More than a year ago, I wrote about the consolidation of five rural Minnesota community colleges. The new institution, known as Minnesota North College, has completed the merger and recently graduated its first class.
Like most other community colleges, each of the five campuses experienced declining enrollment. Without the community college merger, at least some of the schools would have closed. (Minnesota has a centralized higher education system, so the state exercises more control over each institution.) The merger has opened some new possibilities for all of the schools.
All campuses offer the same programs, which means that they all gained programs they had not previously offered. For programs that overlapped, faculty from each institution worked to create uniform course offerings.
In addition to delivering the same courses and programs, the combined institution adopted many of the policies and practices of individual institutions. For example, the Hibbing campus created a program in 2016 that was designed to recruit and support women studying in male-dominated fields. All Minnesota North campuses now use that program. Further, Minnesota North has transformed it to include students who are underrepresented in various fields of study.
The community college merger has also enabled Minnesota North to perform outreach and recruiting to high schools all over northern Minnesota, and to tribal nations there as well. Minnesota North is building a mobile welding lab that it will take on the road to recruit and train welders.
Successful community college merger requires actual oversight
A community college merger can be successful. Recently, seven community colleges in Dallas, TX combined to create a single institution, Dallas College. Combining community colleges provides the opportunity to strengthen the academic and student support services at the combined institution while reducing the size and cost of the institution’s administration.
Community colleges will need to learn to become highly efficient if they expect to survive. They will need to take concrete steps to rescue their programs and their facilities. That will require their Boards to deliver unflinchingly on the oversight they were elected to provide.
At WCC, the Board has tolerated years of unrestricted administrative hiring while simultaneously approving shrinking budgets for campus maintenance and capital expenditures. Besides tumbling enrollment, the consequences of nominal oversight include buildings in poor condition and raw sewage spewing out of broken wastewater facilities.
If the WCC Trustees are unwilling to do the work they were elected to, it’s time for a change.
Photo Credit: Arizona Department of Transportation, via Flickr
