The Magazine

In exploring the uncharted territory of training people for green jobs, community colleges are a modern-day Lewis and Clark.

But career colleges – the potential settlers of this brave new world – are waiting in the wings, ready to stake a claim if green jobs prove sustainable.

With billions of dollars in economic stimulus funding already in the pipeline and much of it linked to energy conservation, green energy sources and job creation, career college administrators have a keen interest in what develops.

Robert Johnson, Executive Director of the California Association of Private Postsecondary Schools, believes that member career schools on around 120 campuses are watching to see if the job market reinvents itself.

Too bad this is the first time these faces have appeared together. In compiling interview responses and photos from the career college sector’s most innovative executives, it was tough for our editorial staff not to imagine what might happen if these leaders all sat down together in one room with an issue is solved … or if certain conditions are needed for original thoughts to surge.

When it comes to innovation, there is much to be said about timing and circumstance, and maybe pressure. Those factors, in many cases, were the very things that led these men and women to do something innovative, to look at the normal approach to a challenge and answer with an extraordinary reaction.

Twenty-seven employers paid $150 apiece in March at an annual career fair targeting Longview Community College students and the general public in Lee’s Summit, Mo. The total number of exhibitors declined more than 40 percent from the previous year, college Employment Resource Coordinator Linda Anderson said – despite Anderson making personal calls to the previous year’s attendees.

“Last year I had 65 employers and a waiting list to get in,” Anderson said. [This Year] “they just said, ‘We’re not hiring.’ I know some of them wanted to participate, but they just had no vacancies.”

The Magic of Hire Education

Across from the entrance to Disney World and the spires of the Magic Kingdom, career college executives will gather to discuss almost storybook growth. In the failing economy, career colleges have posted enormous growth that should lift spirits as high as the rollercoaster turns at Walt Disney’s Florida dream park during the 2009 Career College Association Convention & Exposition. The conference will be held from June 14-16 at the Orlando World Center Marriott in Orlando, Fla.

Kaplan’s ‘Talent Campaign’ Introduces a Different Kind Of University

Innovative? Yeah, you could call it that. Or maybe trendsetting … what you’ve always wanted to advertise, but held back for some reason. Call it what you want, but Kaplan University’s new advertising campaign – the “Talent Campaign” – debuted Jan. 6 and its uses imagery and messages that speaks to the thousands of people who do not fit into the traditional student mold without speaking down to them. The central message is higher education is accessible to them, too.

Career colleges report healthy enrollment gains, while community colleges struggle with increased enrollments and declining revenues

The stimulus package designed to relieve the country’s economic woes would bring more relief to students than to the career colleges that educate them, observers agree.
If anything, educators say, the recession has helped proprietary schools by delivering a wave of new students.

“Based on all the conversations I’m having, career colleges are doing well attracting students,” said Harris Miller, CEO and president of the Career College Association. “I’m hearing that all across the country. Enrollments are up.”

The DAVE School is virtually leading the way when it comes to training top-notch animators and designers

Career colleges come in all shapes and sizes. Many are tucked alongside hectic strip malls or in busy urban arenas. And then there’s the DAVE School in Orlando, which is nestled in the back lot of Universal Studios Florida. How many colleges can boast having a theme park literally in their backyard? How many career colleges can boast a bevy of graduates working for major movie studios and animation houses? When it comes to the DAVE School, it’s way more than location, location, location … there’s a certain novelty and charm to this eight-year old Digital Animation & Visual Effects School. (Get it? D-A-V-E?)

California’s bill for regulating career colleges gets shot down, Governator-style

Flexing muscle is nothing new for Arnold Schwarzenegger
– not in films and not in the halls of
state government. Last month, California’s Governor
squashed what he and career college proponents
throughout the state thought to be an ineffectual
bill for regulating private postsecondary schools.

Schwarzenegger let an earlier version of the bill die
last summer without his signature and has criticized
the latest version as a big mess that missed its mark.