Low jobless rate pressures career college enrollments

Nate Clark's worries these days are twofold.

Everyone in town is working.

And when they're not working, they're not watching as much local TV as they used to.

That means that Clark's team of admissions counselors at the privately owned Career College of Northern Nevada is working harder to keep enrollment full.

About 280 students these days attend the school, learning the skills they'll need to become medical assistants, information technology specialists, paralegals,medical billing specialists and the like.

That's down a bit from the peak enrollment a few years ago at the school, which occupies about 15,000 square feet in a building in the Dermody Business Park of east Reno.

It's harder to pitch potential students on the value of building their workplace skills when they already have jobs in the booming northern Nevada economy, says Clark.

And his potential students aren't glued to the TV where the school once was spending $12,000 a month advertising on local channels the way they were in the past.

Instead, they're glued to the Internet, and Career College of Northern Nevada's advertising dollars have followed them.

The Internet doesn't generate the same number of potential students as local TV, Clark says, although Internet-generated prospects are more likely to sign up for classes.

Tuition at the school ranges from $9,450 for a 42-week program in medical billings to $23,100 for a 90-week program that leads to an associate's degree in information technology.

Students go to school 48 weeks a year they get a break every 13 weeks and take only a handful of short breaks each day as they hammer away in sessions that run all morning, all afternoon, or into the evening.

That schedule, Clark says, fits with the needs of most of its students who work fulltime while they're building their skills.

Even so,most of the college's students need the help of federal student loans and grants.

That, in turn, puts pressure Career College of Northern Nevada to ensure that its paperwork is impeccable.After paying a $20,000 fine after an audit in the early 1990s, the college redoubled its compliance effort.

But an even bigger part of Clark's effort is spent on serving his customers the students who are his customers today as well as the employers that hire his school's graduates.

Students grade their teachers in confidential surveys every six weeks.

Employers, meanwhile, serve on advisory boards that help the school shape and update its programs.

"We always need employers' involvement in the curriculum design," Clark says."They need to be involved in the solution." The combination creates job-ready graduates.

Eighty percent of the school's graduates are working in the careers for which they were trained within a year after graduation, says Mitzie Going, graduate services director at Career College.

And her personal goal is to see most of those graduates placed in good jobs within six weeks of graduation.

Clark acknowledges that private trade schools sometimes carry a stigma with employers, and Career College of Northern Nevada battles hard to overcome employers' reluctance.

"We put our graduates in front of them," he says."If we can get them to hire a graduate, the stigma goes away."

The school was founded in 1984 as Apollo Business and Technical School.

Since 1989, it's been owned by Clark's parents, Larry and Margie Clark.

Larry Clark got into the trade school business as a longtime training executive with Control Data Corp., and CareerCom, an operator of business schools that owned by the Reno college before it was sold to the Clarks.