TCTC Building on National Reputation; Finishing Upgrades for New School Year

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

The fact that Tri-County Technical College was built on a hill in Pendleton has become a useful metaphor for a school that continues to expand its footprint and offerings.

The college was built in the early 1960s, in an era when public education was expected to be affordable and accessible.

Now the college is remaking that terrain. It is completing Pickens Hall and the second phase of its Central Plaza Nexus project, a renovation intended to make the main spine of campus more accessible to everyone. A ribbon-cutting is planned on Veterans Day November, when the college will also rededicate South Carolina’s first Vietnam War memorial, which has long stood on the Pendleton campus but is being moved to a more accessible location with expanded space for the public.

In Pendleton, upgrades to the campus will continue to move toward more accessibility to those using a wheelchair, pushing a stroller, or carrying equipment tries to cross it.

The construction is visible, but it is only one expression of the larger change taking place at Tri-County Tech. The college has been growing in enrollment, programs, partnerships, facilities, and ambition. This past fall, enrollment increased by more than four percent; in the spring, it grew by more than six percent; and the summer brought another increase. President Galen DeHay expects about 6,200 students this fall and says the college serves roughly 9,000 people annually when noncredit workforce training is included.

For a technical college, growth is not just a matter of more students arriving on campus. It is a question of what they are coming to learn, what jobs await them afterward, and whether the surrounding economy can absorb their skills. DeHay said the college’s purpose is a long-term commitment to student success, measured not only in enrollment but in graduation, employment, postgraduate earnings, and the practical question of whether an education changes the trajectory of a life.

In June, Tri-County Tech was named one of 10 finalists for the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence, a national recognition based largely on student outcomes. The distinction has allowed the college, DeHay said, to tell the story of work that has been accumulating for years: partnerships with local industry, support from legislators, philanthropy, faculty effort, and the patient construction of an institution designed around access to higher-wage careers.

“We can’t do this work alone,” DeHay said, describing the college’s development as a journey rather than a finished achievement, which is perhaps the only sensible description for an institution that must continually redesign itself to match the labor market it serves.

The fastest-growing fields at Tri-County Tech are advanced manufacturing, health care, and information technology. “Advanced manufacturing” is one of those phrases that can obscure more than it explains, but DeHay’s version is concrete: mechatronics, automotive technology, programmable logic controls, machinery maintenance, computer systems, and the people who know how to make complex industrial operations continue functioning.

These are jobs that rely on Artificial Intelligence technology but cannot be reduced to it, requiring human beings who can diagnose a malfunction, repair equipment, interpret systems, and take responsibility for work that is both physical and technical. DeHay sees them as high-skill, high-wage careers, and he believes they are less likely to be eliminated by artificial intelligence than transformed by it.

AI, he said, will enable many jobs rather than remove them. Workers in two-year-college fields may need to add new skills as technology changes, and people with bachelor’s degrees, graduate degrees, or years of experience may return for shorter training programs. The college’s task is to make that upskilling possible without requiring someone to abandon work, family, or the rest of life in order to do it.

The college’s industry partnerships are designed to keep training close to the actual work. Every program has an advisory committee, but the college also brings in high-performing workers — not only supervisors or executives — to help map out the skills a job requires. Through a process known as DACUM, or “Developing A Curriculum,” those workers break their occupations into tasks, tools, knowledge, and decisions. Faculty members and curriculum specialists then turn that knowledge into instruction.

In theory, the process is simple: ask the people who do the work what the work requires. In practice, it is an unusually direct way of keeping a college curriculum from drifting too far from the factory floor, the hospital wing, the truck cab, or the repair shop.

Health care is another expanding frontier. Tri-County Tech is working with AnMed Health to increase nursing enrollment by 100 students a year over the next five years, an effort meant to answer a growing regional demand for nurses. The partnership is necessary, DeHay said, because nursing is the college’s most expensive program to operate.

But for every nurse the college produces, he said, Tri-County Tech loses money. Clinical programs require faculty, laboratories, equipment, placements, and facilities that cannot be improvised. AnMed’s role includes helping provide some of the resources that make expansion possible. The arrangement is an example of the kind of partnership technical colleges increasingly depend on with an employer with an urgent need for workers helps fund the education of those workers, while the college provides the structure, instruction, and credential.

The college is also developing a physical-therapy-assistant program, and recently hired a program director, a necessary step toward national accreditation. The two-year degree would prepare graduates to assist physical therapists in rehabilitation and recovery settings, another high-demand field that depends on personal contact and practical skill.

Dental hygiene may be next. DeHay said the college is studying where such a program might be housed, with Easley emerging as a possibility. The field is lucrative and in demand, but expensive to establish. The college is looking to corporate partners, state lawmakers, and federal support to assemble the equipment and facilities needed to make it real.

Tri-County Tech now operates across Anderson, Oconee, and Pickens counties, with each campus developing something like a specialty.

The Pendleton campus remains the original center, where Pickens Hall will house the I-BEST program — Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training — along with cybersecurity, business administration, expanded early-childhood education, and other programs. I-BEST, now celebrating its 10th year, provides under-resourced students with pathways into manufacturing and health-care careers.

The Anderson campus, near the 28 Bypass, is undergoing a $31 million expansion scheduled for completion late next year. Plans include a full two-year mechatronics program, automotive technology, a new diesel and heavy-diesel certificate, expanded commercial-driver training, power-line education, and heavy-equipment programs.

At the Easley campus, the college is concentrating more heavily on health-care education, including the planned physical-therapy-assistant program and the possible future dental-hygiene program. The Oconee campus remains a center for advanced manufacturing and dual-enrollment work with the local school district.

The programs have a remarkable financial proposition attached to them. DeHay said some students with high financial need can attend Tri-County Tech using Pell Grants, LIFE Scholarships, and the state’s SC WINS scholarship program and still receive a refund. Students without high financial need may pay roughly $500 to $1,000 out of pocket.

When DeHay began working at the college in 1999, annual tuition was about $500. In actual out-of-pocket cost for some students, he said, the college remains startlingly close to that figure more than a quarter-century later.

SC WINS supports short-term, high-priority workforce programs, including truck-driver training, emergency medical technician training, phlebotomy, plumbing, electrical work, and other fields where a credential can lead relatively quickly to a job with family-sustaining wages. In an age when the cost of a four-year degree often dominates the conversation about higher education, Tri-County Tech is making a quieter argument: that college can still be affordable, specific, and close to home.

For students who do intend to move on to a four-year institution, Tri-County Tech’s Bridge to Clemson program remains one of its most visible successes. The program is celebrating its 20th year and now serves about 1,050 students annually.

Its measure of success, DeHay said, is not simply how many students enroll at Clemson after starting at Tri-County. It is whether those students finish. Bridge students graduate from Clemson at the same rate as students who began there as freshmen, a statistic DeHay calls unusually strong by national standards.

The college’s foundation has also raised more than $1.3 million in about a year and a half for a new dual-enrollment academy with Clemson, with the goal of making the program free for students permanently. It is another example of the college’s larger aspiration: to make the first step into higher education less dependent on a family’s ability to pay for it.

Tech is also awaiting the fate of directed funding from the South Carolina General Assemble. DeHay said about $8 million in capital funding for Tri-County Tech could be funded, including support for the Anderson-campus expansion and deferred maintenance. The money is needed because high-demand programs are also high-cost programs. A college cannot train a future electrician, nurse, diesel technician, or mechatronics specialist with a lecture hall and a whiteboard alone.

By this time next summer, DeHay hopes to be talking about expanded programs, completed campus projects, and another successful year. By April 2027, he hopes the college will have won the Aspen Prize and been named the nation’s leading community college.

It is an ambitious wish, but Tri-County Tech has built itself around the proposition that ambition works best when it is attached to a tool, a credential, a classroom, a laboratory, and a job waiting at the other end.