VALLEY BUSINESS : Institute Aims to Turn Profit on High-Tech Industry : Jobs: A new campus of DeVry will open soon with the goal of preparing students for employment in the Valley, where there is a shortage of qualified workers.

WEST HILLS — One of the newest private schools in the San Fernando Valley hopes to cash in on one of the most pressing demands facing Valley industry: the lack of qualified workers for high-tech jobs.

DeVry Institute of Technology will open its new campus Nov. 1 at the site of the former Hughes Missile plant near Roscoe Boulevard and Fallbrook Avenue in West Hills.

The new DeVry campus represents both an expansion designed to complement the college’s other Southern California locations--Pomona and Long Beach--and an effort to fill a crucial shortage of high-tech workers, according to Iraj Borbor, recently named dean of the new campus.

“The San Fernando Valley is a logical location because the Valley has one of the largest manufacturing centers in the United States and is part of a large economy that is also highly technological,” Borbor said.

“Anything that has to do with computers is in demand now. Our business administration program, for example, is business-related and computer-related. Our telecommunications program is computer-based,” he added.

Opportunities are especially bright for women with high-tech training because so few women enter technical fields, yet many companies are actively seeking women with technical training to ensure a diverse work force, he noted.

“They’re looking for female graduates in technology, and they’re not finding them,” Borbor said. He said fewer than 10% of workers entering technical fields in the United States are women, adding that DeVry is trying to attract more women to its campuses through its Women in Technology and Women in Business programs.

DeVry, of course, might be expected to tout demand for technical training--that’s how the company makes money. But Valley business leaders concur with the school’s assessment.

“It has been abundantly clear for quite some time that we are not producing the work force that is demanded by industry. A great many industries are going outside of California to recruit,” said Joe Lucente, co-chair of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn.’s education committee.

Lucente is also co-director of the Fenton Avenue Charter School in Lake View Terrace, which teaches children from pre-kindergarten through fifth grade. He said the school places a heavy emphasis on computer literacy because the demand for technically competent workers is expected to continue for years.

The need for high-tech workers was underscored in a recent report by the California Employment Development Department, which said that more than two-thirds of employers who responded to an agency survey said they had difficulty finding qualified workers--despite the higher wages and benefits companies are offering for such workers.

The shortage is “beyond a need--it’s an opportunity for people in the Valley and surrounding areas who can get the training for higher-paying jobs,” said Daniel Blake, a labor economist at Cal State Northridge.

“A technical training institution like this helps an area like Los Angeles in that, because it’s here, it attracts businesses that know they can get highly skilled workers,” Blake said.

He said that Employment Development Department figures show strong projected job growth for computer programming, systems analysis, installing and maintaining networks, Internet-related specialties and a host of other technical jobs.

According to agency figures for Los Angeles County, the number of jobs in some of those fields will have grown by up to 55% in the period 1995-2002. The number of systems engineers in the county, for example, is expected to grow to nearly 22,300 in 2002, compared with about 14,400 in 1995, while the number of computer engineers is expected to grow by 40% to more than 7,800 during that time.

The demand for high-tech workers seems made to order for DeVry, one of the largest private schools in the country, with 38,000 students, according to the company.

Borbor said the West Hills campus will offer bachelor’s degree programs in electronics engineering technology, computer information systems, business administration, telecommunications management, technical management and related fields. It will also offer associate degree programs.

The emphasis at DeVry is equal parts theory and practice, according to Borbor, a former engineering consultant for companies in the United Kingdom. Borbor, who joined the DeVry faculty in 1984, has engineering degrees from Liverpool University and Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in England and from Georgia State University.

“Our programs have a hands-on slant to them,” Borbor said. DeVry keeps the curriculum current through industry advisory boards, student internships with local businesses and regular meetings with business leaders, he said.

Although DeVry offers no liberal arts degrees, “It’s a misconception to think of us as just a technical school,” Borbor added. “We are a four-year college, the difference being that our students have an opportunity to finish in three years because we have three semesters per year.”

Tuition and fees at the West Hills campus will run about $8,000 per year, with scholarships and financial aid available, comparable to aid programs at other institutions, Borbor said.

DeVry will probably start out with a few hundred students and a small faculty when it opens in November, but the school plans to grow to about 3,500 students, 50 permanent faculty and many more part-time instructors, he said.

The West Hills location, the 17th DeVry site in North America, houses 30 classrooms, computer and electronics laboratories with more than 340 computer workstations, a library and student common areas.

DeVry has also applied for state approval to offer classes in its Keller Graduate School of Management, a master’s degree program.

DeVry will offer details about its programs at open houses scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Sept. 18 and 9 a.m. Sept. 22.