Vocational Schools

To Henry Weinstein’s excellent article about vocational schools can be added the sad history of the decline of an entire profession.

Respiratory therapy, like nursing, requires graduation from a two- or four-year college program. Unfortunately, most persons employed in respiratory therapy in California are not registered respiratory therapists, but are instead respiratory therapy technicians, products of the plethora of vocational schools that abound here. These technicians, whose original function was to assist the therapists, have traditionally been of such uneven quality that many hospitals would stipulate “No one-year vocational grads” when hiring. The rare vocational school that did train good technicians, therefore, was stigmatized by association.

Over the years, hospitals hired more and more technicians, their lower salaries being attractive to ignorant hospital administrators who didn’t know the difference between therapists and technicians. This created a self-perpetuating market for the unscrupulous vocational schools, many of which hired “faculty” who didn’t know much more than the students.

I once taught, during a time of naive idealism, in such a school. I figured that if respiratory technicians were a fact of life, then I could at least contribute by making sure that some of them would reflect my standards. Well, we had “students” who could barely read or write, except to sign their government loan applications. Respiratory equipment was virtually nonexistent. No student was allowed to fail; the same exam was administered over and over until the student “passed,” usually by memorizing it. The bottom line was money: If the tuition was paid on time, that person was going to graduate and wear a genuine white lab coat and stethoscope and be a representative of respiratory therapy.

Pride in one’s profession is difficult when most of its representatives were cranked out by the types of schools mentioned in Weinstein’s article, and rarely can a decline and fall be so easily traced to one source.

TOM BURNS

Acton