Madison Area Technical College — MATC to most of us — is going great guns, now serving more than 43,000 students at its seven campuses and turning out graduates in many of today’s high-tech skills. Ninety percent of them take jobs right here at home.
But the school’s president, Bettsey Barhorst, is still perplexed that more area high school grads who can’t get into the University of Wisconsin-Madison as freshmen aren’t taking advantage of a new program that allows them to get a two-year liberal arts associate degree at MATC and then guarantees them admission to the UW-Madison for their junior and senior years.