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
ment training program. The Michelin experience and some oth-
er programs that demanded high skill helped push us up a notch
in terms of the quality of the training we were delivering.”
In the beginning South Carolina mobilized a 1960s workforce
and made typewriters; soon it made helicopter and jet engines,
and one-hundred-day miracles began to transform the state.
In the 1970s, the technical training system showed other states
how to train workers and recruit industries hand in glove. Inter-
national success took place too. There was more West German
money in South Carolina than anywhere else other than West
Germany. During all the growth—as the successes accumulat-
ed—the capability of becoming a true college system gathered
strength also.
It all started so simply. Ernest Hollings stepped into a Dayton,
Ohio, night and saw a technical training center filled with people
at eleven o’clock. “The rich are getting richer and the poor are
getting poorer,” said Hollings. “We don’t have anything like that
in South Carolina.”
Well, now it did and as of 1989, the system was twenty-eight
years old. Throughout the eighties, there were no big industrial
wins, not the kind that media gush over. The eighties, however,
did something else. They set the table for more and better train-
ing that ultimately would bring in astounding companies.
December 31, 1989, was a Sunday. When the clock struck
midnight, it ended a run of 3,653 days that had comprised that
decade we call the eighties. That decade set events in motion that
would let South Carolina grab not just national but international
headlines. The 1980s would help the state make history in the
decade to come.
The eighties accomplished something else just as, if not more,
important. Overcoming internal barriers. Remember how the
state’s textile executives opposed technical training for mill
workers? Dr. Jim Morris does. “When I first came here, if the
