By By JONATHAN CLAYBORNE
Staff Writer
Wayne Fisher was on the fast track to success.
The Bath resident was a plant manager at Flanders Filters in Washington.
He’d had three jobs in 15 years, two of which were in engineering departments.
A 36-year-old father of three and the husband of a working wife, Fisher was ascending the professional ladder.
“One day they called me in the office,” he said. “I never saw it coming.”
After watching rounds of layoffs take out fellow workers, Fisher suddenly realized he was next in line.
“We were doing well,” he said. “And then, as the market took a downturn, the new manager on the totem pole got knocked out.”
Faced with an uncertain future, Fisher elected to go back to school.
This fall he enrolled in the two-and-a-half-year biotechnology program at Beaufort County Community College.
“It’s a growing market,” he said of his chosen field.
Thanks to prior credits, Fisher hopes to graduate early in 2011.
He’s returning to school through a worker-retraining program administered in part by JobLink in Washington.
As the economy improves but jobs remain hard to get, Fisher is just one of a flood of students heading back to school, or entering college for the first time, according to BCCC officials.
The college has seen significant increases in enrollment over the past couple of semesters, related Judy Meier Jennette, director of the BCCC Foundation and public-information officer for the college.
By the end of the fifth day of early registration, BCCC already had enrolled 1,562 students for next spring, Jennette said.
By contrast, the college enrolled 1,345 for spring 2008, and had 1,571 students at the start of classes in spring of this year, she said.
With late registration starting in January 2010, it appears the college is on track to break previous enrollment records, Jennette acknowledged.
“The primary thing is just the bad economy,” she commented, “because when people don’t have jobs they go back to school and get retrained.”
BCCC officials were surprised by the jump in registration for the spring semester, which tends to be less of a draw for students than the fall session, shared David McLawhorn, president of the college.
“The folks that are being laid off are coming back to us to retrain,” McLawhorn said. “A lot of them are trying to find jobs that are more recession-proof.”
The college also is seeing a rise in college-transfer students fresh out of high school, thanks partly to tuition increases at four-year colleges and universities, McLawhorn noted.
Faced with budget cuts, BCCC staff and faculty are taking on more responsibility to keep up with demand, Jennette added, noting that the college’s dean of administration is teaching an economics class.
“We’re doing as much as we can with full-time people, and our part-time staff is down because we’re just trying to do it internally as much as we can,” she said.
Fisher offered a little advice for other workers who have been laid off and need to further their education: go back to school.
“I just encourage everybody to do it,” he said. “Don’t be held back.”