Dr. Keith Cotroneo says the new home for Mountwest CTC will have 34 classrooms and labs, and ample parking on its 28-acre campus.

Every dollar funded for higher education brings four dollars back into state coffers, Dr. Keith Cotroneo told Putnam Rotarians today.

"If you figure the indirect return," he said, "people not on the welfare rolls, people not being incarcerated -- some states, such as Connecticut, have calculated (the payback to the state) as high as $16.41.

"The evidence that post-secondary education generates money for the state is irrefutable," said Cotroneo, president of Mountwest Community & Technical College since 2007 when it was Marshall University's CTC.

Now Mountwest, along with other CTCs in the state, has cut its ties with the parent university.

The board of governors has purchased 28 acres on a hill overlooking Huntington's Fifth Street interchange on Interstate-64. "It will be a wonderful resource for the community," said Cotroneo. "Thirty-four classrooms and labs, 650 parking spaces."

Mountwest expects to occupy its new home, the former Arch Coal building, by January, 2012.

"There is a very strong correlation between degree attainment and income," Cotroneo said, "and West Virginia is low in per capita income.

"Part of the reason the state has struggled with degree attainment is because of the lack of a community college system."

While the state has made progress, the change is not so fast as in the fest of the country. "If we are going to elevate the economic well-being of our citizens we have to move more than incrementally," he said.

"Community colleges in West Virginia grew up under universities. . . . The emphasis when we were under the university was largely in preparing students for the university.

"We need a centralized portal for under-prepared students, for the hundreds who need to brush up before they can really dig into a college degree program. . . . We need to centralize the support for adult basic education."

Although Cotroneo avoided this topic, critics of the university system have said that attention is weighed toward the graduate programs and upper level offerings.

The CTC and junior college tend to offer classes for persons seeking specialty career training, and these courses are usually offered at the university entry levels. Without the weight of advanced programs, tuition should be lower in a CTC than in a traditional university setting.

"We have had dramatic increases in non-traditional adult enrollment," Cotroneo said.

"Our college has a 22 percent increase. Sounds great! But we are serving 22 percent more students with the same staff because our state revenue did not increase. And we are driven largely by state revenue.

"So we're 'thinning the soup.' You spread the soup, you have less nutrients -- the less the quality of service we're able to provide.

"We need to stop thinning the soup," he said, "because our adults need quality service.

"We need to shift the cost burden away from the students. We need to have low-cost tuition, as North Carolina does. They're about half our cost.

"We need an agreement that 75 percent of the cost is paid by the state, and 25 percent by the student. And we need to keep that system consistent."

By the way, lifetime earnings for a high school dploma are $1.2 million; nationally, the earnings for the holder of an associate (two-year college) degree is $1.6 million. "What could you do with an additional $400,000?" Cotroneo asked.