Technical Righting

PUBLISHED OCTOBER 2024

Nine years. That’s the current success metric at State Technical College of Missouri, where the fall semester produced a ninth straight record year of enrollment, hitting 2,415 students. Since the start of that streak, enrollment at the two-year program in Linn, Mo., has nearly doubled, up 90 percent.

With more to come: “Our current projects,” says President Shawn Strong, “will help enable our next enrollment milestone of 3,000 students.” That’s not far in the future if trends since 2018 hold. In that span, enrollment is up 53 percent.

What’s happening in Linn matters. “Skilled work force is the greatest problem facing Missouri employers,” he said. “We do one thing, and we do it very well: prepare the work force. Employers know when they get a State Tech resume, they are getting a quality employee.”

StateTechMo, to borrow from its X account, is by no means alone. To the west, technical colleges in Kansas have enjoyed robust growth as well, shrugging off the early pandemic enrollment pullback to post combined growth of more than 18 percent since 2018.

Driving that is what James Genandt, president and CEO of Manhattan Area Technical College calls “a sea change” in the way members of Gen Z, in particular, are viewing their post-high school options and the way employers—in aviation, advanced manufacturing, IT, health care, applied technologies, culinary and hospitality settings—have expressed their appetite for hiring students with training that can be put to use immediately.

High school graduates today, Genandt says, “might have heard their older brothers, sisters, parents, others discussing student debt, seeing them struggling to find a job with that philosophy degree. There are a lot of folks who would say some of this current generation isn’t as smart. These kids are very smart. It’s a different smart. They don’t want to listen to somebody, but they’ll watch a video, and they’ll practice doing things, and they’ll use gadgets. That’s the way the world works anymore. I think what we’re seeing is a sea change for all of higher education that’s taking a long time for a lot of higher education to grab onto.”

Multiple other factors have conspired to throttle enrollment at traditional four-year and liberal arts institutions. Foremost among them is cost; the average sticker price at a liberal arts college in the U.S. (often steeply discounted for better-qualifying students) topped $43,500 last year. Compare that to $5,715 at the Wichita State University’s Campus of Applied Sciences and Technology. Or the $7,361 at StateTechMo, after scholarships and grants.

Beyond cost, though:

• Demographics have cut deeply into four-year enrollments, with numbers of high school graduates generally in retreat since 2010. 

• Armies of liberal arts degree holders have been unable to leverage their credentials into careers in those chosen fields; some studies have shown that more than half of the nation’s college graduates now hold jobs that don’t require a college degree. 

• And it hasn’t helped that social issues driving campus unrest over the past decade—entailing racial division, gender equity, and, most recently, war in the Middle East—have given some parents pause as to whether they want to pay six figures for certain degrees, or risk going that far into debt.

By contrast, technical college programs can provide students a short pathway to high-paying jobs within industries starving for talent, and in many cases, they can begin their careers without significant school loan debt, if any.

“I think there’s a real awakening in terms of the value that’s brought to Kansas and the work force and to the students from the technical colleges and just how relevant and quickly applicable the skills are that they get,” says Steve Kearney, a Topeka lawyer who also serves as director of the Kansas Association of Technical Schools and Colleges.

What’s happening, says President Sheree Utash at the Wichita tech campus, is that “A lot of the landscape of what is needed in knowledge and skills to be employable has probably changed quite a bit over the last several years.” 

She cited a study by Deloitte showing that while 30 percent of the jobs available in the United States as of next year will require a four-year degree, some form of post-secondary education will be a must for nearly everyone else working. “The rest of them will require some kind of credential or some kind of technical certificate. “That’s a huge shift … and there’s certainly a lot more emphasis by employers as they hire on industry credentials, certifications, knowledge, skills—that kind of thing.”

Genandt, Utash and Kearney believe the growth driver for technical colleges is grounded in their ability to respond quickly to employer demand for new programs that address technological changes they are seeing, even in traditional blue-collar job tracks.

That speed-to-classroom factor can’t be overlooked.

“I’m going to stick up for some four-year universities and say, there are a lot of universities that are doing that,” Utash says.
“It’s just not the prevalent piece. There are some two-year community colleges doing it,” but again, “it’s just not the prevalent piece.”

Responding swiftly to business demands—which can be boiled down to “more, faster,” she says—isn’t without some unique challenges, making it incumbent for state funding to remain a legislative priority. “The stress becomes twofold,” she said. “Number One, how do you move somebody from industry through professional development where they become a very good, high-quality faculty, teacher, or instructor? And then, how do you keep them current on these new practices, these new processes, the new technologies?

After designing the program changes employers want, she says, “then we provide them with that work-ready individual who has the knowledge, the skills, certifications, the credentials, and also the work ethic that they need to be successful. So, at the end of the day, that job placement rate for us is 92 percent and always rocks around 90 to 92 percent. That’s like our report card in my mind because that means that students are getting what they need, and they’re becoming employed, and they’re staying locally.”

That last point is key for Genandt.

Often with tech-school graduates, he says, “We don’t have the out-migration of talent that sometimes others do. Now, in all honesty, there’ll be a group of people having a conversation like this probably 10 or 15 years from now, and the sea change will probably be much different. But for right now, this is the world that we’re living in. And so it is extremely important to make sure that you’re engaged with industry and that you’re producing what they want.”

His message to employers: “Talk to us. What can we do to help you? You need specialized training. You need a new program. You need something that may be only temporary but makes a big impact. We have the ability to do it. So don’t be silent. Come partner with us and watch what we can do together.”