Pittsburgh Technical College in Oakdale needs more students like Regina Gurske.
Gurske, 20, of South Park, is three months away from earning her associate degree in “surgical technology,” which will enable her to work in an operating room assisting a surgeon with surgical tools and medications.
She said she chose the degree program because she wanted to get into medicine and liked the idea of working on a team in an operating room, rather than meeting with patients individually on her own.
Gurske said she already is employed at St. Clair Hospital in Mt. Lebanon, where she receives about $5,000 in tuition assistance. And she said she’s had multiple job offers before she’s even graduated, in a field where salaries average more than $50,000 per year. She is about to start her three-month internship in an operating room.
“Surgical technologists are in extremely high demand,” she said.
But interest in the program in which Gurske is enrolled at the college has recently dropped, according to a PublicSource report about the challenges of training medical staff in the region. The college is struggling with enrollment in its 30 programs, which include everything from welding and culinary arts to criminal justice and nursing.
The college’s drop in enrollment was exacerbated by the pandemic, according to PTC president Alicia Harvey-Smith. Harvey-Smith said the college has fewer than 1,000 students enrolled in its 30 programs — less than half of its advertised enrollment a decade ago. The college’s current goal, Harvey-Smith said, is to enroll at least 1,500 students.
Pittsburgh Technical College transitioned from being a for-profit employee-owned trade institute to a nonprofit college in 2016 and restructured its debts. Then in 2017, the college was flagged by the Department of Education because of the low salaries of some of its recent graduates. A year later, its longtime president departed.
Harvey-Smith took over leadership of the school just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, she has been trying to diversify the college’s revenue streams by creating an educational foundation that can attract philanthropic money and offering professional development for companies, she said.
The school has partnered with Aurora to develop a new robotics service technician training program, and with Carnegie Mellon University to attract high school students who complete CMU’s robotics program. It also is partnering with West Allegheny School District to enroll high school students who want to earn college credit in health care courses.
“We are taking a serious look at the institution and expanding how we can service our region and how we can service the industries in our region based on what we do well,” Harvey-Smith said.
During a tour of the college’s 180-acre campus on Monday for U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, some of the electrical, welding and HVAC teachers at the school said that their teaching spaces are too small to accommodate a growing number of students and a curriculum that needs to change rapidly to keep up with the times.
The Energy Technology Center space where they teach welding was built a decade ago to train workers for the fracking jobs moving into the region. Space-X hired a couple of its recent welding graduates at a salary of $150,000, Harvey-Smith said.
Dave Becker, the academic chair of the college’s electronics, trades and technology program, told Deluzio that the college needs more business support.
“We've got to figure out ways to get businesses to drive people to trade schools,” he said. “We can't recruit enough people. So we've got to figure out creative ways to get businesses — sort of like the model that unions use [for] apprenticeships.”
Because PTC is a private college, it doesn’t receive state or county funding. Deluzio recently helped the college secure $3.8 million in federal employee-retention tax credits that it had been requesting since 2021 but which had not been released by the IRS until this week. Deluzio’s office helped fast-track a response from the IRS to figure out what paperwork was missing in order to obtain the COVID-19 pandemic relief funding.
Deluzio said he was pleased to hear that the college’s medical programs are popular.
“You talk to any big health care system in our region, there are problems with getting folks and keeping folks in those jobs,” Deluzio said. “They are hard jobs, which we should make more humane. But we also have to be training folks to come and fill them.”
Harvey-Smith said the one-time addition of federal money will be a “comprehensive infusion across the institution.” The college plans to hire and train faculty in key areas and provide scholarships for students who otherwise might not be able to afford college, she said.
The school also will look at providing additional support for students, such as a counseling program that is looking to help the roughly 15% of students who have a learning disability.
Gurske said Pittsburgh Technical College was a good value for her: It prepared her with the skills to succeed in her medical internship. The $22,000 tuition is also less expensive than the four-year colleges she considered.
Gurske’s degree program also benefited from the closure of another private trade school, the Pittsburgh Career Institute, in November, after the school lost its accreditation, she said. Some of the Career Institute’s students enrolled in Gurske’s program at PTC, she said.
PTC also tried to enroll students after the Pittsburgh Art Institute closed in 2019 and provided space for some ITT Technical Institute students in 2016 after that school closed abruptly. Two other local private trade schools merged in 2019, amid a growing national trend of closing private schools.
“Although we're extremely excited to be getting the tax credit and it will go to tremendous use, there are still needs that exist,” Harvey-Smith said. “And so we would like to stabilize long-term with additional support.”
