Bingham may have revealed more than he intended to in his quote for this story. Did he really mean to say that the UCAT board's "first choice" was not "what is best for our students"?

On what other basis was the UCAT board making choices? Perhaps, as some have suspected, the UCAT board members really are interested mostly in increasing their own personal power--and not so much in the students.

Good thing they didn't manage to secede from the Board of Regents!

Could it be that the UCAT just wants to provide a cost effective way to train people for the technical work place, while the State Board regents, was upset that students were getting reintroduced to education with an approach that was less structured then what they feel is appropriate, with a payment plan that allowed students to pay as they go without supporting the overhead of the state. As I recall SLCC was SL Trade Tech, before the state got their involved. UCAT was quite content with their model of education, The Board of Regents is the aggressors here.

Never give away training for a dime that you can bill for a dollar. This is about the continued overcharging of students for education. Check it out the costs are spiraling faster than a tank of gas. How do you control price, keep out the competition!!!!!

"SLCC will take over career and technical education in Salt Lake County, absorbing the Salt Lake Skills Center"

The Salt Lake Skills Center has long been part of SLCC and is not being absorbed into SLCC. It provides more technical training than all UCAT campuses combined.

This is just the logical extension of a trend of eliminating duplication between community colleges and UCAT. A year after UCAT was founded, one of its ten colleges--the Central Applied Technology College--was absorbed into Snow College. Snow college still shows up at the UCAT trough for CTE funding. More recently, the Southeast Applied Technology was merged into the College of Eastern Utah. SLCC and the Salt Lake/Tooele ATC is the only pair of community colleges and ATCs left for this kind of merger.

Meanwhile, Mountainland and Dixie ATCs are benefiting from programs being shifted from Utah Valley University and Dixie State College as those colleges push toward more traditional education and away from skills training.