By Dennis Quick
Senior Staff Writer

Education and business should go together like a hand and glove, like peanut butter and jelly. Such an arrangement only makes sense and should go without saying. After all, businesses rely on educational institutions to supply them with skilled employees.

Unfortunately, the education/business relationship often has been a rocky one, not just in the Lowcountry but across the nation. You’ve heard it and we’ve written about it: Businesses just can’t find enough qualified, potential employees emerging from our schools. The gap between the schoolroom and the workday world can seem so wide as to appear almost unbridgeable.

However, here in the Lowcountry, we have a shining example of a school and an industry that have become solid partners.

I’m talking about the College of Charleston’s Hospitality and Tourism Management Department and the Lowcountry’s hospitality and tourism industry.

Recently, the industry came to the school’s rescue by agreeing to fund the department’s internship coordinator position, previously a 15-hour-a-week post. The person currently in that role is leaving the college at the end of the year.

The department needed to convert that position from part time to full time because more students have enrolled in hospitality and tourism management than had been anticipated. More than 75 students are expected to intern this coming spring in restaurants, hotels, catering establishments and event-planning companies—a reflection of how popular the program has become.

The problem was the department lacked the money to pay for a full-time internship coordinator.

John Crotts, the department’s director, appealed to local hoteliers, restaurateurs, resort managers, event planners and other hospitality-related business people to contribute $5,000 each for four years to fund a full-time internship coordinator position, with the promise that from the fifth year onward, the college will fund the job. Like champs, more than a dozen such businesses stepped up and dished out their dollars.

Now that’s what I call a beautiful friendship.

Follow that example

The Culinary Institute of Charleston at Trident Technical College is another example of how our local tourism and hospitality industry supports our educational institutions. Without the input of industry professionals, the institute probably wouldn’t be nearly as spectacular as it is and might not have gotten off the ground.

The education/business partnership flourishing in our hospitality and tourism industry is what helps make that industry a strong one.

Maybe we can follow that example in our quest to create other clusters.

Buckle your seatbelts and ride along with me as I venture, mentally, into outer space.

The AngelouEcomonics report recommends we spawn aerospace, bioscience, automotive, creative industry and advanced security clusters. It seems we could do this, in part, by spawning relationships between our educational institutions—middle schools, high schools, colleges and universities—and leading companies in each of those clusters.

How? By providing incentives for these companies not just to relocate or expand here but to fund programs in our schools and colleges that would help create the kind of work force these companies need. The funding could be part of their total investment packages. When companies invest in our region, they would invest not only in real estate and buildings, but also in education. And for their educational investments they would receive additional tax breaks.

This requires a lot of forward thinking on the part of the companies we’re trying to recruit. Most companies prefer not to relocate or expand anywhere unless the work force they want already exists.

But since qualified workers seem harder to come by these days, this is an opportunity for businesses to shape and mold their future workers, managers, planners, researchers and inventors.

Our local hospitality industry certainly doesn’t mind footing an academic bill to get the future leaders that industry needs. Maybe other industries should follow suit.

Dennis Quick is senior staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dquick@charlestonbusiness.com.

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