Colleges On Call Competition and cooperation in the higher-education marketplace have created a buyer's market, with educational malls offering a smorgasbord of options.

The expanded Continuing Education Center in South Boston could offer coursework from seven Virginia schools, says Amy Lammerts, the center's director.

By Mike Ashley
The old warehouse in the run-down tobacco district of South Boston used to symbolize the tiny town's past. Now it's becoming a beacon for the entire region's future.

The area's leaders — working with several surrounding colleges — plan to transform the old warehouse into the new home of the Halifax-South Boston Continuing Education Center. South Boston's bastion of higher learning is quickly outgrowing a former Lowe's building and a strip-mall site across town.

The Continuing Education Center expansion is one of the most ambitious projects the town has ever undertaken, and it was backed by more than 75 percent of the region's voters in a bond referendum last November. But the project demonstrates more than South Boston's commitment to higher education: It also shows what great things Virginia's colleges can achieve when they work together.

At the South Boston center, classes offered by Longwood College, Averett College, Southside Virginia Community College and Danville Community College are serving a previously untapped market. The breadth of local choice is a welcome change.

"You have to understand the importance of education to economic development," explains Chris Lumsden, chairman of the Halifax Educational Foundation and CEO of Halifax Regional Health System. "You have to understand the value of education to job and income potential. And this project will enhance educational opportunities and quality of life, not only for residents of Halifax County, but the entire region."

Renovation work on the 70,000-square-foot warehouse, a historic landmark, is slated to begin in January. Its first phase, some 30,000 square feet, could be ready for the spring semester of 2001. The additional space will be used for future expansion and business incubator space. There also will be enough room to bring more colleges and universities into the consortium, says facility director Amy Lammerts of Long-wood College. Virginia Commonwealth University's medical school plans to offer a bachelor's of science program in nursing, and Virginia Tech wants to offer an MBA. Old Dominion University also plans to provide classes at the facility.

"Whatever we feel we need in the community," Lammerts says, "we try to find it at one of the schools and invite them to come here."

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The Halifax-South Boston Continu-ing Education Center is part of a major trend in higher education. Colleges and universities are reaching out to students like never before. There's strong demand for worker training, and the students themselves are coming from vastly different demographic groups.

Universities have to change to meet those needs, says L. Douglas Strickland, director of the Roanoke Valley Graduate Center and of Virginia Tech programs in Roanoke. They need to go where the students are, offer what employers need and tailor continuing education to working adults.

A good example is Cindy Snead, billing coordinator for CCI Systems in South Boston. She began working at the heating and air-conditioning company 10 years ago in the service department. As her job evolved, she took on more accounting duties, so she began taking night courses at the continuing education center in South Boston. "The [center] has been so important to me in offering the courses I needed to advance in my job," she says. "And I'm just one of a lot of people here who have benefited."

CCI Systems has paid for all of Snead's courses, and she's just three classes shy of a business management certificate. Her boss, CCI Systems founder John Cannon, has been a big booster of the higher-education center. He and his late partner donated the warehouses that were renovated to house the facility.

"You have to stay ahead of the curve in attracting industry and jobs to a region," says Cannon, chairman of the Southern Virginia Economic Partner-ship. "The way to do it is to provide industry with an educated work force."

Southside Virginia isn't the only region to recognize the advantages of a resource like the Continuing Education Center. There are similar education co-ops across the state. Seven different schools joined forces in Abingdon to form the Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center. And the busy Northern Virginia Center in Falls Church is a partnership between Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia. In August, Old Dominion University opened the $4 million Virginia Beach Higher Education Center near Tidewater Community College. ODU shares 46 classrooms there with Norfolk State University. Likewise, ODU's Peninsula Higher Education Center in Hampton offers degrees from U.Va. and Tech.

"It's a buyer's market now in terms of students finding the programs they need when and where they want them," says Gary Ellerman, Radford University's director of extended education. "With the advent of distance-learning technologies, students can get coursework or degree programs online or through interactive television. There are just so many options."

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Ed Lewis, Lockheed Martin's site education manager in Manassas, knows a good thing when he sees it. Martin says all 1,700 Lockheed Martin employees at the Manassas facility will undergo some sort of training this year.

Increasingly, Lewis is using Virginia's higher education resources to meet these needs. Technical training classes provided by Virginia Tech on company time are replacing object-oriented vendor training. Tech can spread the courses over a longer period. Otherwise, students might have the training crammed into one week by a visiting vendor.

Lewis also uses Virginia Tech for management training. Harold Kurstedt, a management systems engineering professor at Tech, works directly with Lockheed managers to assess their strengths and weaknesses, coordinate discussion groups and plot ways to improve.

"The reason we had somebody from Tech to do the feedback is because this is of such a personal nature when you're talking about strengths and weaknesses," Lewis says. "It's a more comfortable environment because of Dr. Kurstedt's interpersonal skills and because he keeps the results confidential."

Test scores are presented to upper management in composite form. No one is singled out, but Lewis schedules classes and seminars to help managers work on their weak points.

Lewis wants to form an educational "alliance" with several other area companies and the Northern Virginia Center. By banding together, the businesses can make the classes less disruptive to their work flows. "You can't pull 20 managers out of one company on a given day for a class, but you can pull a few from this company and a few from other companies," Lewis explains. "All these companies have similar management training needs."

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Civic and business leaders in the Roanoke Valley came together to bounce around ideas in a program they called "Destination Education." The result is the new Roanoke Higher Education Center, just blocks away from the Roanoke Valley Graduate Center.

"The idea has been percolating for some time," says Tom McKeon, who was hired this August by the Roanoke Valley Education Authority to run the facility.

The Higher Education Center is a $22 million project that will be housed in the old Norfolk & Western headquarters beside the Hotel Roanoke. When it opens in August, the 80,000-square-foot educational mall will house programs from 12 institutions, in addition to work-force training programs sponsored by Total Action Against Poverty and the Fifth District Training and Education Consortium.

"I don't know of any other 'mall' that has this many institutions involved," says McKeon.

Such involvement can be a difficult balancing act, notes Rachel Fowlkes, director of the Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center in Abingdon. "The way higher education is structured in Virginia allows for some competition," she says. "We have an agreement among ourselves — those of us who work together here — that we will not compete with each other. There [is] some duplication of programs, but we do it in such a way that we are not competing with each other."

Radford's Ellerman offers an example from the Roanoke Valley Graduate Center, where Virginia Tech and Radford University each offer MBA degrees. "We're both surviving because ... the philosophies of the programs match different needs," she says. Virginia Tech's MBA program doesn't require an undergraduate degree in business, while Radford's does. Accordingly, the Tech program takes four years to complete, while a Radford MBA, with specific undergraduate work in business, can be completed in two or three years.

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The Internet is helping to fuel the boom in continuing education. Many Virginia colleges and universities are offering distance-learning programs, but ODU is the clear statewide leader of this trend.

ODU's bold distance-learning initiative offers 20 baccalaureate programs and 30 master's programs at community colleges and other education centers around the state. The classes are broadcast through Teletechnet, a state-of-the-art, two-way system beamed from ODU's Norfolk campus.

"No one in the commonwealth of Virginia is more than 30 minutes away from those programs," says Anne Savage, ODU's associate vice president of academic affairs. "These programs are all economic engines, selected specifically for the work force."

ODU also has been a leader in partnering with community colleges, which are often higher education's most reliable link to the changing work force.

Fowlkes wants the state to promote more cooperative efforts among four-year and two-year schools and between public and private institutions. "Every-one thinks this big push is all about technology training, but everybody doesn't want to be a computer geek. You've got as many demands in the health care industry. You've got serious problems in education with real shortages. We've got to respond with lots of different training programs."