Since its doors first opened in Providence in 1911, the Katharine Gibbs School has been at the forefront of educating skilled workers. Opened as a secretarial school for women when the job of an executive assistant was primarily for men, the school’s founder Katharine Ryan Gibbs felt women needed more opportunity to become financially independent. Her idea caught on — creating seven schools nationwide.
Today, after almost nine decades and 90,000 graduates, the school continues at the forefront, said David Waldron, president at the Providence campus. Though the school, at 178 Butler Ave. on the city’s East Side, still offers traditional secretarial courses, it has expanded to include two new programs: visual communications, and computer technical support.
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Waldron credits the school’s expansion with this year’s enrollment of more than 450 students, the school’s highest.
”Historically, Katharine Gibbs has been a low-tech school, training students primarily for different kinds of secretarial work,” he said. “But we are reinventing ourselves because of economic demand. Society dictates where this school needs to be, and all of society is using computers.”
Waldron said the school’s reinvention began when The Career Education Corporation purchased it, along with the six other Katharine Gibbs Schools in 1997. The Career Education Corporation, based in Hoffman Estate, Ill. owns and operates schools in 15 states, offering programming in career-orientated disciplines, including computer technologies, visual communication and design, business study and culinary arts.
Waldron said being part of the Career Education Corporation has provided Katharine Gibbs with a greater ability to meet the needs of its students.
”One of the great things of having a system like this is that we can use each other as a resource,” he said. “For example if one of the other schools wanted to start a secretarial program they would look to us for help and when we wanted to expand our programming we looked to some of the other schools that already had it in place.”
Financially, Waldron said, the school runs independently from its parent organization, but he said many of the new features at the schools, including its new computer labs, were the result of help from the Career Education Corporation.
Now, Waldron said, Katharine Gibbs offers “three schools within a school,” all of which are based on computers.
”We are a career training school with a focus on computers,” he said. “If a student wants a career working with computers she can take the secretarial program. If she wants to market her creativity on a computer they can take the visual communication and design program and if they want to work on computers they can enroll in the computer technical support program.”
Waldron said the new programs are gaining momentum. Officially approved last March, he said, the graphic design program already has more than 150 students enrolled.
”Providence has a great art culture,” Waldron said. “There are a lot of students who are looking to market their creativity through advertising, publishing, or animation and many of them are coming here.”
Waldron said what draws many students to the school is the time it takes to graduate, with each program lasting only nine to 15 months, a high rate of job placement, and the availability of financial aid.
”The programs right now have an appropriate length for students to achieve the necessary outcome and that is very appealing,” he said. “And we are offering training for jobs that are in demand.”
According to the federal Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the need for skilled workers, or workers that have some sort of specialized training beyond high school, is at a staggering 65 percent in the year 2000, up 20 percent from 1991.
”The employer is our ultimate customer,” Waldron said. “A lot of employers are the same. They need computer technicians, they need designers, and they will always need executive assistants. As long as the employers continue to demand our graduates, we will continue to do what we are doing.”
Waldron expects enrollment over the next five years to swell to almost 1,000 students, forcing the school to look for a new location in Providence. But, he said, no matter how large the school gets its mission will always be the same.
”We are and will remain focused in one direction,” he said. “We are a career-training school, and we have a moral obligation to continue on that path.”
