Click the picture for the $29.99 deal on Windows 7

College students can get Windows 7 Home Premium for only $29.99 by going here.  The Office Ultimate Steal is also still available for students at $59.95 for Office Ultimate 2007.

He not only the President of TSTC Waco, he’s also a graduate!  Click below to see the local news interview with Elton Stuckly:

Go to the interview.

(Clarification: The anchor is talking about the Community College Week number one rating for TSTC Waco in Engineering Technologies.  My post about that is here.)

Here is my video of the TSTC Student Appreciation Day lunch where we serve our students free burgers.  It is all a part of the big Welcome Week activities.  Unfortunately, this was my first shot at editing HD and I need to update my tools.

As I walked around this morning to catch up on what was going on, I ran across these scenes:

Automotive students intently watching their instructor do a demonstration.

Mr. Jerry Shaw teaching students about Photoshop

—- And on the not-so-positive side:

Enormous lines at the bookstore.  A big increase in enrollment and trouble with the computers have us well behind in getting books to our students.  I think we began to turn the corner this afternoon.

There is a first-semester Computer Science (game programming) student at TSTC who is video logging his experience day by day.  Checkout the videos by clicking here.

Talking with new students over the last few days has reminded me of just how great a stride this is for them.  Just like me so long ago, many of our newbies are first-generation college-goers and find ‘normal’ college practices bizarre (and sometimes they are right). One student looked intently at his schedule and said, “I just realized that not all of these classes are in the same building.”  Why would he know that?  A lot of high school ‘campuses’ are really just one big building.  Another student asked if he was allowed to go home between classes!

Freedom, responsibility, heightened expectations, and no buffer between them and hard realities - no wonder it is such a difficult transition.

The 2009-2010 Student Government Association Officers (from left) Vice President Aaron Jones, President Jay Hicks, Treasurer Joshua Norvell, State Host Representative Jessica Skinner.

The first of many New Student Orientation groups for the fall 2009 semester. (Photo by M. Jordon Pollock, MCI Student)

Hispanic Student Association members watch as Avionics student Fernando Lopez flips burgers at the HSA free burger event held at the gazebo. (Photo by M. Jordon Pollock, MCI Student)

Summer 2009 Commencement at the Heart of Texas Coliseum

For more TSTC Waco pictures - visit the Flickr page.

Follow this link for a video explanation from TSTC’s GIS expert Lee Hilliard.

GIS is a very cool and underexposed area of study.  A lot of great jobs are available in the public and private sectors.  In my waning days of teaching database management courses I loved my GIS majors.  I had several distance and hybrid delivery students who were active in the field.  They turned in fascinating projects.

For more information on GIS, start here.  For more on GIS at TSTC, check out this link.

Via Micheal Bettersworth, please take a look at this piece from Inside Higher Ed about Kellogg Community College’s efforts to provide skills training that is flexible and customized.  Also, be sure to look at the college’s Program Builder program all done up in ASP.NET.  They will sell training in increments like .17 or .58 credits. What great way to deliver technical education!  No more “one size fits all” philosophy at Kellogg!

Instructor Bryan Necessary helps a student in an Electrical Power & Control lab class. (6/2)

6-3-09
Student on his way to class through the TSTC mall. (This scene has changed - now it is torn up to install new chilled water pipes).

6-4-09
Instructor of the Year Deann Graham celebrates with her students in the Web Club. (I should point out that Deann was voted instructor of the year by the Student Government Association - a REAL honor!)

6-5-09
Walking on water? A student takes a leap off the diving board at the SRC pool. Photo by M. Jordon Pollock, MCI student (The SRC is the Murray Watson Student Recreation Center)

6-8-09
Student Chad Pate plays golf with his son on the Golf Course & Landscape Management four-hole practice course. Photo by M. Jordon Pollock, MCI student (This course is in addition to our on-campus 18-hole golf course - really. The small course is intended to be a student lab, so playing it is FREE.)

6-9-09
Aviation Maintenance student, Christopher Mitchell enjoys the warm weather during a class break. (I’m glad that Christopher is enjoying the ‘warm’ weather, I’m burning up!)

6-10-09
A student works out in the Student Recreation Center. Photo by M. Jordon Pollock, MCI student (I’m thinking that we should try to keep this guy happy.)

6-11-09
Automotive students Kayla Roberson, Esteban Trevino and Tom McKinley watch as their lab partner Lonnie Robinson works with a drill press in AUMT 1305. Photo by M. Jordon Pollock, MCI student

I have been trying to get pictures of TSTC campus scenes. A lot of people don’t know what kinds of things go on at a technical college. It is different from a community college, but there are a lot of parallels. Here are some electronics students that I ran across in the Spring.

Why are these students playing with electric racing cars and lighted replicas of famous buildings?

What is underneath that has them working so hard?

Not much down there, really - just hours and hours of work programming microproccessors to control all of the systems in the “city.” Digital students know these processors inside out when they leave this course!

The local paper has noticed the college a lot lately.  Here is an roundup:

Waco TSTC student would like to cash in on iPhone application ‘goldmine’

Dolan is awaiting approval from Apple for an application he developed called “Pocket Puppy Raiser,” which he designed to raise money for Guide Dogs of Texas Inc., an organization devoted to training guide dogs for visually impaired Texans.

Elton Stuckly, guest column: Jobs are there, and here (a column from the Boss!)

While the U.S. economy may seem soft right now, don’t let it fool you, and most of all, don’t panic. There are still jobs available – especially for technically skilled workers. Other fields may be adapting, changing or rearranging, but Texas has always emerged on top as a strong economic force, and one of the leaders in innovation and job creation.

High-skill jobs drive Waco pay gains

Company president Mike Sullivan said the factory jobs typically require at least a technical degree from a place like Texas State Technical College, followed by an apprenticeship training program at the factory.

And saving the best for last -

3 TSTC grads planned additions for Cameron Park Zoo as class assignment

Velia Garcia-Reyes, and plans she made for Cameron Park Zoo.

“What I have been impressed by with these young women is their professionalism,” Cox said. “They listened to what we said we needed, but they had their own ideas as well. The result is more original and more functional than we anticipated.”

Thanks Waco Trib, for covering these stories that are important to TSTC, Waco, and Texas.

The New York Times notes again that sloppy thinking about degrees and marketable skills can hurt, especially in this economy.

They bought into the notion that if they went to college — never mind the debt — their degree would lead to a lucrative job. And repaying their student loans would never be a problem.

But the economic crisis has turned those assumptions on their ear as thousands of recent graduates have been unable to find jobs or are earning too little to cover the payments for loans that are sometimes as high as $50,000.

Actually, this was always a risky assumption.

Read the whole thing.

We had a delightful visit this week from a group of vice presidents from Chinese technical colleges. In the picture above (from left to right): our translator from George Mason University, Hua Jian of Wuxi Institute of Technology, Elton Stuckly - President of TSTC Waco, Dr. Zhang Huibo of Ningbo Polytechnic, and Tian Nai Lin of Chengde Petroleum College.

Our guests were brought to us by Dr. Al Pollard of McClennan Community College. They were keenly interested in all things technical and asked excellent and insightful questions. They also took a lot of pictures and video.

Our tour included an engines class in our Toyota lab. TSTC Waco was recently given an award by Toyota as one of the top programs in the country.

Jerry Davis of Instrumentation, Computerized Controls, and Robotics explains how the Delta V HMI (Human Machine Interface) controls the actions of TSTC’s state of the art digital process control trainer. The trainer was built by TSTC instructors with generous donations from our industry partners.

Case Jones and his students demonstrate the importance of motion capture to gaming and simulation design to our vistors.

Our guests enjoyed using the games written by our Game Programming students. We are proud of the fact that our students wrote the gaming engine.

As you can see, the game is a lot of fun!

Student projects in the High Performance Computing lab. After learning the principles on these, they move up to the real thing.

We visited a lot of other areas of campus, including Industrial Systems, Welding, Laser/Electro-optics, and Mechanical Engineering. Our visitors also had the opportunity to eat the meal prepared by our Culinary Arts students.

It was a great day and it is always fascinating to meet people from a different part of the world - especially if they are in the same business.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Are students who don’t thrive in a traditional education track academic failures or valuable experiential learners?  That is the question answered by this video about the Institute of Technical Education in Singapore.  (For some reason, the introduction plays twice, but the video is still excellent).

Please note the following:

• Importance of technical education to maintain infrastructure
• Reducing technical education stigma
• Providing university-class facilities for technical education students
• Making certain that no skill is wasted

The introduction says that ITE is an innovation, but they are doing what we do in U.S. technical education - links to industry, focus on faculty industry experience, hands-on learning, etc.  In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that they came here to study technical education.  What they have done differently is to  invest the money to make technical education a priorty.  First-class facilities and student services make the students feel more valued and valuable.

Our focus on 4-year degrees is hurting our competitiveness, not helping.

This is how to respond to the need for welders.

There is an excellent post over at the TechCareers blog on technical education trends in Texas. A slideshow of interesting stats and quotes by TSTC Associate Vice Chancellor Michael Bettersworth linked there is worth watching. Here is a sample showing the challenge Texas has in filling technical jobs while attendance at technical programs is down:

UPDATE: TechCareers Blog, a collaboration between TSTC Publishing and TSTC Emerging Technogies, has been added to the blogroll.

Texas State Technical College invaded the beautiful rotunda and halls of our magificent Capitol building in Austin on Tuesday March 24.  We had a great day with technology exhibits, an ice cream social, and delivery of a small gift and note from our Chancellor to every legislative office by our own TSTC Student Ambassadors.  A resolution proclaiming Texas State Technical College Day was passed in each house- one introduced by Representative Doc Anderson and the other by Senator Kip Averitt.

See a quick overview in my YouTube video:

– The question from “Declining by Degrees.”

I really want to see this documentary.  If you’ve seen it, leave something in the comments.

Charles Murray knows something about controversey. The coauthor of The Bell Curve stirred up quite a tempest in the media and in the scientific community with that book’s conclusions about intelligence. Although some of those conclusions have withstood scrutiny by an American Psychological Association task force, others were probably a reach.

In his recent book, Real Education, Murray takes on the education industry using intelligence testing as a basis once again. Murray posits “four simple truths” that we should take into account if we are going to “bring America’s schools back to reality.” Those truths according to Murray are:

1. Ability Varies
2. Half of the children are below average
3. Too many people are going to college
4. America’s future depends on how we educate the academically gifted

I have seen evidence of these truths and would only offer a different emphasis than the book.

First of all, ability varies in many ways, not just in basic I.Q. Although Murray discusses eight different kinds of intelligence, he doesn’t do enough to indicate the very high value of mechanical and other abilities not related to the appreciation of King Lear. As I have written before, the infrastructure of modern life may have been invented by scientists and engineers, but it is built and maintained by skilled technicians. Those technicians may not know the finer points of Athenian democracy, but they understand Ohm’s law, circuits, gearing, and many other important industrial principles better than most of our political class (and I’m not sure our political class understands the finer points of Athenian democracy, either).

Secondly, while it is incontrovertibly true that half of our children are below average, how we educate them is also vital to the future of the country. Right now, we are often wasting this resource by not offering them an opportunity to learn a trade in high school or in post-secondary education.  As Murray says:

Despite the current obscurity of vocational education, most school systems around the country still maintain substantial programs and facilities. The label for them is no longer vocational education, but CTE (career and technical education)… Moreover, the empirical evidence in favor of CTE is not in dispute. CTE works. Giving high-school students the option of taking technical courses increases the likelihood they will graduate from high school. High-school students who pursue the vocational track do better in the job market, in terms of both employment rates and wages, than those who stay in the academic track but don’t belong there.

Murray points out that those high school CTE resources available are “radically underused.” He attributes this to the “misbegotten, pernicious, wrong-headed idea that not going to college means you’re a failure.” I would agree with that assessment and add that there are plenty of post-secondary opportunities for students who won’t be attending Harvard or Yale. Those opportunities also increase a student’s expertise and earning ability in his or her chosen field.

That would lead me into the third point - college needs to be defined more broadly than the bachelor’s degree. Murray ends up there, but through most of the book he refers mainly to the BA. Part of the misunderstanding that “deforms the behavior of all the actors in America’s high schools - principals, teachers, guidance counselors, students, and parents” is the idea that college only means a BA. Technical and community college programs in medical, IT, industrial, and engineering technology fields offer a lot of opportunity for students to excel in a relatively short period of time. They generally don’t receive the respect they deserve, even though they have trained many of our nurses and pilots to whom we entrust our lives. Since those individuals have been certified in their fields, we never ask them about whether they attended a prestigious university. While it is certainly true that too many people are trying for a BA, there are not too many people attending college if you don’t mean “university” when you say “college.”

In all, Murray has made a very valuable contribution to the discussion of education in our country. He includes an interesting and timely section on using certification to undermine the BA and identifies the rewards that can be found by attaining the right technical skills for the marketplace. He concludes that the Army’s old slogan of “Be all that you can be” should be the slogan of education. I agree that seeing to it that all students reach full potential is paramount - not just the elite, but the rest as well. The path will not always be the one that Murray identifies. Many of the best engineers started out in high school and college CTE courses. Perhaps that route will be recognized by the educational community one day.

UPDATE:  Since I am by nature anti-elitist and I was troubled by the focus on “the elites” in Murray’s book, allow me to offer my blog post on Elitism and Education as a balance.

This time it is Robotics, Rocketry, Research at the Rapoport Academy Early College High School.  TSTC is involved in helping with these projects.  More secondary and post-secondary cooperation in CTE!  Read all about it on the Texas High School Project website HERE.

An article in the Corsicana Daily Sun about CTE at Corsicana High School mentions secondary and post-secondary connections twice (Corsicana is about 55 miles from TSTC Waco).  The building trades teacher said “his program has 38 young men working on their carpentry level I certification, which is very much like a college transcript, and are being taught the same curriculum as students in Waco at TSTC”

The new automotive teacher was most recently teaching in the award-wining Toyota program at TSTC Waco.  We hated to seem him go, but we are glad that his high school students will get the benefit of his experience and dedication.  Our best wishes go out to Michael Schmidt in his new postion at Corsicana High School.

If the tide in technical education is going to continue to turn, high schools and colleges need to persevere in finding ways to partner.  As we work on more articulation, dual credit, and innovative programs our students and our economy will be the winners.

The Texas Comptroller’s Office has released a report called Texas Works 2008: Training and Education for All Texans which has really gotten it right.  Among the important facts in the executive summary:

• Slightly less than 20% of Texas jobs required a Bachelor’s degree in 2007
• 43.65% of the jobs paying better than average salaries do not require a Bachelor’s degree
• More than 343,000 jobs in Texas in 2007 that paid above average were for Associate’s degrees (mostly Associate of Applied Science degrees - technical degrees)
• There were nearly 80,000 jobs that paid above average that could be had with a certificate
• Dwindling enrollment in vocational training is hurting the economy
• We are producing TOO MANY four-year degrees (in the wrong things)

I think that the following graphic really says it all (click to enlarge):

The recommendations made are as follows:

1. Make more parents and students aware of all postsecondary educational options, including career and technical education (CTE), and the availability of financial assistance.
2. As part of this effort, use data on educational and employment outcomes to quantify the economic benefits of CTE, and publicize these results to help make current and prospective students aware of its value and promise.
3. Ensure that state academic requirements, such as those represented by the new “four-by-four” policy and new GPA calculation standards, do not prevent or discourage students from enrolling in career and technology courses.
4. Establish a $25 million Jobs and Education for Texans (JET) fund to provide support for postsecondary CTE courses, including startup funding for new programs.
5. Link any incentive funding for postsecondary technical education to measures that help ensure the state receives a positive return on its investment.

All I can say is HOLY COW  and CUE THE HALLELUJAH CHORUS!!!!!

Some people think so… and I think it has all of the signs of susceptibility to a crash.

Over at the College Affordability and Productivity blog Richard Vedder writes about the “open source” university.  Read the whole thing.  He also gets into the Baylor “gaming” of the U.S. News ratings.  I am more forgiving because gaming is the unfortunate and predictable result of the game college rating has become.

The game itself must end.  I would go along with Vedder’s idea of letting employers judge the quality of education, although it would be anathema to the academy.  Since we are in the “icky” profession of workforce or technical education (’vocational’ having become a bad word), we spend a great deal of our time trying to meet the needs of employers.  As a result, we do meet their expectations and consistently receive high marks from them.  Interestingly, as we strive to meet the needs of industry, our graduates seem to attract more interest from universities seeking to articulate them into four-year degrees.  Perhaps our interests do not diverge as much as some believe.

An open-source university is an interesting idea.  I hear more employers than ever say, “I don’t care what degree they have - I only care about what they can do.”  Their practice and profession do not always match, though, and HR departments can be frightfully conservative regarding paper qualifications.  If the change does come about, it will be driven by sheer desperation for capable employees.  Some companies have already reached that stage.

Baylor Abandons SAT Payments (Inside Higher Ed) - So a magazine sets up a college rating system. It becomes wildly popular and more important than it should be. Whatever you do, don’t game this “system.” It would be “dishonest.” I read this one because it was about our local university, but it could have happened anywhere.

Are Universities Above the Law? (The Weekly Standard) - Three recent cases that illustrate the difficulties faced by higher education institutions in the legal system. The big universities are now very rich. It will make them a target for more legal action in the future. In these cases, Dartmouth, Duke, and Princeton may deserve what they are getting, though.

What Shortage of Scientists and Engineers? (The New York Times) - John Tierney argues that there is no shortage, just a shortage of American-born ones. Very interesting - but I don’t have enough information to evaluate the arguments. I do know that scientist immigration is no reason to feel sanguine about the state of math and science education in the U.S. I also know that we are very short of technicians in areas critical to economic growth, and we are not importing many of those.