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Los Angeles Trade Tech stopped churning out certificates in telephone switchboard operation in 1960, and L.A. City College ended its aeronautical engineering program in 1964, but there is still no shortage of highly specialized two-year degrees offered by local community colleges.

Not far from Silicon Beach, students master digital special effects and computer animation at the Academy of Entertainment and Technology at Santa Monica College--a certificate program that began in 1997 and now boasts 300 students. The Auto Collision Repair and Painting department at Rio Hondo College in Whittier prepares students to straighten frames, weld and fix mechanical and electronic components for the auto body industry. Dreaming up computer game designs and interactive CD-ROM software is what 125 students do at Sylmar’s Mission College Multimedia Studies department, formed in 1997. In that former agricultural mecca, the San Fernando Valley, Pierce College’s 51-year-old farming program includes one student who’s studying llama care, an “introduction to soils” class and “equine science,” in which graduates are prepped in horse husbandry. And finally, 80 to 100 students just dying to become embalmers, funeral directors or work at the coroner’s office enroll annually in the Mortuary Science program at Cypress College, established in 1977.