Expanding for Impact

March 31, 2021

By Dr. Carrie Besnette Hauser

Recently, I received my first COVID-19 vaccination.  As the nurse who administered my shot – a Colorado Mountain College nursing program graduate – placed a small bandage on the injection site, I was once again energized by the contributions CMC makes to our state. This “shot in the arm” was both cause for optimism and a symbolic reminder that many challenges still lie ahead.

While it has been an exhausting year, it has also been inspiring and transformational. Ever since the pandemic rocked our world in March 2020, our team never missed an opportunity to make the dream of college a reality for students enrolled at CMC’s 11 campuses and online.

We worked nearly nonstop to gather facts, plan, innovate, communicate and implement strategies – all while maintaining an operation and facilities that support over 15,000 learners and nearly 2,000 employees without interruption.

Mere days after the Governor’s stay-at-home-order, we launched CMC Responds, a major initiative to provide local businesses with no-cost consulting and free summer tuition for thousands of students whose lives were disrupted by an economic nose-dive. Our employees and students agreed to practice the Five Commitments to Containment, which resulted in very few COVID-related incidents on our campuses.

This spring, CMC has offered more than 1,000 courses online or in a flex format, while safely delivering select classes in-person.

Facing a devastating recession, we were still able to secure several multi-million dollar grants, reinvesting them locally to make CMC even more accessible to learners in rural Western Slope communities.

I could not be prouder of our faculty and staff for their resilience and going above and beyond to maintain continuity of CMC services in new and creative ways.

And, their efforts paid off.  We are on track to graduate the largest class of students in CMC’s history this May.

So, where do we go from here?

It will take more hard work, thinking differently about how we relate to each other and avoiding a “return to normal” that reinforces cultural divisions in our society. It means exploiting what this massive disruption taught us and using that information to more effectively reach all students.

And, by “all students,” I mean every individual who could benefit from CMC irrespective of income, age, gender, background or political beliefs and especially those marginalized by an unforgiving and rapidly-changing economy.

Colleges across the country articulate commitments to diversity and inclusivity.  Noteworthy progress has certainly been made at CMC.  The 15-point achievement gap between Hispanic and majority students when I arrived in 2013 is gone. The college’s senior leadership team is nearly equally gender balanced. I’m approaching eight years of service as the institution’s second female president.

While these are milestones to celebrate, the pandemic intensified barriers to college in our high-cost mountain towns. The lack of affordable housing, food insecurity and inadequate mental health services add great pressures to existing and aspiring CMC students.

Additionally, segments of the public remain dubious about the value of college. The pandemic’s heavy economic toll only reinforces their doubts. While higher education has become more open and accessible to a broader range of individuals, a renewed and charged perception that it is “elitist” has some students and families choosing to bypass its benefits. Better understanding and addressing this unfortunate narrative will be critical, especially for an open access institution that prides itself on welcoming everyone.

So, considering the challenges that will remain post-pandemic, we must recommit ourselves to finding and serving those still excluded from higher education.

CMC’s vision statement begins with these words: “We aspire to be the most inclusive, innovative and student-centered college in the nation…”

While this important phrase guides our institution daily, I also wonder if being “inclusive” underscores the disconnection some individuals feel? Inclusive implies inviting others in to an existing culture, environment, family structure or community. It doesn’t suggest that the culture or community itself must change.

Perhaps it would be more appropriate for higher education to expand itself to reach those not currently enrolled, aware or interested by examining long-standing norms and practices to find missing voices and divergent ways of thinking, challenging existing mind-sets and questioning operating practices that may exclude certain groups or individuals.

For CMC, “expansion” means looking differently at the hurdles that exist for our students (and potential students) to live, learn and thrive.

As we face the months ahead, I remain hopeful. This fall, all of our campuses will welcome students – both in person and online – with new tools, perspectives and attitudes. Together, our team will evaluate who is missing from the college, barriers that prevent their enrollment and strategies to ensure that all are successful and belong.

The Promise of Dual-Mission Colleges

The institutions, which mix certificate, two-year and four-year programs, offer a novel approach in a postsecondary ecosystem that needs to adapt, write Jamie Merisotis and Carrie Besnette Hauser.

By Jamie Merisotis and Carrie Besnette Hauser

Originally published on Inside Higher Ed, February 4, 2021

Today’s postsecondary education system is out of sync with what our nation needs — as surveys of students, employers and others show. One reason is that it’s ossified by structures put in place a half century ago, which led many colleges and universities, even new ones, to pursue academic and business models that aligned with strictly designed categories, whether they served students or not.

In recent years a group of colleges started offering a mix of programs challenging the notion that college credentials must come in neat two-year or four-year packages.

From our respective perches, we believe that these “dual-mission” institutions offer another way forward for higher education in the post-pandemic period.

We got here in part because a group of higher ed leaders, led by former University of California president Clark Kerr, worked to create some order out of a rapidly growing and changing system. The Carnegie classification system was designed in the early 1970s, a time when higher education was booming following the passage of the Civil Rights Act, rapid expansion of community colleges and the adoption of the Higher Education Act, which launched many of the federal financial aid programs that still benefit millions of college students today.

In the decade that followed, the United States saw the launch and expansion of hundreds of colleges and universities that, to a very large degree, looked identical. Most had two 15-week semesters, offered “traditional” academic degrees and adhered to the expected standards assigned to “two-year” or “four-year” institutions. Yet college prestige was universally accepted as if it were chiseled into stone tablets.

With this backdrop, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which designed the original classification system, offered a taxonomy to differentiate colleges based not on their productivity, learning outcomes or innovation, but on their degree types, research intensity, resources and student populations. For 50 years this system has organized colleges in seemingly well-defined categories, effectively creating the expectation that colleges must fit such categories.

The problem is that today, those categories — and the students they were meant to serve — have gone the way of shag carpeting and the BlackBerry.

As with everything else in 2020, higher education was turned on its head. After the pandemic hit, students and faculty went home. Removed from the historical architecture and scholastic traditions that reinforced the rank-ordered classification system, students began to question whether their colleges were worth the price. Some even sued their colleges for charging full tuition for an online experience.

Once colleges and universities shifted to a universal instructional mode — one that treats musty teaching traditions as a liability — some students began to question their ready acceptance of higher ed hierarchy. This has added complexity and urgency to the need for new models.

And as students more openly consider a wider array of pathways, such as technical certificates and associate degrees that lead to high-demand jobs requiring specialized skills, increasingly, they ask, “What exactly are we getting for our money?”

All the while, employers complained about not finding the talent they need. Nearly three-quarters of employers told a 2019 Cengage survey that they were having trouble hiring qualified candidates.

In response, a group of colleges decided that, rather than adhere to the confines of the Carnegie classifications, they would try to serve as many students as possible without considering predetermined classifications. These class-busting, dual-mission institutions broke out of the two-year/four-year mold by factoring in prior learning, online course offerings and pathways that might range from six months to four years (or more) depending on students’ circumstances or a rapidly changing economy.

Today, an estimated 400 dual-mission colleges — including many in Utah endorsed by state legislation, the Florida system of state colleges, a handful in Georgia, Colorado Mountain College and others — offer technical certificates, applied programs and robust liberal arts degrees at all levels.

The timing is providential. As machines get smarter and smarter, the work of the future will be rooted in things that differentiate humans from machines: our intelligence, our drive and our values. To succeed in the future, workers will have to develop both their human traits — including empathy, ethics and compassion — and human capabilities such as creativity, problem solving, analysis and communication.

Teaching those skills and capabilities — and combining them with the deep technical expertise gleaned from “traditional” higher education — is what distinguishes dual-mission institutions.

At a recent national summit on dual-mission institutions, we were joined on a panel by a group of presidents who said that a key strength in the dual-mission approach was meeting today’s increasingly diverse students where they are. That’s especially important right now because these students — adults, parents, workers, people of color and those from lower-income households — rarely earn a “two-year” degree in two years or a “four-year” degree in four years — underscoring dated nomenclature and structures designed decades ago for an entirely different student profile.

Summit participants agreed that, due to the disruptions caused by the pandemic, U.S. higher education is at a pivotal moment — and that the dual-mission approach has the nimbleness to respond.

One president shared a recent conversation with a faculty member, who said she was able to adjust to changes forced by the pandemic “because I’m used to teaching students from a variety of backgrounds who are juggling school with their lives.”

Several student speakers shared that dual-mission institutions are effective because they offer a welcoming environment and flexible experience. Those enrolling in entry-level or shorter programs can transition seamlessly into bachelor’s degree programs at the same institution, having seen their peers be supported and successful. Conversely, students pursuing bachelor’s degrees can easily pick up a specialized certificate or “reverse transfer” to earn an associate degree.

The moral of this story is that adaptation and innovation needn’t be confined to classifications determined 50 years ago. The pandemic has challenged nearly everything we once assumed true in our business, government and education systems.

Many colleges are struggling; some have failed. But others are adapting to students’ shifting needs and aspirations.

Whether we call them multimission, dual mission or just boldly nonconforming, these blended institutions may be the canary in the Carnegie system’s coal mine. They are the approach best able to reach the millions of Americans who will need more — and different — education or the work of the future.

Jamie Merisotis is president and CEO of Lumina Foundation and author of the recently released book “Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines.”

Carrie Besnette Hauser  is president of Colorado Mountain College.

Read more by Jamie Merisotis and Carrie Besnette Hauser