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IMS Global: Describe for us, please, Ocean County College and what makes it unique? How would you define the community you serve and what is the profile of your average student? What are some of the more popular programs at your institution?

FW: The college is located in Tom's River which is on the New Jersey shore. It's about an hour and a half south of New York City and about the same distance east of Philadelphia. This is a county of about 500,000 people, has a very large retirement community. It's a beautiful coastal area - beaches and yacht harbors. Our college has about 5,888 FTEs for FY 06 (July 1 through June 30, 2006). Our students are heavily transfer-oriented. We do not offer the traditional hands-on career programs. From 75 to 80 percent of our graduates transfer to a four-year institution. The largest career program we offer is nursing located on our main and southern extension campuses.

We now have a partnership with Kean University here in New Jersey. They are going to build a 60,000 square foot classroom building on our campus and eventually, as the enrollments grow, a dormitory so that students can attend Ocean County College for two years then complete their degree locally through Kean. New Jersey now has the state-sponsored "STARS" scholarship program: any student graduating from the top 20 percent of their high school class gets two years of free tuition and fees at a community college. And if they're successful at that level, maintaining a B average, they get two years at the university. We believe that this partnership with Kean will transform higher education in Ocean County. Students in this area have not had convenient access to universities. Most of the universities are located in the northern part of the state. This was an initiative of our president and already we have over 300 students who intend to transfer to Kean in popular fields such as criminal justice, business, education, history, including other liberal arts. Kean is already offering the second two years of the BSN in nursing at our Southern Education Center.

IMS Global: Tell us about the nursing program at Ocean and some of the unique challenges you've faced?

FW: Like most community colleges in the USA, the nursing program is one of our traditional and most popular programs. We're responding to the nursing shortage, but have more student applications than we can accept at any one time. We have a day program, we have an evening program, and we now have a One-Day-Per-Week Nursing Program in which students do an online portion. They come to campus one day a week, which is Wednesday, at which time they do their labs and clinicals. The hybrid program was started about three years ago. It was the brainchild of Professors Leah Kelly and Joan Barrett who had the idea for a while but the concept was never developed. We then got a new dean of health sciences and human performance, Jim Brown, who is technologically oriented and pushed the idea forward. Through the efforts of the dean and faculty, we also received a $458,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that provided the resources to build the program.

The purpose of the one-day program was really to accomplish three things: to expand the program without the additional cost of building new classrooms, to reach out to underserved populations, and to offer opportunities to people who already were working in healthcare and who see nursing as a career ladder but cannot attend a traditional program because of family and work obligations. Thus, applicants with patient care experience are given priority in admissions.