Technical Education in NV?

Letter to Dr. Reed (Vice Chancellor NSHE

Dr. Mike Reed
Vice Chancellor’s Office
Nevada System of Higher Education
2601 Enterprise Rd.Reno, NV 89512


Dear Dr. Reed
Congratulations on your new appointment (news just released to us common folks via RGJ article 10/9/06). I am please that you see the problem (and there is a big problem) connecting the “academic” way of doing things with the business community. Dean Bill Verbek (TMCC Applied Industrial Technologies) was keenly aware of the problem also and paid the price for his “disrespect” to the academic community (the audacity of bending the educational process to actually serve the industrial community!)

Oh… they’ll tell you old Bill “retired” (that he did after being told he was “not a leader” and stuffed in a windowless office on main campus in a little used corner of the library). I was another “casualty” (among many others) of TMCC’s anal fixation on “this is the way we’ve always done it…….. don’t rock the boat”!

Well…… they’ve paid for it. The IMT program I started (and wrote seven classes for which I was also delivering on the web using the WebCT format) is in a total state of disarray. The last time I was at the Edison Campus, my old classroom, which had 10 lab computers, an instructor workstation/projector (smart classroom paid for by a grant) had been stripped bare of all computers AND lab materials. My downstairs lab, where I, with the aid of students, had built a motor control / VFD / control panel wall had also been stripped and all components piled in a heap in a corner (along with 3- $8,000 (ea) donated VFD drive units). I’m pretty sure all this has been trashed by now (as the current administration down there does not have a clue what they were, or what they were used for).

I’ve been in the electrical / automation / instrumentation & control field since I was in my early 20’s. I’ve been a “trainer” for 13 years (I quit an $85K/yr job with a major private training company to come to work for Dean Verbek at TMCC (I thought the man was a visionary and believed we could actually make a difference). I was one of the top industrial electrical trainers in the country (who really I hated to travel).

I guess the good news is I will be bringing my salary back into Nevada. The bad news is the ONLY decent industrial training in Northern Nevada (outside of GBC which has an excellent program) will be through outside private training companies (which average about $300 per day per student). This money will be leaving Nevada and, unfortunately, only those companies willing the pay the rate will benefit (which leaves out a whole lot of individuals who could use this training to better their job skills and improve their incomes).

I challenge you to address this problem. I still hear the biggest problem to attracting new business to Nevada is the lack of an educated work force. I can see the problem. We may not have had the total solution, but we sure had a handle on it until derailed by the bungling bureaucracy.


Thank You for your time in this matter


Charles L. Dickinson

Former Instructor: TMCC IMT dept
Former Program Coordinator: National Technology Transfer Inc.
(Currently Senior Electrical Instructor (project based) NTT).

posted by cl @ 7:29 PM