Overview

Located in small-town South Dakota, Lake Area Technical Institute (LATI) offers exemplary workforce training. With 27 discrete programs aimed at career preparation, ranging from aviation mechanics to nursing to welding, the college achieves exceptionally high rates of completion and job placement.  While some part-time options are available, programs are designed for full-time attendance (for example, four days a week from 8 a.m. until 3 p.m.) providing students the clear scheduling and progression inherent in a block-structured format. As a result, the college faculty, who generally worked in and remain connected to the industries in which their graduates will work, know their students well, and serve not only as instructors but as de facto guidance counselors. Students are primarily traditional college-age and most are lower-income, with 53 percent of students receiving Pell grants. Given the high percentage of students on need-based aid, it is notable that LATI has virtually eliminated the necessity for remedial education by establishing a different set of readiness requirements for entry into each of its programs of study.

No room to get lost

Administrators at LATI will tell you, “We’re not a community college.” Yet the Watertown, S.D., higher education institution embodies as profound a sense of community as any community college in the country. Faculty are hired and trained with an eye toward ensuring they’ll pay attention to students as individuals, a mission made easier by the fact that faculty members see students almost daily.

Nearly all of LATI’s 1,400 students attend full-time and everyone is enrolled in a technical program as part of a cohort, which progresses together through each semester, course, and day, from morning until mid-afternoon.  At LATI, there’s no room to wander. Program instructors serve as students’ advisors and can’t help but know when they are troubled, or struggling academically, or absent. (At LATI, attendance is mandatory and administrators track down students who are absent three days.) Students with remedial needs are not held back; they are given online materials to work on before they arrive on campus and then launch into their technical programs right away with their peers, fitting in developmental math and reading courses at lunchtime.

That rigid structure and intense focus on student development is a key reason for the school’s remarkable success. Sixty-six percent of LATI students graduate within three years, and over 90 percent of those then secure jobs or continue their education.

LATI president Deb Shephard, whose background is in counseling and social work, said, “We tell [instructors], ‘You’ve got to know their names. You’ve got to know their little town. You’ve got to know what they did over the weekend.” Many LATI students come from far-flung towns so small that Watertown, at 21,000 residents, seems overwhelming. So, early in the fall, the school holds a Hometown Day, where students mix with others from their area.

Chelsea Morris, 20, attended a high school far smaller than LATI, and even so felt like her high school teachers didn’t care if she succeeded or not. “The teachers here, they actually want to help,” she said. “Lake Area people, they get in your face, and I like that.”

Todd Bretschneider, who ran an auto body shop in Minnesota for 23 years before coming to LATI to start its new custom paint and fabrication program, said, “I want to get to know each and every one of my students. That’s my responsibility. I don’t want a single one to leave my program saying, ‘I don’t think Todd gave me the attention I deserved.’”

Strong business partnerships

LATI benefits from unusually close relationships between faculty members and area professionals through advisory boards in each of the school’s 27 programs. Most community colleges have such boards; few, if any, rely on them more intensely. Members, who serve for three years meet formally at least twice a year with LATI faculty but, in reality, are in touch far more often—even weekly, in some cases.

The advisors ensure that the educational programs stay ahead of industry trends and give feedback on how LATI’s graduates are faring in the workplace. When weaknesses are identified, faculty respond immediately: redesigning the agriculture program with a greater focus on precision technology; giving dental assisting students more practice taking impressions; teaching energy students not just how to operate hydroelectric equipment, but also to repair it; adding conflict resolution training to the nursing program to smooth interactions between graduates and their colleagues. If industry experts suggest a new need based on area trends, LATI administrators analyze projections, focusing not just on whether enough jobs will be available, but enough good jobs. They can build a new program in a year, as they have done recently with energy technology, entrepreneurship, and custom paint and fabrication.

Ed Mallett, a Midwest region vice president for the energy and grains firm CHS Inc., serves on advisory boards for LATI’s agriculture department and for the school’s president, Deb Shephard. “With the pace of change, you need to be able to respond and evolve,” Mallett said. “The faculty listens to what is coming down the road. They’re very futuristic in their approach to what kids are going to need to be successful.”

This pays off in student success. In his field, Mallett said, LATI graduates are coveted and have their pick of several jobs.

“They hit the ground running”

When Isaac Hoesing, 26, arrived at an aviation maintenance company for an internship last summer, he had a year under his belt at LATI and an edge over his fellow interns. He was the only one with his own tools: a $3,500 Snap-on set that LATI students can buy at a deep discount. More important, the first year of Hoesing’s associate of applied science degree program had been spent not just learning about aviation maintenance technology in the classroom, but actually living it: installing flight controls, restoring planes from nose to tail, even getting up in the air with instructors each month.

“At other schools, it’s, ‘We’ll show you what it looks like,’” said Hoesing, who studied aviation at a four-year college before arriving at LATI. “Here it’s, ‘Get in there and see for yourself.’ You can sit in class and get the concepts, but when you get out here”—a spacious hangar with nine aircraft to work on, from a Piper Cub to a 727—“everything starts clicking.”

Hoesing was working on airplanes within a month at LATI, ursing students interact with patients in their first year, and automotive students get under the hood of a car in their first week. Thanks to aggressive grant-seeking and the school’s strong business partnerships, students learn on state-of-the-art equipment: the only truck chassis dynamometer at a South Dakota school, to measure the force of an engine; new John Deere tractors each year; a cadaver lab funded by a local hospital. Even the campus itself is a cutting-edge tool, fitted with water control features that environmental technology students use as a learning lab.

The community college’s strengths culminate in uncommonly skilled, impressive graduates. Scott Lawler, who hires for robotics and machining jobs at a 3M plant an hour south said, “These kids, they come to me, they hit the ground running.”