Shady Grove Site Offers Flexibility For Hard-Working Degree-Seekers
By Jennifer Lenhart
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Amid hugs and boisterous greetings, the pioneering students at the unconventional campus known as the Universities at Shady Grove assembled at Education Building II last week to celebrate their college graduation.
Now and then someone shouted "over here" to students heading toward the other campus structure, Education Building I, and corralled them into line for pin-on red carnations, supplied by the school for the occasion.
"There are only two buildings, you know," accounting senior Ying Huang, 30, said to a guest as she and about 100 undergraduates surfed a buffet of tuna croissant sandwiches and tortellini salad. "That's what makes it nice."
Small classes and the chance to form friendships meant a lot to Huang, who left her native China to marry and settle in Gaithersburg and missed the feeling of fitting in. She found it at USG, where the typical class size is about 30 students and people working toward the same degrees take almost all their classes together. "Here, there's a community," said Huang, whose degree will come from the University of Maryland at College Park. "We feel very strongly a rapport."
Shady Grove, a Rockville neighborhood dominated for years by its hospital, Shady Grove Adventist, has blossomed into an academic and research center with satellite campuses of the University of Maryland and the Johns Hopkins University. Nestled in Montgomery's biotechnology corridor, the campuses attract more than 7,200 students, most of them part time, and offers more than 67 degrees and dozens of certificate programs.
The universities' Montgomery centers are the physical expression of goals outlined 20 years ago, when county and state leaders invited the University System of Maryland and Hopkins to build branches in Shady Grove. The county provided 300 acres for the schools and companies, and dubbed the project "Shady Grove Life Sciences Center," an effort to develop a partnership between the growing biotechnology industry and higher education.
Drawing on the strengths of the area's multicultural community and biotechnology corridor, the two universities opened in the late 1980s with one building apiece and went on to create two unique -- and very different -- campuses.
Offering degrees from seven of its institutions, the University of Maryland system developed the Universities at Shady Grove, beginning with part-time graduate courses in some of the colleges' most popular programs. A few years ago, officials began offering day courses for upper-level undergraduate students, attracting nearly 700 this year.
Hopkins, meanwhile, offers graduate degrees in four schools focusing on business, engineering, public health, education, and arts and sciences. A little more than 5,000 part-time students currently are enrolled.
And interest in the schools continues to grow. One evening last week, dozens of Hopkins faculty and staff members worked well past the advertised 7 p.m. closing time at an open house. Professors peered from their tables to see lines of prospective students of all ages and ethnic backgrounds, with wide-ranging interests to match, perusing graduate course listings in engineering, biotechnology, public health, computer science, education and other fields.
"We call this place a meeting of the minds," said Elaine Amir, director of the Shady Grove campus. "We have people coming here who have PhDs, who have law degrees, who are coming back to take courses in specialized programs."
Most students are full-time working professionals from area schools, government agencies and the biotech industry who want to stay on top of industry advances, she said.
Hopkins faculty members either work full time at Shady Grove or shuttle from the home campus in Baltimore. The teaching ranks include newly recruited specialists from neighboring businesses, professionals with expertise in genetics, cellular biology and other fields. To accommodate the schedules of students -- and some teachers -- classes meet mainly in the evenings and on weekends.
"It's one of the reasons it's really neat -- that it's right here in Montgomery," said Peggy King-Sears, a special education professor who was interviewing students at last week's open house.
As the Shady Grove campus grew in the last decade, officials nurtured relationships with area businesses and government agencies, in some cases tailoring courses to their needs.
Fruits of those efforts include a degree in construction management technology offered at the Universities at Shady Grove. At Hopkins, a teaching laboratory opened in August, catering to the needs of area lawyers, engineers and scientists but also available to public school teachers and students through specialized courses.
Partnerships with the Montgomery County public school system and Montgomery College were forged. The campuses offer programs tailored to the needs of public school teachers and make summer programs available to students.
Working with the Universities at Shady Grove, Montgomery College signed an agreement that guarantees students who successfully complete two years in a specific track of courses to "seamlessly transfer" those credits, whereby students finish their undergraduate degree in an accelerated program. Three-quarters of USG's undergraduates have transferred from the community college, said Stewart Edelstein, executive director of the Universities at Shady Grove and Shady Grove Center.
Edelstein arranged a meeting last year with area construction industry leaders, resulting in the development of the construction specialty. USG is one of only two schools in the University System of Maryland to offer a degree in hotel and restaurant management, a direct response to the needs of Marriott Corp., headquartered in Montgomery, and other hoteliers, Edelstein said.
"One of the beauties of Shady Grove is because of our location, our relationhips are deeper and we can work more closely with client needs," he said. "We're trying to build these partnerships, and the partnerships are with these industries because they're the ones being benefited by the students we produce."
Newly minted professionals go forth into a business community that greets them eagerly. Students meet recruiters at job fairs and through word-of-mouth referrals from teachers who know the people doing the hiring.
Full-time employment -- and often, an internship or clinical rotation in advance of graduation -- are in abundant supply for genetic researchers, computer systems specialists, nurses and teachers of English for speakers of other languages.
"There's always an opportunity to advance yourself here," Amir said. "The biotech corridor is a very advanced and specialized area, and that's what we speak to all the time, and that's why we're expanding so much."
In response to the growth at the Universities at Shady Grove, the Maryland General Assembly recently approved $50 million for a new building with a library, faculty offices, student recreational facilities and student center. Construction is scheduled to begin this fall.
Hopkins, which opened its campus in 1988, also has plans to triple the size of its Shady Grove campus with four more buildings over the next 10 to 12 years.
Last week, as the Universities at Shady Grove graduation party began, Huang and about 400 celebrants filled the auditorium to overflowing. Strollers spilled into the aisles, parents and spouses held camera phones above their heads.
The formal cap-and-gown ceremonies are later this month on the home campuses of the seven University of Maryland schools with branches at Shady Grove, which does not issue its own diplomas. Last week's celebration honored the 311 undergraduates who earned their diplomas in classrooms at Shady Grove.
In some ways, the event progressed the way it would at a more traditional college, with speeches by school administrators, a slide show featuring highlights of campus life, and periodic wisecracks from the audience.
The uniqueness of USG was obvious in the diversity of students. Many have kids and spouses. Not everyone was in their twenties. Students have a wide range of ethnic backgrounds.
This year's student enrollment is 58 percent minority. Eighty percent live in the county and 68 percent work and pay taxes here, Edelstein said.
Students pay the tuition charged by their home school -- currently anywhere from $5,000 to $7,500 a year. The students' fees are as much as $800 a year less than at the home campus, depending on whether students are full time or part time. That kind of savings alone made a big difference to Tincy Thomas, 22, a Gaithersburg resident receiving a degree in accounting this year from the University of Maryland at College Park.
After graduation and a month-long break, Thomas will begin working with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, where she interned while at USG.
"For me, the choice was easy," said Thomas, who said she paid for her education through a combination of summer internships, help from her parents and a scholarship from an accounting organization. "For me it's the convenience; it's closer, and it costs less. Plus, you get to know your classmates."
The audience cheered guest speaker Tom Perez, the Montgomery County Council president, as he spoke of his background as the son of immigrants. Perez encouraged the students to be proud of their "bilingual, bicultural heritage."
"There are so many similarities between this campus and Montgomery County," Perez said. "This, like Montgonery County, is a minority-majority community. . . . This is one of the crown jewels of Montgomery. This is why businesses want to locate here. You are proof that [these colleges] are the future of our county."