Page 11 - Campus Technology, July 2017

COMMUNITY COLLEGES
training. We’ve now got certificates in several construction areas, in a number of manufacturing and fabrication areas, in transportation, in heavy equipment operation. And we made these things portable, so we could take them around the community. Today we might have heavy equipment operation in one end of the district and the basic construction certificate at the other end. And a month from now we might flip them. People don’t have to travel all over the kingdom to get this training.
It receives no state support. It’s tuition only. We did get
systems in central Florida, called Orlando Health. It became apparent to me that the cost of the nursing shortage was much, much greater than people had estimated. We did our math here. We thought that the cost was about $40 million a year in marginal costs due to overtime and supplying nurses to fill slots that were unfilled.
We gathered the university and the colleges in the area and the hospital systems and said, “Do you agree that this is the scale of the problem?” They said, “Yes.” We said, “Would you be willing to spend a tenth of that amount to solve the
graduates need to go on and get a bachelor’s and [the university] can’t handle that kind of volume. There’s a massive nursing initiative underway that I think is going to have a huge impact. It will change us. It’ll change healthcare in the community. It’ll make it more affordable and more accessible. It’ll raise the quality. All those things. Then I think about that additional 300 or 400 graduates every year that Valencia will produce — a thousand across all of the colleges in the region. For every one of those families, think about the impact. Every one of those families moves from having a $30,000-$40,000 income to a $70,000 or $80,000 income — almost overnight. That changes the trajectory of the lives of everybody in that family.
CT: Your new award comes with a little honorarium — $50,000. Not enough to buy the old Tesla, a little more than you need to buy the new Tesla. What are you going to do with the money?
Shugart: Great fun. That’s a bigger check than I usually get to write. I’ll give it to our foundation, of course. Valencia earned that prize, not Sandy Shugart. I’m going to reinvest that money in the mission.
Dian Schaffhauser is a senior contributing editor for Campus Technology.
“We asked, if we could have one impact on our community beyond what we do now, what would it be? The answer was, we’d add rungs to the ladder, so the people stuck at the bottom could move up the ladder and move from $9 to $12.50 to $16 to $19 an hour, where they could support a family for the long term.”
some Department of Labor money from the Feds to get it started. And everybody gets jobs. This notion of short, intensive, industry-credentialed training that leads to immediate employment and growth in pay, $2, $3, $4 an hour for each certificate, is a big deal for us right now.
I’m the chairman of the board for one of the big hospital
problem?” They said, “Yes.” So we’re in the process now of a little more than doubling our nursing programs. We have the largest program in the region now, for about 360 graduates a year. We’re going to be at 700 in three years.
And we’re going to add a bachelor’s degree with the blessing of the university, because 80 percent of these
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | July 2017
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