Passing grades: tech schools sell well during downturn.

• Author: Caley, Nora

THE PROMISE A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO: attend technical school for a few weeks, earn a Cisco or Microsoft certification, and get a high-paying job at a dot-com with Foosball tables, massages, and free dry cleaning.

The promise now: attend technical school for more than a few weeks, and you'll probably get a job somewhere.

IT workers who once, like athletes, enjoyed signing bonuses, no longer find jobs just by showing up with a certification. "It is used to be if you had some experience or knowledge you were marketable," says Timothy Campagna, president of DeVry University's Colorado campuses. "Now you need depth and breadth." So some experienced tech workers -- and non-tech workers, too -- are going back to school.

The economics of such choices are counter-cyclical: as tech companies shutter or downsize, workers return to school to improve their tech skills. "When the economy goes down you see more people coming back to school to get training to get back into the workforce," says Tim McGuire, director of marketing for Colorado Technical University, headquartered in Colorado Springs.

Andy Scantland, vice president of marketing for Denver-based Westwood College of Technology says overall enrollment was up 16 percent in 2002. "We were doing pretty well prior to that: we went from four campuses to 15 in the last four years," he says. "There is greater recognition that this is a good way to get a career-focused education. For our audience, the focus is on getting in, getting out, getting a career.

CTU's McGuire says that only two years ago employers would recruit students straight out of high school, after they'd attended a three-month course. "Back in the competitive marketplace, they'd get that certificate of knowledge, have that on the resume. The certificates were alphabet soup: MCSC, CCNP, CCNA," McGuire says. "They would start them at $30,000 a year. To an 18-year-old that's a lot of money."

Although employers are no longer recruiting everyone who has taken a certification course, tech schools still attract people who need to update their tech skills. "If you look at where the layoffs are, a lot of them were the groups that were hiring two years ago," McGuire says. "We expect to see the same ones coming back."

He adds that enrollment picked up recently.

"It was extremely quiet in December compared to years past. After the first of the year there was a flood of students, There was uncertainty, and people (who) haven't been laid off, think they...