Technical Education in NV?

ELKO -- Great Basin College resembles the grounds of any small college, a cluster of brick buildings arrayed around a fountain and a clock tower.
But this campus doesn't stop at the dorms or the ball fields. It stretches south to Pahrump and north to Oregon and Idaho, taking in a swath of mountains and sagebrush larger than the state of Georgia.
It could be the most far-reaching school you've never heard of.
"We've got a large service area, but there's not a lot of people in it," says college President Carl Diekhans.
Great Basin's service territory includes 54 percent of Nevada's total land area but less than 5 percent of its population.
As a result, the school ranks as the state's second smallest community college by enrollment, with about 4,000 students, most of them part-time.
But its effect is amplified in six of Nevada's most isolated counties, where the college turns townfolk into teachers, nurses and other needed professionals.
Schools, hospitals and mines get skilled workers. Rural residents get careers and a reason to stay in communities hundreds of miles from the nearest big city.
"We're doing what we're supposed to do," says Bret Murphy, dean of technical trade programs and other so-called applied sciences. "We're a community college. We're serving the community and its industries."
Now school officials insist that mission is jeopardized by mounting state budget cuts and, worse, talk of consolidating Nevada's community colleges.
Diekhans calls it the worst crisis he has seen since he was hired as a math and computing instructor at Great Basin in 1980.
"I get a little possessive. This is my college, and I don't like people messing with it," he says. "They're really messing with it right now."

Today the college offers about 40 associate degrees and seven different bachelor degree programs. It has branch campuses in Battle Mountain, Ely, Pahrump and Winnemucca and 13 satellite centers in smaller towns from Jackpot to Amargosa Valley.
Last fall, the college expanded into the Nye County seat of Tonopah, where it set up an interactive video class inside a room at a local casino.
You don't deliver classes across 62,000 square miles by sticking to convention.
About a third of Great Basin's courses are offered through an interactive video network that enables a professor in Pahrump to simultaneously teach political science to students in Winnemucca, Ely and Elko.
At some more remote sites, most instruction is by television and computer. Tests and term papers are turned in by fax or email. Larger class projects are boxed up and put in the mail.
Sean Pitts, who teaches history part-time at the branch campus in Ely, says interactive video takes some getting used to, but is effective.
"You can fill a class of 20 people from five different locations," Pitts said.
Without that ability to draw students from across the service area, a lot of classes would have to be canceled because of insufficient enrollment....

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