Degrees of Change
by Craig Berosh
June 1, 2009
Through courses like “Mathematics of Games," "Tribal Gaming: Legal and Regulatory Issues” and “Casino Resort Marketing” the casino managers of tomorrow are getting a real-world education at a growing number of colleges and universities today
While enrollment numbers are modest, the Class of 2009 may very well
represent the largest number of new college graduates to receive degrees
specializing in casino-related curriculum.
As part of its hotel
management department the University
of Nevada, Las Vegas offers students the opportunity to
earn a bachelor’s degree in gaming management with topics covering table games
management, table games security and the sociology of gaming. The gaming
management program at UNLV has been around for five years and includes
non-gaming curriculum such as law courses, organizational behavior, human
resources and facilities management. Current enrollment is about
130.
“[Students] get an
understanding of the gaming industry from a much broader perspective. It’s a
much more rounded degree in business operations,” said William Werner, interim
chairman of the hotel management department at UNLV.
The goal at UNLV and
other schools offering gaming degrees and certifications is to continue to fill
the casino-resort employee pool with a fresh supply of management-level
candidates.
“As we progress
toward more educated people, people with degrees moving into gaming management,
the executives at the companies expect more of their gaming management people
to really understand what the game is, how we make money at it and understand
the numbers of it,” Werner said.
Essentially, the
colleges strive to offer feeder programs for gaming operators, and they welcome
input and support from the industry.
“We are always
looking to the industry to add unique and interesting courses,” said Alan
Silver, director of the Casino Resort Studies program at the Mississippi Coast
Campus of Tulane University in Biloxi.
“As educators you have to be there and available to help the
community.”
When Silver took the
job in 2004 at Tulane, which offers an associate in arts degree, a minor and a
post-baccalaureate certificate in Casino Resort Studies, one of his first
priorities was to get the right curriculum in place. He and Richard Marksbury,
dean of Tulane’s School of Continuing Studies, hosted a luncheon for casino
executives from the Mississippi
Gulf Coast,
including casino presidents and executives of marketing, human resources and
slot operations to get a better understanding of the skills sets demanded by
casino operators.
The feedback Silver
received at that meeting is now the basis for the Casino Resort Studies
program, which had an enrollment of about 120 in the fall of 2008. During its
evolution the school has added courses such as “Casino Resort Financial
Accounting” and “Casino Resort Marketing” to give the program more of a business
focus and approach. It also added customer service and casino resort leadership
and group dynamics to address the need for interpersonal skills. Some of the
school’s more popular electives include data base marketing, security and
surveillance and table games management. Silver said the school is looking to
add a course in the information technology sector. Tulane even offers a course
on “The History of Gambling”.
Specialization
Last month the first-ever graduates from the Sycuan Institute on Tribal
Gaming at San Diego State University received B.S. degrees with an emphasis in
tribal gaming.
“This is the very
first and only degree in tribal gaming in the world, so the Sycuan Band are
pioneers in that sense,” said Kate Spilde Contreras, chair of the
institute.
With a 2005 endowment
from the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation, which operates the Sycuan Casino
in El Cajon, Calif., near San Diego, the institute provides research and
education, including classes with titles such as “Tribal Gaming: Cultural and
Political Context, Casino Operations, Legal and Regulatory Issues” and
“Marketing and Public Relations”.
According to Spilde
Contreras, tribal gaming’s management and operations environment is unique, and
it often takes outsiders, even outsiders with commercial gaming experience,
time to get up to speed on the different regulations and cultures of tribal
governments.
“We talk a lot about
government, as it is the only other form of government-owned gaming in our
country,” she explained. “We have state lotteries, but tribal gaming is the
only government so far that runs casinos in the U.S.”
Another unique aspect
of the curriculum, Spilde Contreras says, is its emphasis on the fact that
tribal gaming has a “larger purpose” and is “bigger than the business”. All the
classes offer a foundation to show what happens when net revenues from gaming
are transferred to tribal governments and then get put to work, “as the federal
law intended,” she said.
As Werner at UNLV and
Silver at Tulane have done, Spilde Contreras has brought practitioners and
regulators and general managers and executives from the casino industry into
the classroom. A general manager from a nearby casino might be the guest
lecturer for one class and a tribal chairman for another. “We want to give
exposure to both because, yes, the general manager might be your boss, but who
you are really working for is the tribal community. Luckily, we have 10 casinos
in San Diego County to draw from as far as
expertise,” she said.
In much the same
spirit as the endowment from the Sycuan Band that made the Institute on Tribal
Gaming a reality, the Association of Gaming Equipment Manufacturers made a
$300,000 contribution over three years to support curriculum at the College of Southern Nevada designed specifically
for slot technicians. The college’s School
of Applied and Advanced
Technologies used the contribution to upgrade supplies and staff and buy a slot
machine simulator.
“One mission of AGEM
is to support education initiatives, and one of the best examples of this was
our contribution to launch a slot technician curriculum at CSN with a goal of
training technicians to enter the workplace and hopefully work for AGEM members
or operators by having the skills needed,” said Marcus Prater, the
association’s executive director.
Enrollment in the
program has increased to some 250 students during the last three years, Prater
says, and a text book documenting best practices is being developed. AGEM is
looking to expand the slot curriculum at other schools across the country. As
server-based gaming and networked casino floors push forward it seems likely
that the job of slot technician will become a more technical task in the
future. With that, AGEM and its members are acting to ensure that there is a
ready supply of workers to fill the need.
Valuing education
“I’m pleased to see that the gaming industry has risen to the point to where it’s been justified to actually be a formalized curriculum at a college,” she said. “There are a lot of complexities in this business, from a gaming operations perspective, that until you really get inside the industry and really understand the inter-workings you probably wouldn’t guess it to be so.”
Of course many operators also have in place their own executive-development programs which are specific to their properties’ operations and procedures. Harrah’s Rincon in California, for example, has a 12-week Supervisor Development Program specifically designed to provide “high-potential” supervisors exposure to the workings of departments that they may have been curious about or interested in working.
“Of the 50 supervisors who have participated 22 have transferred into other departments or have been promoted to a management position here at Harrah’s Rincon or at another Harrah’s Entertainment property,” said Peggy Keers, the casino’s vice president of human resources.
The trend toward more universities offering casino-specific educations goes against the ways things have been done in the industry for many years, say educators. Universities are attempting to equip students with the skills needed to become managers, and eventually executives, after or soon after graduation. As explained by UNLV’s Werner, the “classic gaming story” is the casino worker who began as a pit clerk and worked his way up to casino manager as opposed to the person who goes to school and gets a degree in gaming management. “That is slowly changing,” he said, “and students are finding more and more that a degree is giving them an opportunity to start at a higher level instead of working as a dealer and trying to get some sort of management job. Now they are being hired more directly into management jobs.”
A formal education in gaming at the university level has evolved, agrees Silver. And the mindsets of casinos around the country need to continue to evolve for further acceptance of the importance of education.
“We’ve really come a long way here in the South,” he said. “There was a stigma that education in casino studies was essentially teaching people how to be dealers. This is not the case; we are preparing students for management roles. For casinos it’s accepting education when you have people in management roles who didn’t go to college, and all of a sudden you have people with a college degree. There is this fear and intimidation. That attitude is definitely less so today; it’s been an evolutionary process, more and more over the years.”
Officials at UNLV and Tulane are sensitive to the idea that current gaming employees are also interested in their programs as vehicles for career advancement. One of Silver’s initiatives going forward is to upgrade Tulane’s online education and certification offering to allow working students as well as distance-learning students to participate. Silver also points out that many casino operators offer tuition reimbursement programs for their employees.
Lastly, with the souring of the global economy and the casino industry enduring its share of worker layoffs, experts say now might be the opportune time for casino employees to consider going back to school and upgrading their education credentials.
“Being an eternal optimist I know that the economy will turn around in the near future, so now would be a great time to learn something new,” said Char Coburn, director of human resources for the Bonanza Casino in Reno, Nev. “The best way to learn to deal is to go to a dealer’s school. The best way to learn to work on a slot machine is to go to a trade school. On the other hand, if you are a casino worker who has been laid off, now might be a great time to go to a community college and learn accounting skills.”
Today’s casino world is a different one, Coburn said. From housekeeping in a megaresort to cocktail servers on a casino floor, jobs have a different flavor.
“We need to acknowledge that and train and prepare people for that.”
Craig Berosh
is associate editor/multimedia
editor for BNP Media Gaming Group. He can be contacted at +1 702 794 0718, ext.
8711; or by e-mail at beroshc@bnpmedia.com.
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