THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 12, 1994 TAG: 9408120604
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium: 99 lines
A consultant hired by the city five years ago to study Norfolk's need for a community college says the plan for a $20 million Tidewater Community College campus misses the mark by stressing academics instead of vocational education.
``If this will be a more traditional community college, it's going to continue to miss a chunk of population in Norfolk that needs the kind of education that's not there now,'' Dennis Jones, president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems consulting group in Boulder, Colo., said in a recent interview.
``It's going to create more capacity in what they're doing instead of creating other alternatives.''
TCC President Larry L. Whitworth dismissed Jones' viewpoints as ``totally, totally off-base.'' More students than ever are using community colleges to get the first two years of their bachelor's degrees, he said.
``People vote for programs with their dollars,'' he said, ``and it's our job to accommodate them.''
The Norfolk campus has won broad support from politicians and educators in Norfolk and Richmond. The campus, which is to open in 1996, is seen as a double-dip for Norfolk - expanding the opportunities of residents while revitalizing the city's downtown.
But in a recent interview, Jones echoed the findings of his 1989 report to the City Council, which said the city first needed vocational programs, such as welding and hazardous waste management, before starting a full-fledged community college offering academic courses such as English and math. The report said nearly 40 percent of the city's residents didn't have high school diplomas.
``If those (vocational) things are not created first, they will never be created,'' he said. ``There's a big enough population in Norfolk that needs that stuff. To start with the traditional community college will probably shut them out.''
But Whitworth said, ``Vocational education, as we knew it back in the '70s and '80s, is almost totally off-target. What it really boils down to today is knowledge; training somebody to do something specific is going to be obsolete in a short period of time.''
Whitworth said the Norfolk campus will offer some vocational courses in areas such as chef's training and will provide videos that will allow students to get credits in subjects like electrical safety. But the bulk of the courses at the Granby Street campus will be academic.
That, he said, fits with the changing patterns of enrollment in the past decade. In 1983, nearly half the college's students - 48 percent - were enrolled in occupational programs and 23 percent in academic - or ``college transfer'' - courses, said Lisa Kleiman, TCC's director of institutional research. The remaining 29 percent were listed as unclassified.
But as of last fall, 36 percent of students were in academic programs, 28 percent in vocational and 36 percent unclassified, she said.
The City Council, taking its cue from Jones' report, voted in 1989 to support opening a college that offered solely vocational courses, leaving open the option for expanding it into a ``comprehensive'' college. The council later voted to endorse a full-fledged campus.
``There was obviously a need in the community for the types of training not available at four-year colleges,'' Mayor Paul D. Fraim said Thursday. ``But at the same time, it became apparent to us that a large pool of the population needed academic classes there to get into four-year colleges. I would want students in the community college to be given the opportunity to engage in both types of courses.''
Other researchers also questioned Jones' views on the priority of vocational education. ``The skills that are needed in the work force now are higher-level, more analytical-type skills than what they were 10 years ago,'' said Roy L. Pearson, an economist at the College of William and Mary. ``A lot of those skills would be what we would call academic.''
Arthur M. Cohen, a national expert on community colleges based in Los Angeles, said: ``Anybody who says you're in an urban area so you ought to emphasize vocational is not understanding what's going on.''
To him, the vocational-vs.-academic debate misses the point. ``There's really a lot of spillover,'' said Cohen, director of the ERIC Clearinghouse for Community Colleges at UCLA. ``To put vocational against academic is kind of silly when you're talking about something like a nursing program,'' which he said is a blend of the two.
Amy Rowe, 20, who will start courses at TCC's Norfolk center on Monticello Avenue this month, also thinks it shouldn't be an either-or dilemma. She will take sign-language courses and hopes eventually to become a teacher.
But, Rowe said, ``I do think there's a need for both academic and vocational training. I would think both are appropriate for this campus, too.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photos
Dennis Jones
Larry L. Whitworth
KEYWORDS: TIDEWATER COMMUNITY COLLEGE
NORFOLK CITY COUNCIL
by CNB