As our crowded classrooms, hallways, and—yes—parking lots suggest . . . we’re back in force this week. I hope you had a wonderful holiday and productive intersession. For the first message of spring term, I wanted to share a brief update from last week’s League for Innovation in the Community College Board retreat and respond a bit to the first State of the University speech that Chancellor Zimpher gave while I was away.
At the League retreat, we had the opportunity to interact with two key leaders for our sector: Walter Bumphus, new president of the American Association of Community Colleges, and Mark Milliron, director for postsecondary success at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
From his vantage point in DC, Walter Bumphus sees this as a time of great opportunity and great challenge for community colleges. The challenges we face are fairly obvious: declining state and local support, increasing enrollments, growing upward pressure on tuition and fees, and continuing issues with students’ college readiness. The opportunities largely rest in the positive attention that our sector has received from the President and from an ever-growing chorus of community college supporters within industry and foundations. The goal now is to capitalize on this attention by messaging—consistently and succinctly—the value and return that community colleges offer, encouraging investment in our work. At the federal and state levels, community colleges are seen as central to workforce preparation (training and retraining) and to the college completion agenda.
Clearly, the Gates Foundation is soundly behind the completion agenda. To promote success, the foundation wants to identify existing best practices and disseminate them to wider audiences. Perhaps unsurprisingly, technology-based innovations and solutions are central to Gates’ agenda. One area of specific focus is developmental education, wherein the foundation is looking for modularized and accelerated approaches that will prepare students more quickly for college-level work or career training. The foundation also wants to spur meaningful efforts in curriculum alignment between K12 and community colleges and then structured undergraduate experiences that promote completion. And if one concept is wrapped around all of these initiatives, it is the need for evidence-based practice that, once proven successful, can be scaled up to serve significant student populations.
Within the walls of MCC, I would love for us to engage in an active dialogue about how to promote completion within a context of open access and unrivaled quality. How do we localize the national conversation in service of our students and our community? How do we put our students at the center—recognizing their goals, setting high expectations, and promoting their success? This approach to student learning is nothing new for us at MCC, but what has changed is the need to support our practices with evidence and evaluation as we consider how best to use our increasingly limited resources. I very much look forward to these conversations.
And, now, a quick note about the State of the University address. Chancellor Zimpher’s speech last week put the Power of SUNY out front in Albany, directly on the heels of Governor Cuomo’s focus on SUNY in his inaugural address and in his plans for regional economic development councils. Her visible and unwavering leadership will be critical to SUNY’s own economic future within the state, and I am delighted to find that so many at MCC made time to listen to or watch the address. For this reason, I want to clear up a misunderstanding that seems to have arisen from the speech: community colleges are not part of the performance-based funding plan that the Chancellor announced. This plan is currently under discussion for SUNY four-year colleges and universities only.
So, what are your thoughts about the observations from AACC and Gates—or about the State of the University address?
Share them on the blog or send them to me directly. And remember, I’m always happy to visit departments, offices, and affinity gatherings to discuss all of this and more.