Education must focus on region’s economic strength

Two years ago, Fadwa Bouachrine and Lisa
Breitenfeldt lived in worlds apart.

Bouachrine was studying engineering and software
management at Morocco’s Al-Akhawayn University,
while Breitenfeldt was building Web sites for Spokane
clients.

Don Adair
Special to The Spokesman-Review

But technology has a way of shrinking great
distances, and for the past year Bouachrine and
Breitenfeldt have been classmates in a master’s in
technology management program (MTM) at
Washington State University Spokane.

Offered since 1998, the program includes core
courses in marketing, finance, accounting, decision
sciences and management, and provides an
information services overlay.

"It’s like an MBA for high-tech workers," Breitenfeldt
says.

Both women say they enrolled in the program to
extend their skill sets. Breitenfeldt plans to take her
newly earned business-management tools back into
the workplace, while Bouachrine, whose English is
inflected by both the French tongue and her native
Arabic, will pursue her doctorate.

"I was kind of like having my engineering
background, and I did not want to go purely for
business or purely for technology," she says. "I
needed (something) in between, because that’s
what’s needed in the market today."

The MTM program seems to slot a growing sweet
spot. Enrollments are up and the program has
earned an international reputation: About half the
members of this year’s 15-student graduating class
are here on visas.

In fact, the program is a bright light in the troubled
efforts of WSU Spokane to mount local graduate
programs in the technology arena.

When WSU Spokane dean Bill Gray arrived here in
the mid-’80s, "we had graduate programs in electrical
engineering and engineering management. Those
two programs had just been developed, and they had
reasonably healthy enrollments," he says.

But over time, he says, enrollments dwindled. "They
did OK for a few years, largely, in my judgment,
addressing pent-up demand."

As those programs began to falter, high-tech
appeared on the community’s economic-development
radar. When Hewlett-Packard passed on Spokane
and built a plant in Boise instead, alarmed civic
leaders prevailed on area schools to marshal their
high-tech resources.

"The community was very enamored with electronic
circuitry and the electronic future," says Gray, "and
graduate programs in electrical engineering were
thought to be very important."

WSU hired residential faculty to supplement the
school’s video-based long-distance learning system.
Master’s programs in mechanical engineering and
material science and engineering were put forward
with "some fanfare, but drew virtually no enrollment,"
says Gray.

Subsequent efforts to merge the foundering master’s
in electrical engineering program with Gonzaga
University’s program also failed for lack of interest.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates added a new wrinkle to
the story when he told a United Way breakfast
audience his company wouldn’t consider adding a
Spokane facility until the community had an
engineering school.

In response, WSU, the University of Idaho and
Gonzaga formed an engineering consortium, with the
intent of building a series of baccalaureate
completion programs, tailored to community college
graduates.

"By that time, we all realized that graduate degrees in
engineering in the Spokane/Coeur d’Alene area was
not a winning proposition," Gray says.

From this program would come the students to fill
planned graduate-level degree programs in
computer and manufacturing engineering, but, again,
enrollments "were far less than we had been led to
believe (they would be) by industry," he says.

The consortium dissolved, although WSU and the
University of Idaho continue to offer the completion
baccalaureate degree.

Observers agree that the problem lies not with the
quality of the courses, but with the size of the area’s
tech community. "If you look at the number of
high-tech businesses around here, you don’t have
that kind of density here," says Itron senior training
program developer Jim Stokoe.

Nonetheless, Gray says WSU is committed to serving
the high-tech community, and last month convened a
focus group to consider its needs. The strongest
recommendation to emerge from that session calls
for short-duration certificate programs.

Avista Corp. director of engineering Don Kopczynski
says a dozen of his staffers will register for WSU’s
12-credit certificate-based project management
course. "When you complete it, you’ll have 12 credits
toward an engineering master’s degree, and now you
have a certificate."

Bill Gray says there are multiple lessons in all this for
academics. Foremost is the realization that a school
serves its community best when it focuses on the
area’s economic strengths. In Spokane, that means
more attention to health care and the public sector,
the two most powerful drivers of the local economy.

Fadwa Bouachrine agrees: "Recently, I was
introduced to health care through Group Health. I
think I will be following with the health care and
technology."

http://www.spokesmanreview.com/news-story.asp?date=061602&ID=s1168350&cat=section.business