A one-stop education

Come August, students majoring in business at Hillsborough Community College SouthShore will be able to earn their bachelor's degrees without ever leaving the campus.

A long-term, joint-use agreement with the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee campus last week will provide expanded educational opportunities to residents of southern Hillsborough and northern Manatee counties. If the program goes well, other four-year degrees will be offered at the Ruskin campus, said Allen Witt, HCC SouthShore president.

"USF will be hiring the teachers and presenting the degrees," he said. "We will provide the facility."

HCC SouthShore currently offers all the prerequisites students need to enter the USF business program. The agreement signed last week means those who want to stay in the area will no longer have to travel to a USF campus to finish their degrees.

"Now a student can enter Lennard High School at age 14, graduate and then walk across the street to go all the way through to a business degree," Witt said. "I think that's so cool."

In a recent survey of HCC SouthShore students, 56 percent said they were interested in earning bachelor's degrees from the USF Sarasota-Manatee campus.

"Our campus is unique in the USF system," said Chris Manning, the school's director of university relations. "We have a 15-to-1 student-to-faculty ratio, which is similar to HCC SouthShore.

In December, USF, HCC, Pasco-Hernando Community College and St. Petersburg College signed a resolution aimed at increasing the number of associate, bachelor's and graduate degrees offered regionally, reducing the time it takes a student to earn a degree and filling specific degree voids. The agreement HCC SouthShore and USFSM signed Jan. 24 is another step toward that goal, Witt said.

Since its inception in 2008, the SouthShore campus has grown exponentially. It was initially expected to be a small, regional center, but that quickly changed when, instead of 400 students, more than 1,650 registered.

That number will hit 6,000 for the 2011-12 school year, Witt said. "That's about 45 percent of the enrollment at the Brandon campus, which has been operational since the mid 1980s.

"We've already passed enrollment projections for 2020," he said. "We're the fastest-growing of all HCC campuses."

Last year, HCC purchased 20 acres north of SouthShore's existing 60-acre campus from Pulte Corp., giving the college room to grow for another 20 years, Witt said. Two more buildings will be built once funding becomes available.

Meanwhile, the school recently completed $600,000 in renovations, introduced evening classes for its students in six classrooms at Lennard High School — to alleviate space limitations — began a dual-enrollment program for college-bound students at the high school; and graduated its first class of registered nursing students in December. New programs in gerontology and practical nursing are currently being planned.

"We've come a long way from when students take classes in three classrooms in that little storefront center near McDonald's," Witt said.