Companies Turn to Colleges to Brush Up on Skills : Education: Community colleges will design a course to meet the specific need of a company and its employees.

Kelco Co. engineers at first thought they would put together their own course to upgrade the math and chemistry backgrounds of technicians who work on complex experiments at the seaweed products firm.

But they soon began searching for outside help after discovering the difficulty both in pulling together specialized material and in teaching in a way so that employees pick up quickly on the new information.

By accident--through Kelco secretaries calling numbers under the “schools” heading in the Yellow Pages--engineer Craig Ruecker found out that the San Diego Community College District would be willing to design a customized curriculum, complete with a hand-picked instructor and offered at the time most convenient for Kelco.

“It was definitely useful,” said Vince Bevers, a Kelco technician. “The material was tailored to what I am doing in my job, to help me become more the eyes and ears for my engineers, in not just cranking out numbers on an experiment, but knowing how to interpret it.”

Kelco, like several other area companies, had stumbled on a new program in San Diego that, similar to others around the state, promises to draw private enterprise much closer to California’s 107 community colleges. And the link itself is a new twist on traditional business-government relationships: instead of private enterprise contracting to do work for a public agency, it’s the other way around.

For a fee, the community colleges will tailor a course to meet the specific need of a company, taught at the company itself and at the time the company wants, often at a competitive price equal to or less than the cost to a firm doing it in-house or through a private consultant. Prices start at $100 an hour for a customized course, depending on the nature and degree of preparation, administrators say.

For its part, the community college makes a profit that can be plowed back into academic programs that state coffers no longer cover.

And, given the wide range of subject expertise within the educational system, the colleges can tap their faculty and departments for courses ranging from vocational English-as-a-second-language to blood-drawing techniques to security training to employee teamwork-building to advanced instruction in cutting-edge technology.

Even though the program has not yet been widely publicized, San Diego-area community colleges already have done quality control seminars for the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau, software computer instruction for the new Pan-Pacific Hotel downtown, and English language training for the large Japanese electronics firms Sony and Matushita.

In addition, the San Diego district has one of four specialized centers set up by the state to offer small- and medium-size electronics firms the latest technical and management advances in aerospace and other industries considered critical to California’s economic future.

The trend toward contract curricula has accelerated for two reasons:

* Community colleges no longer receive enough state tax funds to cover their costs of teaching the growing numbers of students, and they now must seek new money sources.

* Business in California is increasingly worried about its future competitiveness, which depends in large part on its ability to retrain employees to meet new technological and other workplace demands.

“There’s an urgent need for retraining,” Ernest Leach, deputy chancellor of the California Community Colleges system, said. “We estimate that 80% to 85% of the year 2000 work force is already on the job, and if it is to stay competitive, there must be more on-site training because it’s unrealistic to think (most workers) can leave their jobs and go back to school.”

Just as important, the college system can no longer meet the educational demands it faces solely through public taxes, Leach said, pointing to a shortfall last year of $80 million needed to cover all its courses, construction and equipment requirements.

“So we’re saying to business: If you can support us, we have the expertise and skills and will make them available.”

Contract education per se is not new to the San Diego district, which encompasses three colleges--Miramar, Mesa and City--as well as 10 adult education centers, district chancellor Augustine Gallego said.

The district holds a five-year, $170-million contract for technical education training for the Navy, including bases at Great Lakes near Chicago, San Diego, Orlando, Fla., and Meridian, Miss. The Navy solicited bids from colleges almost a decade ago after deciding it would pay less for instruction under contract than by doing the training itself, Gallego said.

“The dollars we bring in (from the military contracts) support our computing services and pay the debt on $20 million in bonds (sold to) build buildings such as the police academy at Miramar and others at City College.”

But the district did not aggressively seek to apply the idea to private enterprise until yearly increases in state tax dollars began to lag behind academic needs, Gallego conceded.

In part, the slowness also stemmed from memories of the controversial arrangements that former Chancellor Garland Peed made to handle the Navy contracts. Peed set up a foundation separate from control by faculty and other district employees so that it could compete with individual colleges on outside contracts, often using non-faculty. He also designed the financing so that only the interest on any money earned went back to the district itself.

A long-running legal dispute with faculty members was settled in June, 1990, when the foundation handed over its $8 million endowment to control by the community colleges and agreed to sever all ties with the college district.

“We’re very conscious of the past history,” Marcy Schroeder, manager of the Economic and Career Development Services for the district, said in explaining the new setup.

The district has established a nonprofit Community College Auxiliary Organization to oversee an Employee Training Institute, with a board of directors including Gallego, the presidents of Mesa, Miramar and City colleges, and four faculty members.

Each college will have an arm of the institute, and money earned over and above expenses for a contract course goes directly back to the college--and in some cases the individual department--offering the particular curriculum, Schroeder said.

And full-time faculty members are given first crack at teaching a contract course before the district looks to independent teachers to hire, she added.

The new, more intensive program has been under way only since early this year, with about 2 dozen contracts, so there is no data yet on how much money they are expected to generate.

“Now that we’ve got the basics established, we’re going to be much more proactive,” Schroeder said, conceding that, until now, a firm has found out about the program mainly through word of mouth or from some preliminary mailings. The district will also be helped by the state system’s new Ed-Net office, which offers a toll-free hot-line to any employer statewide wishing to line up a college contract course. The Ed-Net office will refer the firm to the nearest community college offering customized curricula.

Already, a customized course for Pacific Bell designed by a Bay Area community college through Ed-Net has been adapted for use by other districts, including San Diego, for telephone employees in their area.

Schroeder said the Kelco contract encompasses the full range of community college resources because it involves major academic subject areas, not just limited vocational training or people skills. Kelco received the expertise of veteran City College chemistry professor Harold Kane.

“Overall, it was a benefit, I have no doubt about it,” Kelco engineer Ruecker said, although a pre-test, post-test evaluation for the 12 technicians who took the 7 a.m. on-site class has not been completed. Although most employees took the course before starting their daily work at 8 or 9 a.m., three took it voluntarily as an “after-hours” class, coming off the overnight shift.

Ruecker would like to see a second course. “You can’t make up for two years of (a lack of) chemistry and math with one 16-hour class,” he said. “This shows that, when everyone always asks why study algebra in high school, well, this is why it is useful.

“We want our technicians to be able to know the issues involved in observing experiments, and that’s why having the (customized curriculum) was important because the examples that Harold Kane used in teaching concepts were Kelco examples, they related to the work we are doing.”

Other companies also praise the college district for meeting their specifications.

“Their price was very competitive, and I called a lot of big one-day seminar (consultants) to shop around,” Teeny Ellis of the convention services division of the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau said. “And I think we got as much or more because they didn’t give as the packaged curriculum stuff (about teamwork) that we didn’t need. They knew up front what we wanted.”

Anthony Mayer, who heads training for the Pan-Pacific Hotel downtown, said he went with the community colleges over a private consultant for computer training because the district had a complete lab in which the employees could train. A private firm would have required the hotel to disconnect its own computers and put them into a conference room in order to run the course.

“And the district was willing to split the class into two sessions because employees didn’t want to attend six hours all at once, especially after a full day” ending at 5 p.m., Mayer said.

Mesa College dean Winifred Khalil calls the potential partnerships “a win-win situation.”

“We aren’t fly-by-night, we back up what we do, and we can integrate into the corporate culture,” she said. “If we don’t do this, the state and the economy are going to suffer.”