Trade and Tech Schools a Better Option for Some Students

As featured in Prairie Business Magazine

Dr. Carrie L. Brimhall, president of Minnesota State Community and Technical College, has seen tremendous change at the school over the years. Now in her 27th year with the institution, she said about 9,000 students are receiving non-credit instruction annually, and most of those are working in business and industry to gain additional skills. Nearly 8,000 students are taking credit-based courses each year and over 2,000 of those are students at 47 area high schools.

“It feels like we could keep adding programs and never meet the demand. We have a pretty broad suite of health care programs including nursing, lab tech, surgical tech, dental hygiene and assisting, radiology tech in Detroit Lakes, Fergus Falls has echocardiography. We do non-credit CNA training. So we do a lot in the health care area. We’re seeing about a 10% growth in students there,” she said.

The average cost of higher education in the U.S. has more than doubled in the 21st century. At an average cost of $38,270 per student per year, according to the Education Data Initiative , attending a four-year university is out of reach for many Americans. For others, it’s not part of their career path. Some are choosing community colleges or trade and technical schools, which offer degrees in two years and most often, job placement.

The number of students enrolled in vocation-focused community colleges in the U.S. increased 16% from 2022-2023, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center . Skilled workers are needed in the manufacturing and construction trades, along with the health care and the energy sectors.

Industry partnerships are often key to a program’s success. M State works with about 500 businesses of all sizes annually, Brimhall said. The college is seeing a resurgence in the construction trades programs, which allow people to work and attend school at the same time. More students are going into education and early childhood development, another sector reporting shortages.

“We still have a lot of students taking business, accounting and HR courses. Commercial Driver License (CDL) is really popular now – we’ve figured out how to teach CDL in about 40 hours to get people behind the wheel of a truck and make money quickly,” she said. “People want meaningful work and want to work at a place that’s going to invest in them and care about them, so we fit that. We have great applicants.”

In Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Dr. Cory Clasemann is starting his first year as Southeast Technical College’s president. The school just set a record for the largest and most diverse number of students in college history this fall, with an enrollment increase of 7%, at 2,659 students. Twenty-seven percent of the student body are age 24 or older and 21% represent a diverse racial and ethnic background.

South Dakota’s Build Dakota Scholarship fund just celebrated its 10-year anniversary. The scholarship program has been very well received and is making strides in filling workforce shortages, Clasemann said. Through partnerships with more than 500 businesses, the program has provided almost 4,000 scholarships and attracted more than $21 million in matching funds.

“An incoming student has an industry sponsor and Build Dakota covers all the costs, their tuition, fees, and program costs. At graduation, they have an agreement to work for that sponsor company for three years,” Clasemann said. “They have that guarantee of a job on day one, so they know exactly what it is they’ll be doing. It really helps with motivation and they leave with no debt.”

The scholarship is offered for certain in-demand occupations, and between the four technical schools in the state – Southeast Tech, Mitchell Technical College, Lake Area Technical College, and Western Dakota Technical College – there’s an industry match for just about any student.

Hands-on learning is important, and some of that takes place in labs on campus, and there are also opportunities for students to get out of the classroom and into the real world. For example, the construction programs may have students work on a Habitat for Humanity project, or a Media Design Technology student may create websites for area businesses.

“It's especially good for our first-generation students who may not know what the college experience will be like, and they can see the range of possibilities. It can expose them to so much more they may not otherwise see,” he said.

In-demand programs such as emergency medical technician, medical lab tech, nursing and sonography will benefit from the new state-of-the-art Healthcare Simulation Center that opened earlier this year at the college. It was made possible with financial support from industry community partners including Avera Health, Sanford Health, Forward Sioux Falls and the state of South Dakota. It was designed as a miniature hospital so that students can learn in an environment that mirrors where they will be working after graduation.

“There’s been a stigma with two-year colleges and with those trade professions, but we’re breaking those down and making good progress in changing the conversation,” Clasemann said. “We’re seeing the generation coming up wanting to see the applicability of what they’re learning. They want to know from the beginning, where am I going? It makes it appealing to them. For people who have been at the same job for years and want something different, it helps them find their passion.”

Heather Koland is the respiratory therapy program director and instructor at Northland Community and Technical College in East Grand Forks, Minnesota. She’s worked as a respiratory therapist for 27 years, first with Altru and now at Essentia Health. She’s in her fifth year of teaching at the college and has helped grow the program which had just four graduates in 2019, to a robust 39 students this year. And if more instructors were available, they could accept additional students into the program.

“Our (program) numbers were originally very low. COVID kind of pushed us to the forefront but not enough for what we needed,” she said. “We’re using a hybrid model. We give students the opportunity to attend in the classroom with an instructor present. They can attend over Zoom in a virtual classroom at the same time, or they can do it online for theory content.”

Respiratory therapists are the professionals called when a patient can’t breathe. Koland said, “We know everything there is to know about lungs. We run the ventilators — most people know it as life support. We give treatments to patients with asthma or COPD, those are the patients that ultimately we deal with. We’ve always been there.”

The pandemic shone a spotlight on the profession. The coronavirus is an infectious respiratory disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and during the pandemic, respiratory therapists were on the frontline. There weren’t enough therapists to handle the patient demand and it quickly became overwhelming. Now the occupation is in high demand.

“We can work in any capacity. A lot of us work in an acute care hospital. We have some in clinic settings, some that work in disease management, we can do a lot of transport – we pick up patients in ambulances, helicopters and airplanes,” Koland said. “We can run heart-lung bypass machines, so there’s a wide scope of what we can do. We aren't limited by our degree – we can go on to be physician assistants, just like nurse practitioners. It’s just a different path we can take but we all end up in the same spot.”

At the East Grand Forks campus, the respiratory therapist students come into class for four days each month for hands-on training. The rest of their learning can be done online around their work schedules. Koland helped set up a secondary lab section at CentraCare in St. Cloud, Minnesota, for students who are coming from the Minneapolis area or surrounding communities. Those who are north of St. Cloud come up to the East Grand Forks campus. This means less travel and they can stay closer to home.

Koland said her ultimate goal is to set up a similar mirroring lab section in the western part of North Dakota, where they are hurting for respiratory therapists. Students who live there could stay close to home while earning their degree, and then hopefully become employed at rural hospitals in that region.

“We also work with Bemidji Sanford, which is sponsoring students, and Alomere Health in Alexandria. We work with the hospital itself to put students in our program. We will train them and send them back and they will then be employees. We’re feeding back into that system,” she said.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment of respiratory therapists is projected to grow 13% from 2023 to 2033, faster than the average for all occupations. About 8,200 openings for respiratory therapists are projected each year on average, over the decade.

“The more we can meet the students where they are and feed into the health systems, the better off everyone will be,” Koland said.