, of Hopkinsville.

Enkhtugs' parents smiled with pride for their child's ingenuity and willingness to explore the world of art after winning his school's science fair last year.

"He draws a lot now," the father said. "We're very proud."

On the opposite wall hangs a picture entitled "Doggy Darkness," drawn by Ambrea Grooms, of Oak Grove. The picture centers on two big eyes staring out of the shadows inside a brown doghouse. Above the opening in the house reads the name "Scrappy." On the borders of the drawing, dog bones and paw prints frame the picture.

The Pembroke Elementary fifth-grader said she drew the picture in about 1½ hours in her bedroom.

"It's about a dog that doesn't like to be outside, so I drew a dog in the dark," Grooms said. "I have a teddy bear named Scrappy, so I named the dog Scrappy, too."

Grooms' mother said she was pleasantly surprised to see her daughter's drawing hanging with her peers' work on the gallery wall.

"She chose (the design) herself. As a matter of fact, she closed her door until she got finished," said Stephanie Grooms. "It's cute. I'm proud of her."

The exhibit, presented by the Pennyroyal Arts Council and sponsored by the Hopkinsville Kiwanis in conjunction with National Youth Art Month, is on display through Friday.

"We celebrate the work of these young artists," Barta said.

Big Sandy News
March 11, 2005

Loretta Hyden exhibits art at Big Sandy Community and Technical College Art Gallery

Loretta’s Inspirations and Reflections is the title of a new art show that is coming to the Art Gallery of Big Sandy Community and Technical College on March 10, 2005. The artist is Loretta Hyden, a familiar face to members of the college community. She is currently employed in the library on the Prestonsburg campus, and she is also a Big Sandy CTC/Sullivan University student.

Although this is her first art show, Loretta has exhibited in student and faculty/staff shows that have been held in the gallery. One of her paintings appeared on the cover of the Big Sandy Community and Technical College literary publication, the Cut-Thru Review, and she has sold several pieces of her work.

Loretta first began to paint in 1998, when she took an art class taught by Tom Whittaker. “I always loved to draw,” the artist states, “but I had never painted until I enrolled in one of Tom Whittaker’s art classes here at the college. I wanted to take art in high school but the classes were always filled.”

Mrs. Hyden has a busy life as a wife, mother, grandmother, daughter and student in addition to working in the library and attending classes. “Painting is a great stress release,” she says. “But I don’t have a lot of time for it while I am taking classes. I hope to be able to spend much more time painting in the future.”

Sometimes she starts with a photograph, sometimes she starts with an idea and sometimes she starts with a blank canvas. Loretta started painting in watercolor, but her preferred medium is acrylic. She states that she finds it easier to transfer her ideas to canvas using acrylic paint.

She has a great love of the outdoors, and this is reflected in her paintings. Many of her paintings are landscapes. She also paints still life, and her preferred subjects are flowers. An animal lover, her favorite subjects are felines and horses, including the magical unicorn!

The Library Staff invites the college and community to meet the artist during a reception at the gallery in the Magoffin Learning Resource Center on March 17 from 2:00 PM until 4:00 PM.

The Chronicle of Higher Education
March 15, 2005

Panelists Promote Institutional Research

Institutional-research offices at community colleges should have stronger relationships with faculty members and should play bigger leadership roles on their campuses, according to panelists in a session at the League for Innovation in the Community College's Innovations 2005 conference.

Most important, said Robert Gabringer, dean of research and planning at the City College of San Francisco, state legislators and education officials should make a priority of beefing up the roles of institutional-research offices, so that their importance becomes ingrained.

Mr. Gabringer's remarks came in response to findings from a study by the Community College Research Center at Teachers College of Columbia University. The study, which attracted responses from 85 two-year colleges, found that 20 percent of institutional-research offices reported having some faculty involvement with projects, while 25 percent reported little to no faculty involvement.

Many faculty members shy away from data-based analyses of their courses and their students' success rates, Mr. Gabringer said, because they think the data could be used against them.

The Next Big Thing
Community colleges are taking center stage as states look to biotechnology to help rewire America's workforce

“It’s true, we are in the middle of it all. All across the city there is a wide variety of biotech work going on,” said Dr. Chi Wing Tsao, dean of the school of science and mathematics at CCSF. “The San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose area is really the hub of some of the most important biotechnology research and development and manufacturing in the country, and that is not to mention the universities and governmental operations like the U.S. Department of Agriculture, whose lab is just across the bay from where we are.”

There are more than 500 small, medium and large biotech companies in and around San Francisco, employing more than 80,000 people and drawing up to $700 million every year in support from the National Institutes of Health. Not only are the jobs diverse — ranging from microbiologist to documentation specialist, biochemical development engineer to laboratory assistant — they are plentiful. According to a 2004 report by the California Department of Labor, the number of biotech jobs in San Francisco and California could surpass 250,000 within the next decade.

CCSF is striving to meet the growing workforce needs spurred by biotech’s boom, but its ambition is no longer unique. Across the country, community colleges have been upping their biotech offerings as they try to anticipate how much the industry will grow in the years ahead and what kind of jobs will be in demand.

A Biotech Vortex
Because much of the nation’s biotech activity has been centered in California, that state leads the nation in biotech education at two-year schools. According to a Department of Labor survey, 110 community-college campuses in California currently offer at least one biotech class. Texas comes in second, offering biotech courses at more than 90 two-year campuses. Third is Georgia, with biotech courses at more than 30 campuses.

“It is really something that we are seeing across the country in state after state and school after school,” said Dr. Paul A. Hanle, president of the Biotechnology Institute in Arlington, Va., a nonprofit group dedicated to the promotion of biotechnology education and training.

“Schools in general, but the community colleges in particular, are seeing that biotechnology education is a great way for a two-year graduate to get a job, or to be retrained from a previous profession into biotech, because it is such a growing sector,” Hanle said. “And very often we are talking about biotech jobs that are waiting for the graduates just as soon as they complete their studies. The percentage of people who find jobs is really pretty high.”

At CCSF, Tsao said, “students who complete a 10-week basic biotech training program, where we teach them the basic language of technology, receive internships to work either in the local private biotech industry or in one of the federal labs. This goes on all of the time.”

And according to a recent report issued by the U.S. Department of Labor, biotech job growth is expected to continue well into the next decade, with biotech firms and companies projected to hire an additional 100,000 new workers by 2007, bringing the national total up to 814,000. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that biotech will comprise one of the nation’s 10 fastest-growing industries between now and 2012, with a 70 percent increase in expected job growth.

Giving and Getting
In response to the expected job growth, community colleges have been crafting specific programs geared for the particular needs of a region — and getting financial backing in the process.

“Small and large companies, as well as venture capitalist firms, are just pouring money into biotech in this particular area,” said Andrew Carruthers, a public information officer with the College of Marin in Kentfield, Calif., which also offers biotechnology training. “So it makes sense that the educational institutions of the area, in particular the community colleges, have had to respond by offering the kind of workforce training that these companies require.”

CCSF’s curriculum includes certificate programs in both biomanufacturing and biotechnology. But the school’s Bridge to Biotech program may be the school’s greatest attraction, Tsao said, because it can offer a “learning community with three classes, one dealing with biotechnology technique, the other with biotechnology language and the third with math.”

“Students take them all at the same time, so that on the same day they are working in a lab they may also be reading about the history of the metric system or some other article in a scientific journal, while also using their math class to convert units from millimeters to cubic centimeters, and so on. It is a very inclusive approach,” Tsao said.

Halfway across the country, Indian Hills Community College in Ottumwa, Iowa recently received a $996,000 grant under President Bush’s High Growth Job Training Initiative to train Iowa workers for jobs in bioagriculture, primarily in the Midwest. Meanwhile, the New Hampshire Technical College system won a grant under the same program for biomanufacturing training for workers in the Northeast; and Bellevue Community College in Bellevue, Wash., won support for bioinformatics training in the Northwest.

Meeting Many Needs
Community colleges have not only been crafting programs for biotechnology technicians, but also for the wide variety of jobs that revolve around the biotechnology industry, including infrastructure maintenance, manufacturing, information technology, quality assurance and quality control.

“Where I think the two-year schools have been particularly effective is in places that are not usually associated with the biotech industry, places where there was once perhaps another industry that was the primary regional employer,” Hanle said.

That has certainly been the case in North Carolina, a state that once led the nation in tobacco and textile production jobs, but is now tapping into the biotech industry to replace jobs lost in those slowly declining industries.

“There has really been a good deal of innovative thinking going on here, with a lot of people coming together to address our state’s workforce needs,” said Norman Smit, marketing director with the North Carolina Community College Board’s BioNetwork.

That board has spearheaded biotechnology education for all of the state’s two-year schools, most significantly with the creation in November of the BioNetwork Validation Academy, which is designed to provide skills training for the new and growing biopharmaceutical and biomanufacturing facilities in the Tar Heel state.

That academy is but one part of an effort by a group called Golden LEAF, which has so far earmarked more than $8.7 million in funding for North Carolina’s community-college system in the hope of providing extensive biomanufacturing training.

“The idea is to empower people who used to be working in the tobacco, textiles and furniture industries here, and through the BioNetwork get them retrained and reskilled for the biotech industry,” Smit explained. “It is really an enormous and unprecedented undertaking.”

The BioNetwork has adapted a collaborative approach that includes input from the state community-college board, local and regional biotech companies, and the Golden LEAF group. Meanwhile, more than a dozen community colleges in North Carolina have so far received funding for biotechnology-related projects. $15,000 was given to Gaston College in Dallas, N.C., for designing two cross-disciplinary biotechnology science electives as part of their biotechnology program. Another $150,000 went to the Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College in Asheville, N.C., for their A-B Tech Biotechnology Curriculum Laboratory Enhancement Project.

Though some of the grants were for a specific purpose — Sampson Community College in Clinton, N.C., for example, was awarded $42,000 to design a series of courses to ensure the safety of food products — most of the money was given for laboratory upgrades and to help buy equipment.

“There are many players in this process,” Smit said. “But so far it has worked out very well for everyone on board, because there is a general agreement with the ultimate goal of making our state’s work force more biotech-competitive through the training they students receive at our community colleges.”

Helping Out in the Heartland
Training biotech workers has also marked the efforts of southern Indiana’s Ivy Tech State College, where many residents have been displaced by a declining auto- and refrigerator-parts manufacturing sector. In early December, Ivy Tech was the recipient of $550,000 in federal support for its biotechnology program to fund scholarships for students working toward a biotechnology degree.

“The biotech program that we have up and running here is part of our larger life sciences initiative,” said Dr. John Whikehart, chancellor of the Ivy Tech-Bloomington campus. “As a community college, we only naturally wanted to respond to the needs of the nearby biotech industries, which in our case includes Baxter Pharmaceuticals, Cooke Industries and Boston Scientific.”

Ivy Tech’s biotech program offers comprehensive training in medical, pharmaceutical and agricultural manufacturing, all growing and major industries in southern Indiana. But like many two-year biotech programs, Ivy Tech also lets students decide how to use their training.

“We already have an articulation agreement with Indiana University that would allow students graduating from our school to go on to IU in pursuit of a four-year degree,” Whikehart said. “Or they can take the degree they receive here and use that for an entry-level opportunity into the local medical manufacturing work force.”

Although exact numbers aren’t available, local biotechs in southern Indiana are anticipating that they’ll need an additional 1,200 workers in the next few years just to meet production demands.

“It is for that reason that we have also tried to be flexible in developing our curriculum, so that we can anticipate what the workforce needs are going to be and respond to them,” Whikehart said.

Anticipating workforce needs is also a particular challenge for the biotech industry in general, according to Hanle, who said he’s sure of one thing: “There are going to be more and more jobs in the biotech industry, a wide variety of jobs, as time goes by.”

Hanle added that while it’s “no longer a question” that the nation’s community colleges have responded to what many economists have described as a major shift in employment needs and patterns, he is less certain about the biotech companies themselves.

“What we really want to do now is make the top levels of the largest biotech companies aware of what the community colleges have to offer,” he said. “That is why we are actively trying to strengthen the relationship between the community colleges and the biotech companies, because that way both sides win.”