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 1990s
A H I G H E R R O L E I N E D U C A T I O N
BLUE COLLAR VERSUS WHITE COLLAR
From the beginning, each college addressed local needs, and
that led to wildly ranging programs of study.
“At Horry-Georgetown,” said Dudley, “we put in hotel and
restaurant management for tourism, golf course management,
and forestry. They had a tremendous International Paper plant in
Georgetown. That was the beauty of technical education.”
Yes, but the ugly truth was that divergent-but-pragmatic
course catalogs generally didn’t impress staid academics. “We
had a tough time in the early years,” said Dudley, “because a lot of
those courses wouldn’t be accepted at the universities.”
Perhaps elitism tainted things. Access to higher education
has too often been a “haves” and “have-nots” opportunity. Back
in the day the “haves” went to college; the “have-nots” went to
vocational and trade schools. Visualize Richie Rich turning up
his nose at the kid from across the tracks studying heating and
air conditioning. We shouldn’t forget a pragmatic matter here
articulated by Montez Martin, who has served as a state board
member since 2001. “Everybody’s not going to be a four-year
college graduate. Everybody shouldn’t be. We would have a
world full of four-year college people and there wouldn’t be
anybody to do the work. We’d all be sitting around thinking and
nobody working.”
Cathy Novinger, state board member from 1990 to 2004,
brings up an ambition that materialized on the heels of World
War II. “Every parent wants their child to have a four-year de-
gree. You know, I’m probably as guilty of that as anybody, but at
the end of the day, there is so much value in many of these cer-
tificate programs and one-year certificate programs and degree
programs. It’s not all about four-year college for everybody for
everything.”
For these reasons and others, the blue-collar image of trade
and vocational institutions shouldn’t have dogged the state’s
technical colleges’ image as long as it did. Not for a moment
when you consider what was at stake.
Dr. Murph Fore goes back to the system’s very beginning.
“The Fritz Hollings, Tom Bartons, Don Garrisons, and Fred
Fores were trying to serve the agricultural base, the textile in-
dustry, the light industry, heavy industry—the blue-collar work-
ers—but blue-collar sometimes sends out an image. Your cler-
ical, your retail workers, your accountants, your bookkeepers,
your secretaries—we were trying to serve them at that time and
still do. We are the start-up for many people who want to begin
and go further in a career in business or hospitality. I always tell
individuals who have never come to this college, ‘Look at the cat-
alog. We are a reflection of the community we serve.’”
Collectively, the colleges’ catalogs reflected the state the sys-
tem served. Those catalogs helped South Carolina slough off dy-
ing textile plants and farms at death’s door. And those catalogs,
along with Special Schools, built a new South Carolina. New
generations could cross the Rubicon of knowledge into a bright
new world ... eventually.
Executive Director Dr. James Hudgins
(1999–2005)
