Striving For An A+ Workforce

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HEAT is also a great deal for students, who pay the standard tuition at Colorado's community colleges -- $57.75 per credit to attend a class in person and $115 online. And for 15 employees taking a single HEAT course, companies pay only $1,000 to $1,500.

Curmudgeonly Colorado taxpayers could argue that HEAT is too good a deal. Investment in the Center by the state and federal governments, as well as by companies, has surpassed $100 million, and the campus is only 60% complete. The benefits to the state as a whole, meanwhile, have yet to be substantiated. "At the moment, we don't have a payback," confesses Ed Tauer, a HEAT supporter and city councilman in Aurora, where the Center is located. "We're still very much in the investment stage. And this is a 10-year investment."

For a high-tech ground zero, the HEAT Center isn't much to look at. The campus consists of 18 unobtrusive buildings constructed on blasted heath. But inside, the Center thrums with activity. Employees from half a dozen large technology companies, along with students from seven community colleges and four universities, roam hallways that glitter with steel, glass, and chrome. Trainees may take a seat in one of the plain, beige-brick classrooms where instructors wax eloquent on subjects ranging from dental hygiene to radiology to virtual reality. Or they may go into hands-on mode by using the Center's state-of-the-art computers, servers, and manufacturing equipment. For digital creatives, a studio worthy of George Lucas is stocked with the latest film, video, and production equipment.

HEAT was the brainchild of Don Goodwin and Mary Ann Roe, researchers who have long shared a vision for improving technical education in this country. In 1993 the two set out to study training programs in Singapore, Japan, and Germany, all of which, they believed, did a superior job of aligning adult-education programs with the needs of business. "U.S. culture tends to divide people into 'blue collar' and 'white collar' professionals," says Roe, pointing out what she considers a philosophical misstep. As a result technical education traditionally targets blue-collar workers and takes place in community colleges. In the eyes of corporate America -- and America in general -- those workers are less valuable than their white-collar counterparts.

Roe insists that that distinction has become less meaningful in the current economy, in which everyone from chief information officer to auto mechanic requires a broader, deeper technical education than ever before and in which skills become obsolete almost as soon as they've been acquired. Consequently, today's workers must be trained and retrained throughout their professional lives. "This is the first time in history in which we need knowledge workers who understand both the reason for and the operation of applied technology," says Roe. "They do not, and cannot, wear either white or blue collars. They work with their heads and their hands. I like to call them 'gold collar' workers."

In countries that value such employees, Roe and Goodwin found, educational and professional institutions worked with businesses to supply the skilled workforces they needed. And the two educators wanted to try something similar in this country. The high-tech training center they envisioned would save taxpayers money, because publicly funded colleges would no longer have to build their own labs or be responsible for keeping equipment up-to-date. It would also improve technical education, because companies could tell college instructors and administrators exactly what skills they were looking for in workers. Most important, it would boost the economy of whatever state it graced by providing an attractive workforce with which to lure outside companies, helping local businesses grow, and -- through distance learning -- bringing new opportunities to fading locales.

"I compare bringing high-speed technology to rural America to bringing electricity to rural America," says Gary K. Lancaster.

Roe and Goodwin required four things to make their experiment work: supportive political leadership; a willing technology industry; a clean, well-lighted place; and an open-minded community-college and university system. In 1994, Governor Roy Romer and the state legislature approved a master plan that Goodwin had drawn up in just 60 days. Lucent Technologies and Cisco Systems signed up, clearing a path for other technology companies. And the closure of Lowry Air Force Base opened up large tracts of land and numerous buildings to civilian use.

The academic institutions proved the toughest nuts to crack. "The community-college presidents ate us alive. They accused us of trying to steal their programs," says Goodwin, who left the Center in August 1999 to create a similar organization for the South Orange County Community College District, in California, on the closed Tustin Marine Corps Air Station.

As Goodwin sees it, the college administrators were in denial over the failure of their own training initiatives. One community college offered an electronics program with no courses in microprocessor technology, despite the presence of an Intel facility nearby. "The private sector wouldn't hire students from that program, and word got around that students shouldn't go to school there," he says.

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