COC’s Automotive Technology students share program complaints at board meeting  

Students from the College of the Canyons’ Automotive Technology department are not happy about the state of the program. 

At the college’s regular board meeting Wednesday, 11 students and one instructor filled the front rows of the audience to speak at the start of the meeting during public comment on items not on the agenda.  

The problems, according to students who spoke at the podium, are mainly twofold: the discontinuation of “live work” as part of the program’s teaching model — where students perform hands-on work on real customer and staff vehicles — and the disengaged method of instruction used in some classes. 

COC student Chase Roman told board members that with the exception of two classes, including one taught by Gary Sornborger, the faculty member who’d accompanied the students to the meeting, he believed the classes he’d taken as part of the Automotive Technology program were ineffective for learning.  

“Outside of those two classes, I don’t think I would have learned a single thing with the money I’ve spent so far at this college,” Roman said.  

Board member Fred Arnold thanked the students for sharing their experiences, and proposed bringing members of the department in for an “Up Close and Personal” presentation, where college departments share their accomplishments at the head of regular board meetings.  

“Thanks for coming. Thanks for being a part of College of the Canyons, and perhaps we can do an Up Close and Personal with the Auto Technology and maybe (have a) deeper dive on the topic that came up,” Arnold said.  

The discontinuation of live work has been a point of contention for some Automotive Technology students for the past several months, according to a message sent to the Signal back in January about the program change.  

Students at the podium Wednesday described live work as a necessary method of not only practicing the skills they need to be employable, but also replicating the conditions that make them usable. 

COC student Grant Prince said the program’s live work component is an indispensable part of a curriculum that’s necessarily designed for students preparing to apply skills learned in the class to a fast-paced work environment.  

“Live work is more than just hands-on practice. It is the bridge between classroom learning and real automotive industry (work),” Prince said. “By working on actual customer and staff vehicles, students gain real-world experience that cannot be replicated through simulations alone … and (it) prepares students for fast-paced environments of dealerships and independent repair shops.” 

Bolstering the college’s career and technical education programs has been a priority at COC for several years. 

COC Superintendent/President Jasmine Ruys said at a recent open house for the college’s interim Advanced Technology Center that discussions about building a permanent ATC began in 2018, at a time when the college was considering how to best prepare students for the future of the manufacturing jobs market. 

Since then, a new ATC building has been one of the college’s most intensely pursued new facility projects — specifically for the purpose of giving students training suited to the needs of Santa Clarita’s job market.  

“When completed, (the ATC) will provide our students the state-of-the-art training they need to enter the manufacturing technology workforce, and further solidify COC’s reputation as a trusted industry partner and driver of the community’s continued economic development,” said former COC interim CEO David Andrus in a news release last summer, announcing the college was moving forward with a Valencia campus ATC. 

Yet at Wednesday’s board meeting, Roman argued that even aside from live work, Automotive Technology classes lacked the robustness that’d make students ready for the automotive industry: The vehicles the students work on aren’t test-driven, he said, and students work on tasks assigned via a lab sheet without knowing why those tasks are significant.  

Compounding those issues are some of the teachers themselves, he said, who have at times taken an extremely hands-off approach to instruction.  

“I’ve been here for six classes now, three semesters, and two of our instructors never once got up and (worked) on the vehicles with us,” Roman said. “They don’t get up close and show you how to do the work. Their indifference is transferred out to the students in the same way, because we end up knowing that they ultimately don’t care whether we are truly knowing what we’re doing.”