When 66-year-old Elliot Stern arrived in 2019 to take over the leadership of Saddleback College as president, he almost immediately began to rethink what would get built on the community college’s proposed Tustin satellite campus.
Trustees of Saddleback had shown interest in a medical program, but Stern persuaded them to pause that idea while he looked in a different direction.
With his background in medicine, he understood the niche well enough to know that the future at Saddleback in an overcrowded medical field wasn’t the home run he was looking for. The college was already far along with plans to set up a medical simulation program at Saddleback’s advanced technology and education park — referred to as ATEP@Saddleback — to train healthcare professionals using “high-fidelity mannequin simulators.”
After a review of Saddleback’s programs, Stern’s pitch to the trustees in early 2020 proposed programs dedicated to teaching high-end culinary skills and advanced automotive training.
“It’s one thing to bestow upon somebody a degree,” said Stern, who has doctor degrees in law and osteopathic medicine. “It’s quite another to make sure that the degree has value.”
The new campus on the former Marines Corps Station, now called Tustin Legacy, is off to a good start since opening Aug. 11, leading Stern to confidently predict enrollment will double there over the next five years.
The 2025 fall semester’s enrollment in the culinary program hit 641 students, up 54.8% over last fall’s 414. For automotive, enrollment grew to 558 students, up 16% over last fall’s 480.
The goal of Saddleback’s campus off Valencia Avenue is to place students in apprenticeships, pay them a living wage, and get them to think about becoming professionals in a lifelong career in automotive or culinary fields, Stern said.
The heads of the two curriculum programs in Tustin agreed.
“My program is very hands-on. I’m trying to make it not a hobby but a professional shop,” said Taylor Brooks, department chair for the automotive technology program. He is is working to establish apprenticeship partnerships with local dealerships, including Irvine-based Karma and Lucid Motors, as well as other EV makers.
“We are an agnostic training program. My goal is to get students out of here and earn a cost-of-living wage,” he said.
The culinary training program has attracted top chef as instructors — including Kyle St. John, executive chef at The Ranch in Laguna Beach, and Louis Eguaras, who has cooked porterhouse steaks for former U.S. President George H.W. Bush at the White House and grilled chickens marinated in tequila and lime juice for President Bill Clinton.
“We’re going from a triple-wide trailer in the village (of Mission Viejo) at Saddleback College, to Tustin,” said Lisa Inlow, chair of the culinary, hospitality and tourism department. “It’s a very stark difference.”
The estimated price tag for the Tustin campus expansion is $60 million to $70 million, according to Stern.
We asked Stern, who plans to retire next July, about ATEP’s partnerships and apprenticeship programs. His answers have been edited for clarity and length.
Q: How did you settle on advanced automotive and culinary programs for the Tustin campus?
A: When I joined Saddleback, my ask of the trustees was, ‘Can you give me some time to figure out what our contribution to ATEP will be, what we’d like to build out there?’
And for us, we had aging culinary facilities that really needed a new home, and were not part of our facilities master plan, so the opportunity presented itself to create a master class culinary facility at ATEP.
And then at the same time, the curriculum for our auto program started shifting and having really good foresight into the future of transportation and with the coming of EV technology and autonomous technology, we realized quickly that we were going to need new facilities.
Q: What happened to the idea of building a healthcare training facility in Tustin?
A: The idea predated me — and it was not a ridiculous one — to build a healthcare training facility. There were several such facilities at the time that were developing simulation centers with very sophisticated, six-figure robotic mannequins, on which training is done in low-stress environments for nurses, physicians and other healthcare providers.
Our nursing program, which today is number one in the country based on board passage rates, [of the National Council Licensure Examination, administered by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing], had one of the first simulation centers. (A simulation facility — or SIM — is a learning environment for medical professionals that uses computerized mannequins to practice clinical skills.)
The idea was to build an even larger SIM facility and then using that with industry partnerships to bring others there that could use it to train on.
On the surface, it sounded like a really good idea, but by the time I came on board in 2019, it was pretty well known that it wasn’t. What I brought to the table was the understanding that most large hospitals, like the ones in our community, were developing their own SIM centers. This idea that we would have big partnerships and revenue generation from a SIM facility might no longer work, and that’s when I asked permission, if we could rethink that.
Q: How do you plan to parlay ATEP into partnerships and internships?
A: One of the attractive things for us as a college in going to Tustin is that when you think about these programs, and where our industry partners are, we’re kind of isolated down here on the southernmost end of Orange County.
The amount of industry partners that we have in that area is somewhat limited. That is to say, the largest partners we’re going to find in our own service area for automotive are going to be dealerships. For culinary, there are lots of restaurants and some restaurant chains, but no major hospitality centers.
So getting a satellite campus in central Orange County and being able to expand our focus with industry partners means that we have more opportunity to work with industry. That’s becoming important to us for the college, and particularly in these programs, because our curriculum is also shifting to incorporate work-based learning — which is internships.
With the demand for workers in these two areas, what we were seeing was that students were leaving our programs early before completion, because the demand in industry is so high that they would hire them after just a couple semesters.
Q: Tell me about forecasts for enrollment with ATEP?
A: For the two programs that moved out there, both had fairly limited enrollments, particularly culinary, because the facility itself had a cap. There’s just so many classes you can offer when you’re in one kitchen in a portable building. So, it really opened up a door for large enrollment increases in culinary.
The last I heard is we’re up [54%] in the fall semester. This sounds impressive, but we were afraid we were going to lose enrollment because students who were based in our immediate service area might not be willing to drive to Tustin. We may have lost a few of those, but we’ve done what we can to support them with transportation.
For auto, it’s growing more slowly this fall. Again, we thought we’d lose a lot of those students along the way, and as it turns out, we’re experiencing big gains. The target for both of those programs is that they will double their enrollment within five years. So far, the trajectory is beating that.
Q: How does a modern-day school like Saddleback manage student demand and raise the bar to get students to pursue automotive and culinary degrees?
A: We stay ahead by making sure our curriculums are revised so that our students don’t end up in entry level jobs. We’re tracking this very carefully through the College Futures Foundation, a nonprofit foundation that just published data showing that of 43 community colleges in Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange counties, rank us No. 1 in both in wage gains that our degrees bestow upon our students, and in 10-year salaries post-graduation.
For us, that translates into wage gains greater than $18,000 for an associate degree from Saddleback College over a high school diploma. This is the highest of those 43 colleges in our region. Our students were earning, on average, more than $50,000 in salaries after 10 years post-graduation, the highest of the 43.
Q: What partnerships has the college developed for the advanced automotive and culinary programs?
A: Many of the small internships are with dealerships. We have a partnership with John Patterson, who owns handful of dealerships (Patterson Autos) around Orange County, and that’s to develop internships, and relationships. We’re in discussions right now with Lucid Motor, and are building partnerships with Fountain Valley-based Hyundai USA and Irvine-based Kia America, both of which have regional headquarters in the area.
We’ve had partnerships with multiple restaurants, including a couple of large chains. We also have ties with The Ranch in Laguna Beach, Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, The Waterfront Beach Resort in Huntington Beach, Pasea Hotel & Spa in Huntington Beach and Surf & Sand resort in Laguna Beach.
The discussions around relationships and internships over the last two years are now starting to come to fruition. Part of the way we’re able to do that is we have a $3 million grant from the Samueli Foundation that we got about a year ago, and the funds help us both create and coordinate those internships with industry partners. In some cases, it helps pay for half of the cost of the paid internship.
It’s a win-win situation. The employer pays for half the cost of the internships and the grant from Samueli pays for half the cost and the student gets a paid internship.
ATEP@Saddleback
Address: 1634 Valencia Ave., Tustin, on 61.42-acres within the 1,605-acre Tustin Legacy, which includes city and regional parks, housing, public schools, commercial businesses, major shopping complexes and a research park.
Cost to build: $60 million-$70 million
Opened: Aug. 11, 2025
Others located on the campus: Taiwanese computer maker Advantech, which signed a 75-year ground lease to build a six-story headquarters for $265 million, leased land adjacent to ATEP from the South Orange County Community College District. Also on the campus is the Goddard School of Tustin, a preschool and daycare program. The college also is in negotiations to bring a kindergarten to 12th grade school.
