Report stresses adapting

South Carolina’s 16 technical colleges must respond more nimbly to industry needs if the state’s new economic plan is to succeed, according to a study released Monday by a North Carolina research firm.

The study calls for creating specialty programs within technical colleges that match up with the state’s “industry clusters”—pools of businesses formed around recognized niche areas such as tourism, textiles, and automotive research.

The report complements an earlier one by the Massachusetts-based Monitor Group, which placed greater emphasis on the ability of the state’s three research universities to create new industries.

Officials from the technical college system will now seek representation on the newly formed S.C. Council on Competitiveness, a public-private sector partnership tasked with reshaping the economy by implementing the Monitor Group’s recommendations.

The study released Monday was written by Stuart Rosenfeld of North Carolina’s Regional Technology Strategies and paid for by the S.C. Policy Council, a Columbia-based education think tank.

The concept of highly flexible technical colleges is not new. Many schools nationwide, and some in South Carolina, already shape programs around needs of local businesses.

North Carolina, for example, recently began investing millions in biotechnology training for students at its two-year colleges.

In South Carolina, Midlands Technical College has partnered with Siemens Diesel Systems Technology to train workers at the school’s Northeast campus.

But Lewis Gossett, president of the S.C. Manufacturers Alliance, said producing high-skilled employees in targeted fields remains one of the state’s biggest challenges.

“Our concerns are very selfish — it’s about the availability of a skilled work force,” Gossett said. “We don’t want to see South Carolina create new industries only to have them exported to other states.”

James Hudgins, executive director of the State Board for Technical and Comprehensive Education, said the schools are willing to adapt.

“Just doing what we used to do will not satisfy what we need for the future,” he said.

Change at the technical colleges would likely include tighter coordination of program offerings, Hudgins said. “It wouldn’t do us any good to have a bunch of schools offering automotive research degrees.”

Since colleges should not expect any new money for starting new training programs, many will look to eliminating existing ones, said Barry Russell, president of Midlands Technical College.

“It’s a matter of redeploying resources we have, and we have to be willing to phase programs out as new ones come up,” he said.

Reach Stensland at (803) 771-8358 or jstensland@thestate.com