Technical difficulties: Navigating through South Park's trade schools

If the saying “third time’s a charm” rings true for Elizabeth Flores, then she’s finally on the right path to a career.

Flores, an East Los Angeles native, started taking classes at Los Angeles Trade-Tech College this fall. She’s a part of the school’s nursing program and hopes to become a medical assistant after she graduates. But it took Flores a while to get to LATTC.

She graduated from Schurr High School in Montebello, about 10 miles away from Downtown LA, in 2009. She tried Le Cordon Bleu culinary school and a nursing program at American Career College before settling at LATTC.

“I started Le Cordon Bleu in 2009. I ended up having a baby so I had to drop out,” Flores said. “After that I tried ACC, and it ended up not working out either. I ended up having another baby then, and that was this past year, October 2014.”

She said she decided to try college for a third time after finding out about a program LATTC was doing with AltaMed, a California health care provider. AltaMed was so in need of new medical assistants that it offered to pay for the full cost of tuition for anyone training to become one at LATTC. Flores is set to finish the one-year program this spring.

“They went around looking for students that wanted to do medical assisting, so they’re paying for everything,” she said. “That’s why I’m still continuing with this.”

LATTC is one of nine schools apart of the Los Angeles Community College District. Located on the border of South Park between Washington Boulevard, Grand Avenue, 23rd Street and Flower Street, the campus serves about 15,000 students in the Los Angeles community a year. In addition to nursing, the school offers a wide variety of programs in fields like business, construction, counseling, cosmetology, culinary arts, design and mechanics.

But LATTC isn’t the only option within a few blocks in South Park. The neighborhood is home to several other vocational colleges. Some are general vocational schools, while others cater to a much more specific group of students.

Coast Career Institute offers a similar array of programs as LATTC. It has some of the typical vocational programs like nursing or mechanics as well as some niche offerings in things like security guard training or cake decorating. It has a much smaller campus, located on 1340 S Hill St., than LATTC, and serves about 200 students a year as of last year’s enrollment data.

Abram Friedman Occupational Center, located on 1646 S. Olive St., is another general vocational college in South Park, offering programs in graphic design, construction, electrical repairs, automotive repairs and even barbering. Unlike CCI, a private, for-profit institution, AFOC is public institution part of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s division of career education.

For more specific career paths, there are even more options for South Park residents. Michael Vincent Academy offers training programs for hairstylists and makeup artists. Its studio is located on 1138 S. Broadway St.

For a completely different route, the Universal Truck Driving School offers training for future big rig drivers. Its administrative office is located on 1600 S. Hill St., though its garage and training ground is in East LA.

Maria Hernandez is an administrator at UTDS. The school offers written test preparation and driver training for commercial driver's license tests. She says the school has about 10 new students come in a week. Training usually lasts five weeks and the standard program costs $2,500.

"There are a lot of jobs," Hernandez said of the truck driving industry. "Local, out of state. Many, many jobs."

The biggest name of the career schools in South Park is the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising. Last year, the school had more than 3,000 students. Like MVA, FIDM offers a variety of two-year aesthetics programs, including fashion design, graphic design, interior design and jewelry design, as well as some four-year industry management programs.

Soo Moon is an interior design student at FIDM. A native of Korea, she came to the U.S. in 2007 just as she was going into high school. She spent a couple of years in community college, but became interested in FIDM's interior design program after her sister enrolled in FIDM.

“Write now, I’m just learning the basic sketching and drawing,” she said. “It’s only my second quarter.”

Tuition can vary greatly across these institutions. According to the National Center on Education Statistics, average annual tuition at LATTC was $1,220 last year. At CCI, that number was $5,175, almost fivefold that of LATTC. At FIDM, annual tuition goes up more than another fivefold, averaging $29,930 last year.

The quality at private institutions like ACC or CCI was noticeably higher, at least during Flores’ experience, which can explain why tuition can be so much higher than it is at public institutions for comparable programs.

“To be honest, ACC has way more help for the students,” she said. “Maybe it’s me and that I haven’t looked for it, but over there at ACC, they’re just throwing it at you, and over here we have to go find it.”

But the price difference is more important than the quality difference for students like Flores.

“For someone like me,” she said, “coming from over there with two kids, and having to pay rent and bills every month, it’s perfect coming over here to LATTC.”