S C T E CHN I CA L CO L L E G E S Y S T EM ’ S
F I R S T 5 0 Y EAR S
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The 1980s
A D E S I G N F O R T E C H N O L O G I C A L C H A N G E
went to the University of South Carolina. So, that small piece of
data said something to me about a change in image.”
The change was not just cosmetic; it reflected a real need for
improvement. Dr. Darrel Staat remembers how things used to be.
“In the 1970s the business community always said, ‘We just need
you to teach guys how to weld; teach women how to do surgical,
whatever it happened to be. Just teach them that specific stuff.’ By
the time we were approaching the 1990s one of the reasons we
had General Education transfer is because the business commu-
nity said, ‘We need people who can think, not just do.’”
The seeds of change had long been sowed. Dr. Lex Walters,
president of Piedmont Technical College from 1968 to 2008,
again points out a key legislative change. “In 1972, legislation
moved the system’s advisory committee from under the state De-
partment of Education into its own board, the State Board for
Technical and Comprehensive Education. That legislation broad-
ened the perspective of the system and established the base for
the institutions to be comprehensive.”
Broader perspectives didn’t come immediately. Dr. Marilyn
“Murph” Fore has been with Horry-Georgetown Technical Col-
lege since 1974 and recalls those days when students weren’t on
the same level field. “We had what I would call a caste system
among the sixteen colleges up through the late 1980s where there
were a number of technical colleges in which students could take,
for example, English 101 at one technical college and then would
transfer to a senior institution. If they took that course here, it
would not transfer.”
“All students were not treated the same regardless of having
taken the same course. Upon approval by the Commission on
Higher Education that all of the technical colleges could offer the
associate in arts and associate in science programs, then all stu-
dents received the same, fair treatment and transferability. The
addition of the associate in arts and the associate in science was a
real change for Horry-Georgetown Tech.”
In time, perspectives broadened and all technical colleges
truly became comprehensive, offering programs from the most
basic to the more advanced in the two-year university transfer
programs. The state greatly benefited from the comprehensive-
ness of the institutions.
Not everyone agreed or would agree on the transfer issue—a
matter that reincarnated itself in other times and other ways.
Former state board chair Cathy Novinger said, “We had many
discussions on the transfer program, whereby you could come in
for the first two years at one of our technical colleges and transfer
to a higher institution, and I thought that was a great program.
But I thought the hands-on technical training, bringing people
to their potential with hands-on, was more important.”
Dr. Jim Morris sees things differently. “The college transfer
program makes life easier today for a lot of South Carolinians
who don’t have the money to go two or four years to a senior
institution; they can get their first two years and transfer. It was
all about affordability, and in some cases marginal students could
be brought up to par with freshman and sophomore students at
the universities. It was a wonderful thing and the best thing that
happened during my administration.”
THE EDGE DULLS
Not so wonderful was the fact that “Design for the Eighties”
was losing its cutting edge. System director Bill Dudley recalls
that several factors hurt the concept. “Edward Deming’s work
modernizing Japan affected what we were doing,” continues
Dudley, who added that the concept’s robotics emphasis came
under fire as a threat to jobs. Many new people were coming into
the system and into the General Assembly, including a new gov-
ernor who “didn’t appreciate what we were doing. We lost sup-
port.”
The chief culprit, however, was money. Dudley goes on, “we
were on the cutting edge, and I’ll be honest—it was a little pie in
the sky to a degree—it was going to cost some money. The plan
was to have a centralized facility in Columbia where we would
