The New Manufacturers
With an eye on the future and training for today, Dunwoody College of Technology is 21st-century manufacturing’s perfect match.
BY ANDREA STRAND
When Dunwoody College of Technology alumni who graduated in the 1930s return to visit, there is one thing they never fail to discuss. Having graduated in the midst of the Great Depression, they often tell Dunwoody’s current president, Dr. C. Ben Wright, how they never went without work.
One of those alumni is Hiawatha Rubber Company and Mid-Continent Engineering founder Art Popehn. A son of German immigrants, Popehn grew up pedaling the Minneapolis Star in south Minneapolis before attending Dunwoody, sweeping the machine-shop floors at night to pay a portion of his tuition. Even in 1940, when the Great Depression still made for tough times, Popehn had a job lined up before he graduated. “It was an opportunity to make some money, and it meant everything,” he says of his first job on the assembly line at Smith Welding Equipment Corp. To this day, Popehn credits much if his career success to Dunwoody. “It’s a first-class outfit,” he says, “and it’s the discipline and everything the teachers instruct that permeates Dunwoody, and becomes a part of a person.”Wright agrees that Dunwoody’s reputation for hard-working students was bar-none. “It was the Dunwoody trademark, the Dunwoody stamp of approval that guaranteed them a job,” Wright says. “That’s a whole generation of people who got opportunities that might not have otherwise had opportunities.”
Founded in 1914 by Minneapolis businessman William H. Dunwoody, what is now the Dunwoody College of Technology has been a staple of technical education in Minnesota since the time when “hands-on” work translated to actual dirt under the fingernails. From the beginning, it has been committed to creating economic opportunities for people by giving them access to jobs and good careers. Now, with more than 20 majors, Dunwoody is training the next generation of manufacturing workers to be everything employers are looking for in the 21st century.
With a motto proclaiming, “Graduate to the Good Life,” Dunwoody is still committed to putting people to work. It’s a good thing, too, because the state now faces an impending worker shortage. According to the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED), the manufacturing job market is expected to grow by 1 percent from 2004 to 2014, offering 3,553 new jobs. But with 14.8 percent of Minnesota’s manufacturing workers being 55 or older, and 42.1 percent being 45 or older, according to DEED, that 1 percent is only a measly fraction of the positions expected to open up within the next few years. Of course, automation will make some occupations obsolete: semiconductor processors, photographic processing machine operators and electromechanical equipment assemblers, to name a few. But skilled workers such as welders, machinists and computer-controlled machine tool operators will be in extremely high demand. “These same high-skill occupations that are expected to grow are also facing retirement problems,” says Kirsten Morell, DEED’s communications director. In other words, Minnesota baby boomers are retiring, and the state’s manufacturing arena will need all the workers it can get.
But manufacturing companies aren’t looking for just anyone. “One of our challenges,” Morell says, “is to ensure that the work force with the necessary skill sets is available to meet the demands and requirements of manufacturing as it evolves over the next 10 years.”
Minnesota state economist Tom Stinson agrees, anticipating an increased need for skills beyond those acquired from a high school education. “There is going to be a premium on having skills,” Stinson says. “Dunwoody is a good example of a place where people get that additional background that is going to be needed in the next few years.”
Keeping Up with Manufacturing
When askedwhat has changed about manufacturing over the last 20 years,Wright cracks a smile. “Everything,” he says. The college’s president for the last six years, Wright started his career at Dunwoody in the early 1980s and has been keeping up with the changing industry ever since. Manufacturing isn’t the gritty, back breaking work it used to be. While manual labor still has a place in a machine shop, much of what is happening today is done on a computer. “If you ask someone who graduated from Dunwoody’s automotive program 20 years ago, they’ll tell you, ‘I don’t know how to fix my car anymore’ because it’s all computerized,” Wright says. Where automotive students used to have to slide under a car to find the problem, computerized engine analyzers can now discover the source of many car problems at the touch of a button.
To train today’s manufacturing workers, Dunwoody is a fully integrated laptop campus. Each of the 1,550 students has all of the latest software necessary for his or her field of study on a laptop provided by the school, which students can take home and use to check assignments and communicate with instructors online. Recent campus improvements, spearheaded by Wright, make for a more comfortable academic experience. An ewly landscaped and paved parking lot offers free parking, a rare downtown amenity. An added building called Carlson Commons houses a student lounge, student game rooms and additional restrooms. The Warren Building, which accommodates Dunwoody’s automotive and HVAC programs, has been significantly remodeled. Although the focus remains on useful career skills, students receive a full education including math, English and social sciences. Close relationships with local businesses guarantee donations of new equipment for labs and training facilities. And as technology moves forward, so does everything Dunwoody teaches.
According to Wright, attending a traditional liberal arts college isn’t always what it appears to be. “Education is missing the mark in terms of linking up people who have spent a lot of time and money on their education to the real jobs that are out there,” he says. About one-third of Dunwoody’s current students transfer from other colleges or come to Dunwoody after graduating with a two- or four-year degree. One of those students, a recent graduate of a four-year Twin Cities college, came to Dunwoody to train for a career after working as a valet parking attendant in downtown Minneapolis. Many current Dunwoody students were successful scholars in college but were completely lost once it came time to exchange cap and gown for suit and tie.
A large part of Dunwoody’s job placement success comes from anticipating the needs of industry. The school has developed close relationships with many local businesses, including Hunt Electric, Rimage, Kraus-Anderson Construction Company, Haas Automation, Inc., Morrie’s Automotive Group and Harper Corp. of America, just to name a few. These long-standing partnerships help students with post-college job placement, and Dunwoody specifically tailors its curriculum to fit companies’ evolving needs. When Haas Automation, Inc. needed more workers trained on its new CNC machine tool building equipment, it donated multiple units to Dunwoody. “We’ve basically converted our lab into a Haas training center,” Wright says. Harper Corp. specializes in flexography, or printing on flexible surfaces such as grocery labels. When they saw a need for more trained flexography printers, Dunwoody was immediately accommodating. Dunwoody students have since become experts, winning national awards in flexography for three of the past five years the awards have been given out.
Dunwoody teaches what the industry needs today, so that jobs will be immediately available for graduates. In the 1980s, the robotics buzz enticed some technical schools to offer training and degree programs in the revolutionary field. But when students graduated with a degree in robotics, they couldn’t find a job at that point in time. “We can’t get too far in front of our employers because then there might not be great jobs waiting for our students,”Wright says. “We’ve got to be just a few inches behind the employers. We have to know what they’re doing and what their needs are going to be.”
This flexibility comes in part from Dunwoody’s status as a private, independently funded college. Dunwoody’s board of trustees is an impressive collection of business and community leaders committed to ensuring Dunwoody’s programs remain current. And with roughly $4 million in annual donations and some careful financial planning, the school can afford to keep up its reputation of constant adaptation to the job market at large. “At Dunwoody, no program is sacred. If the program is not meeting an economic need in the community, we will change it and, reluctantly sometimes, we’ll get rid of it,” Wright says. The baking program was eliminated in 1998 because it wasn’t viable; the job market had changed dramatically. Likewise, if there is a need for a new program, Dunwoody can create one quickly. One of four new programs, the bachelor of science in applied management, was made at the request of alumni who found it difficult to advance in their careers without a four year degree. Where it might take colleges in the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system many years to launch a new degree curriculum, Dunwoody’s entire program was approved in October 2006 and had its first students enrolled that December.
First-Class Results
Staying current definitely has its rewards. For years, the career success of Dunwoody alumni has been unprecedented. “I could rattle off a whole list of guys from Dunwoody who have done well and started off very modestly,” says Popehn. Recent Dunwoody graduates are no exception. In June 2007, a whopping 97 percent of students were employed in their field of study within six months of graduating. In their machine tool technology program, that number was a perfect 100 percent, with an average of 10.4 job offers per student. At the moment of graduation, 65 percent of the June 2007 class already had jobs.
With all of the fantastic opportunities in manufacturing, and the school to make them realities, why weren’t more local residents jumping on the Dunwoody bandwagon before? For Wright, it was a matter of perception. “I believe that in our society we have had a prejudice against people who don’t go on to a four-year college,” he says. “This prejudice is not limited to college-educated people, it’s also embraced by people in the trades who may have had a good trade themselves, but their dream is for their children to go to college, because that’s the great sign in our culture that someone has made it economically and socially.”
This view urged the college to consider a name change. Dunwoody’s Youth Career Awareness Program (YCAP), a 20-year-old program that encourages high school students to stay in school and exposes them to different technical fields, was in large part the driving force. Dunwoody staff members volunteer as mentors to students in underprivileged high schools and offer scholarships to Dunwoody for those who graduate. However, in speaking with some parents of YCAP students, Dunwoody staff found that YCAP students were attending college, but even a full scholarship couldn’t get them to come to Dunwoody because it was an “Institute.” “The name was getting in the way,” Wright says. “So if you can’t beat them, join them.” After polling Dunwoody students and alumni for final approval of the switch, the school became Dunwoody College of Technology in 2002.
Despite the name change, many students from metro area public high schools still weren’t selecting Dunwoody as their college of choice. Staff members were surprised when a student survey confirmed that 80 percent of students drove more than 10 miles to come to Dunwoody. “It just seemed a shame that we couldn’t do a better job of attracting more inner-city residents,” Wright says, restating the school’s vision to grant learning opportunities to people of diverse backgrounds. Additionally, anecdotal evidence from Dunwoody staff and public high school teachers confirmed that public high school curricula provided limited exposure to technical fields to its students. So they decided to create a high school that would.
The college sponsored Dunwoody Academy High School in North Minneapolis last fall, a public, full-time charter high school where tuition is free and learning is practical. In addition to traditional classes like math and science, the Academy allows students to choose from four technical platforms: automotive, construction, manufacturing technology and health care. Wright hopes this industrial focus will pique students’ interest in technical careers at Dunwoody College. Although Dunwoody does not currently have a health care program, four new medical programs will be rolled out in fall 2009. Because registered nurses currently rank among the highest on the DEED list of in-demand occupations in Minnesota (DEED expects 24,042 more job openings in the field through 2014), Dunwoody’s career-focused reputation will undoubtedly remain intact.
So far, Dunwoody director of diversity Amondo Dickerson says, the Academy is everything they had hoped it would be. According to Dickerson, areas of the metro have been deficient in terms of preparatory education, leaving some students from metro-area public high schools ill-prepared for the challenges of college. Dunwoody Academy aims to change that. “This school,” Dickerson says, “was sponsored so that students will be ready to attend a college like Dunwoody.” But the real advantages of Dunwoody Academy over a vocational school, Dickerson says, are “the relationships and the work ethic.When you look at what we have to offer, those are what set us apart.” Wright agrees. “I’ve been in front of kids [at Dunwoody Academy] many times,” he says, “and I always say we’re their parents. We’re their parent college. We know if we can get them to Dunwoody College, if we can get them graduated from Dunwoody College, we know they’ll find a heck of a good job. That’s what’s in it for us. It’s what’s in it for the community.” It’s what’s in it for the future of Minnesota manufacturing.