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 ma

See Full Page