“This institution belongs to the city,” Mesa Community College President Shouan Pan emphasized as he set the stage for a lunch-time brainstorming session Thursday with Mesa activists.
That’s what Pan said. But what does that mean and does he mean what he said?
In exchange for a lasagna lunch, Pan and other college leaders wanted members of what is known as MCC’s Commission on Excellence in Education to talk about their expectations of MCC as members of the Mesa community and in general comment on the vision of its future that the college has been developing.
I don’t think MCC got their lasagna’s worth, except from one table—a table that I was not at.
Former vice mayor Claudia Walters said her table urged the college to “raise the expectations of Mesa.” She said MCC is the “best kept secret” in the community and needs to strengthen its public relations effort. Twitter it, she said.
I later asked what her table was driving at. She said her table mates talked about the fact that too many Mesa high school graduates haven’t seen the need for getting a post-high school education.
They figured they could make enough money through jobs in the once thriving construction trades–jobs that have now dried up. What a hard lesson to learn.
Walters said participants at her table, including East Valley Partnership director Roc Arnett, felt the college needed to put more effort into pitching Mesa’s youth on the importance of continuing their education.
In thinking about Walters’ table report and in looking back on my notes from the session, I realized I was troubled by the five rules that Pan had set down for developing a vision for MCC’s future:
The themes he identified are 1. Protect students. 2. Protect learning. 3. Be strategic and long-term. 4. Be based on sound data. 5. Promote collaboration and resource sharing among various groups within the college.
Nothing wrong with those, but what troubled me in hindsight was that they all seemed insular. There was no clear connection made between the college’s future and the city’s future. If MCC belongs to the city, shouldn’t there have been?
Perhaps I’m being petty and parochial here, but even the video that we watched from a mandatory college staff meeting featured a Phoenix student talking about her experience at MCC.
The recession has brought on a sea-change in the way Mesa leaders are talking about job development. From Mayor Scott Smith to House Speaker Kirk Adams, Mesa political leaders are for the first time that I can remember calling for a broader and more durable local economy with livable-wage jobs.
That won’t happen without a well-trained workforce. (Actually, my table did talk about the relationship between a skilled workforce and job creation).
After greetings, introductions and briefings, the meeting only allowed for about 20 minutes of brainstorming time. I suspect, given more time, this group of people committed to Mesa’s well-being would have pressed hard to overtly intertwine MCC’s future with the city’s.
Check out my website which advocates transforming ASU West & ASU Polytechnic campuses into independent state universities, titled “Phoenix State University” (PSU) and “Arizona Institute of Technology” (AzTech), respectively. The web address is located here: http://PSUandAzTech.blogspot.com
I do believe MCC needs to step up its self promotion and recruitment efforts. For too many years, the growth model allowed MCC to sit back and wait for students to come to it. And students could afford to bypass college, given that there were jobs. But given the times now, MCC needs to become more of a presence in Mesa, especially at Mesa Public Schools, in order to convince students that 1. college is a sound investment in their future 2. MCC is the place for that investment to start. MCC can work in partnership with Mesa schools at the elementary, middle school, and high school levels to establish a presence so that more students from Mesa, and Mesa schools especially, think seriously about attending MCC.