Community College Surge: IT education on a budget

And Kansa isn't the only one advocating alternatives to the traditional four-year-university path to an IT career. Technology education gurus such as Howard Rubin, professor emeritus of the City University of New York and president of Rubin Systems Inc., argue that for the U.S. to remain competitive in today's global and volatile economy, it needs to create a deep bench of perpetually cutting-edge technology professionals. To do that, Rubin envisions what he calls "proactive refresh institutions" that develop, adapt and augment technology capabilities more quickly and frequently -- and more in line with up-to-the-minute business needs -- than what is offered through a traditional four-year approach.

Long time between graduating from high school in 2005

Justin Wegleitner didn't have to wait a long time between graduating from high school in 2005 and starting a full-time job as a network analyst in the summer of 2006. His fast-track ticket to employment: beginning work on an associate's degree in information and telecommunications technology at Century College during his final two years of high school.

But shortly after enrolling at Century full time, he knew his education wasn't complete. "I was thinking of getting just a two-year degree, but as I got further into the program, they basically explained that if you want to go on in the industry, you need the business background as well," he says.

And so, right after getting the associate's degree, Wegleitner went off to Saint Mary's University of Minnesota, where he was able to transfer all of his community college credits and obtain a bachelor of science in IT, with a business minor, in just two more years. When he graduated in 2008, he scored a new job as a network engineer at a consulting firm.

So far, he says, the four-year degree hasn't boosted his salary, but he feels confident that it will increase his upward mobility. His current goal is to move toward a Level 2 network engineer position, and he ultimately sees himself growing into a project manager or CTO role. He is working on Cisco Certified Voice Professional certification and is considering going for a master's degree in some aspect of business management.

Meanwhile, Seattle Central Community College (SCCC) used a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to renovate a 10-year-old computer lab and provide a one-to-one ratio of students and computers, and it added courses in hot areas such as open source, virtualization and VoIP. And Century College in White Bear Lake, Minn., has revamped its entire degree program to make it more relevant to the needs of today's IT professionals.

Century now offers students an introductory course that provides an overview of IT career paths and then requires them to choose one of three tracks: storage-area networks, security or VoIP. "IT is way too complex to prepare people to be generalists," says Scott Simenson, director of information and telecommunications technology at Century. The degrees also include business skills development, in response to suggestions from an advisory board made up of local business leaders, and students can obtain popular industry certifications. "It's more strategic than supporting the desktop connection to the printer," Simenson says. All of this is supported by a $5.5 million computer lab.

Community colleges also work closely with vendors such as Cisco Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. to develop coursework that mirrors their certification requirements or even to become a Cisco Networking Academy or Microsoft IT Academy, which enables the schools to purchase systems for their computer labs at deep discounts. They also work with businesses to share computing resources, through virtual links or directly.

The spotlight these days

Community colleges are particularly in the spotlight these days. The Obama administration pledged last summer to inject $12 billion in funding to community colleges over 10 years through the American Graduation Initiative, which was announced on Macomb's campus in July 2009. The money will fund a variety of initiatives, such as competitive grants to expand course offerings, build business partnerships and offer personalized student services, performance-based scholarships and online courses. An additional $2.5 billion will go toward facilities. President Obama also called on community colleges to produce an additional 5 million graduates by 2020.

Two years ago at SCCC, there were about 120 computer science students, says Lisa Sandoval, who manages the Seattle school's Web design, Web development, database programming and network design programs. Today, that number has risen to 230 in her programs alone, which don't include the application support and business IT programs.

Century also consults with an advisory committee that includes local businesses interested in hiring its graduates, including several large insurance and financial firms and medical institutions. Because those industries have huge storage and backup needs and have to address business continuity concerns, Simenson decided to add a SAN track to the IT degree program, as well as some courses on business skills. "We used to be pretty focused on the nuts and bolts of IT, but that's not enough to adequately prepare someone for the technology profession," he says.