Larta is sad to announce the untimely and tragic death of a friend, Ram Gayakwad, President of Mt. Sierra College in Monrovia, California. He was visiting India over the holidays and died instantly in a horrible traffic accident.

Ram was a pioneer in vocational education, starting his career as an assistant professor of electronics with the Missouri Institute of Technology in Kansas City, Mo. The school is best known by its later incarnation, DeVry Institute of Technology. As part of the management team of the company, he opened the first DeVry camous in California in 1983, and presided over the growth of its student population to 2,500. In 1993, he was named president and director of the newly-founded Mt. Sierra College, and designed and developed all certificate, diploma and degree programs, past and present, for the College. Under his leadership, the college has become known as a leading provider of information technology education, with accredited baccalaureate degree programs in multimedia, telecommunications and IT.

Since 2000, he was involved with accreditation of member schools for ACCST (formerly known as the Accrediting Commission of the National Association of Trade and Technical Schools), which was established as an independent body in 1993 to conform with the Higher Education Act Amendments of 1992. The organization is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as a national accrediting agency for private, postsecondary institutions offering occupational vocational programs. At the time of his death, he was building a collaborative of vocational training providers, incorporating elements of distance learning and skills accreditation. His dynamism, knowledge and intuition about the market was so remarkable that he made believers of many institutions and bureaucracies, bringing them into a new world of possibilities.

We will miss this warm, gracious and intelligent man. Our condolences to his family and colleagues.

by Rohit Shukla
Larta CEO