In Nevada, unprecedented growth has kept just about every entity, from the housing market to government agencies, hustling to keep up with demand. Higher education is no different, leaving the state’s public institutions searching for ways to accommodate more and more college students each year.
In the past 12 years, Nevada’s public higher education system has gone from 35,000 students to 105,000, and Chancellor James Rogers said he doesn’t see it slowing down anytime soon. “I think that in the next year, you are going to see the whole system ratchet itself up,” Rogers said. “The growth line is going to slope upward, and then all at once it’s going to go straight up.”
To pay for the increased services needed, the state allocated $250 million in the past legislative session to help fund construction for more buildings and classrooms, in addition to nearly $1 billion for operating costs. “They gave us two to two-and-a-half times what we would usually get,” Rogers said.
However, he said it will still take private dollars to give the schools an edge on the competition. “Fortunately, Las Vegas is literally awash with private wealth,” Rogers said. “You get a $100,000 here and a $100,000 there, and pretty soon you’ve made a hell of a difference in a lot of programs.”
In addition to Rogers, the Nevada Business Journal recently talked with the college and university presidents in the university and community college system, who offered some insight about their schools and how they are keeping pace with such rapid growth.
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
In the past 10 years, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas has added 103 academic programs. The latest program is a Ph.D. in nursing, which was recently approved and funded by the Legislature. However, its mission isn’t to create more nurses to fill a severe shortage in the state, but rather to create more faculty members who can train more nurses to fill the shortage.
“We are never short on ideas for new programs,” said UNLV president Carol Harter. Nor is the university short on its list of long-term improvements. Among them is a facelift of sorts for the outside of the campus that would revitalize the area on both sides of Maryland Parkway. The project, called Midtown, is a joint effort with developer Mike Saltman, who owns the Promenade shopping center on Maryland Parkway across the street from UNLV.
“We want to narrow Maryland Parkway to two lanes to make it a much safer place to walk back and forth, expand the sidewalks, have sidewalk cafés, a couple of performance areas, interesting shops and a whole group of things that will attract people to the university,” Harter said.
Another item in the works is a proposed 640-acre campus – nearly twice the size of the existing campus – which would be located north of the Las Vegas Beltway, between Pecos Road and Lamb Boulevard. In July, Harter said they were negotiating with the Bureau of Land Management to acquire the land. Although it’s still in the preliminary phases, Harter said the campus would be a joint venture with the Community College of Southern Nevada and Nevada State College to create an innovative teaching center, offering a range of associate, bachelor and graduate degree programs.
Harter is also working toward raising the admission criteria for incoming freshmen. The reason, she said, is not to keep students out of the university, but rather to slow down growth. Enrollment is expected to surpass the 29,000 mark for the 2005-2006 academic year. “Our growth in the last four years is just under 5,000 full-time equivalent students, which is the size of more than half the campuses in the United States,” Harter said.
The current standards allow admission to students with a 2.5 grade point average. “We are already going to a 2.75 GPA in the fall of 2006 and we are scheduled to go to 3.0 in the fall of 2010,” Harter said, “but we may accelerate the pace of getting to that point.”
Generating funding is another top priority for Harter. This month, she is scheduled to announce the goal of UNLV’s first major capital campaign. “The state provides very good, basic funding for the core courses, and we are very grateful, but it cannot provide the dollars to get a law school ranked in the top 50 percent of all law schools or a hotel college ranked as number one or two in the country,” Harter said.
Nevada State College
The fact that Nevada State College’s current campus is a converted vitamin warehouse hasn’t inhibited enrollment in the state’s newest college. The projected full-time equivalent enrollment for last spring was 500 students, but at registration time, that figure nearly doubled to 940 full-time students seeking bachelor degrees ranging from elementary education to law enforcement.
Nonetheless, President Fred Maryanski is looking forward to filling in a vacant 550-acre site in Henderson with a permanent campus that integrates the surrounding community. Meetings were held this summer to develop a master plan.
Rogers said he anticipates the college will continue to expand in new areas once the main campus is built. “In the next 10 to 15 years you may have five or six campuses of the Nevada State College throughout the state,” he said. “I can see three branches of the Nevada State College in Southern Nevada, one certainly in Reno and maybe one in the eastern part of the state.”
Maryanski said he would like to see the new campus include facilities that provide students with opportunities for internships and real-life experiences, while benefiting the community, including a medical clinic for its nursing students.
“We are talking with the [Clark County] school district about potentially having a public school, like a middle school, here in the future,” Maryanski said. “We are talking with the city about having a joint library. It would be a branch of the Henderson public library and also the college library.”
The college has graduated 100 students since it opened in 2002. Its largest programs are in nursing and education. “Clearly there is an enormous demand for students in those areas,” Maryanski said. “We are doing our best to turn them out.”
The college is also establishing two-plus-two programs with Western Nevada Community College and Truckee Meadows Community College, in which students take their first two years of courses at the community college and the remaining two at Nevada State College. It implemented these types of programs early on with the Community College of Southern Nevada.
“Our vision is to develop a college which really is responsive to the needs of the business and civic sectors of the economy,” Maryanski said. “We need to educate professionals and really become players in the state’s economic development.”
Community College of Southern Nevada
The Community College of Southern Nevada (CCSN) has had its share of challenges in recent years. Perhaps its most difficult task was overcoming a rapid turnover of administrative leadership in the last decade. “I’m the seventh president in 10 years,” said Richard Carpenter, who was hired in August 2004.
One of his goals is to establish stability in what is the nation’s fourth largest community college. Already, Carpenter and his team have managed to trim $1 million per year off administrative overhead costs. “We are putting every bit of that back in the classroom and student services to increase student success,” Carpenter said.
Another difficulty has been keeping up with growth. The college’s student population has soared to an unprecedented 35,000 students, a figure that could reach 50,000 soon, according to Chancellor Rogers.
Carpenter estimates CCSN turns away about 3,000 students every semester due to lack of space. A $25 million general purpose classroom building planned for the Charleston campus should offer some relief. CCSN is also preparing to construct a new $22 million automotive technology center on its Cheyenne campus. The automotive program is the largest of its kind in the world, and currently enrolls 800 students, with another 400 turned away each semester. Both projects are being funded with money appropriated from this year’s legislative session and private donations.
Carpenter is also aggressively trying to decrease CCSN’s dropout rate, particularly among minority students. Half of all Nevada’s minority students enrolled in higher education attend CCSN. “Not enough of them are succeeding,” he said. “We have 26 counselors at the college. Academic advising is done exclusively by counselors. You have 26 counselors and 35,000 students. How much advising do you think students are getting?”
Part of the strategy is to put a formal student retention plan into place that will include early warning signals for students who may be on the verge of dropping out. By January, the college also plans to recruit additional staff solely dedicated to academic advising.
“We grew very quickly, and while we were growing very quickly we were turning over leadership, so our policies and procedures just didn’t keep pace with our growth,” Carpenter said.
Great Basin College
Great Basin College has come a long way since it first started holding classes in Elko residents’ garages and dining rooms in the 1950s. After several unsuccessful attempts to prove to the state that a college was needed in the small, rural community, Howard Hughes came to the rescue and wrote a check for $250,000 to jump-start Nevada’s first community college. It opened in 1957.
Ever since, Great Basin has been a pioneer of sorts. It was the first two-year college in the state to offer bachelor degrees – five in all. In the fall of 1999, it began its elementary education program. Danny Gonzales, deputy to the president, said it was a call to train and retain its residents, since 93 percent of the teachers in rural areas at the time came from out-of-state programs.
In 2001, Great Basin started a bachelor of applied science program, which targets miners in the area who want to pursue supervisory roles. Mining is Elko’s primary source of revenue. In 2002 it added a liberal arts degree. This academic year, the college opened with bachelor programs in nursing and secondary education.
President Paul Killpatrick said it’s important to pursue economic diversity in Elko, so it is not completely dependent on mining. He said community support is strong. In the past 20 years, the Great Basin College Foundation has raised about $20 million. “That puts us in the top 5 percent of any two-year college in the country, based on the length of time our foundation has existed and the size of the college,” Killpatrick said.
Next year, the college is expected to break ground on a $14 million electrical technical building, which will be used for programs in industrial plant mechanics, electrical technology and instrumentation. In addition, it will house the school’s academic success center.
University of Nevada, Reno
Growth may not be happening as quickly at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) as it is at the Southern Nevada schools. However, President John Lilley said the university is looking ahead with a master plan that will eventually take the campus from 275 acres to nearly 700 acres.
“It’s a long look at what we need to do to get ready in 20, 30, 40 years out when we expect to be at 30,000 students,” Lilley said. The student population is now at 16,000. The university is currently buying surrounding properties as they become available. Excavation began in July for a new student union and a library. The 165,000-square-foot student union is expected to be completed by 2007. The library, named the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center, will feature state-of-the-art digital access to about 20,000 scholarly journals, as well as digital workrooms for students to prepare presentations, a Basque studies center, art museum and auditorium. “We have gone from scarcity of knowledge to this explosion of knowledge,” Lilley said about the resources that are readily available to students now in the digital age. At $105 million, the library is the largest public works project in the history of the state. It is slated to open in 2008.
UNR also found some success this year in the legislative session, when the state allowed it to keep all of its research funding. Typically, 25 percent of almost every research grant goes to facilities and administration. “We appealed to them to let us keep all those dollars and invest them in a new biotech/biomed facility at the School of Medicine that will serve not only the School of Medicine, but Nevada Cancer Institute. It will also support cutting edge biology and cutting edge biotechnology.” Lilley said. As a result, the university will be building a $75 million biomed/biotech research center.
Truckee Meadows Community College
Whenever Truckee Meadows Community College (TMCC) President Philip Ringle is asked if the college needs anything, his usual response is: “The college doesn’t need anything. The right question is, ‘What does the community need that the college can help with?’”
Ringle said TMCC prides itself on helping to provide Northern Nevada communities with a skilled, trained workforce and helping to create economic diversity. “We see ourselves as a real partner with the community and with both governmental agencies and business and industry in solving some of the workforce needs in the area,” Ringle said.
The college is working with various industries where the need is greatest, including construction, manufacturing, automotive repair and allied health. This year it started two new accelerated nursing programs, in which students can earn a degree in 18 months. One is for adults who already have a bachelor’s degree and the other is a dual-admission program for 11th graders, who attend the program the summer before their senior year in high school and the summer after.
This year, the college also opened its Redfield campus, a joint venture with UNR. TMCC offers various programs, including nursing and veterinarian technician training, as well as general education. It is planning to add an alternative-energy program in the future. Ringle said the two institutes will be looking at offering several joint programs.
TMCC also received a television channel from Charter Communications that will help with its distance education programs. “We now have 3,000 students enrolled in some form of distance education, via the Internet or television,” Ringle said. “We’ll not only be providing distance education, but we will be able to broadcast to the community some of our cultural events, plays and musical performances and highlight some of our programs via television.”
Western Nevada Community College
High school seniors who are hesitating about whether to attend college had better watch out. “If we get our hands on them, we turn them into college students,” said Western Nevada Community College President Carol Lucey. “And we hope they become successful college students, earning associate degrees and then bachelor’s degrees. We’ve had many success stories of students who have gone on to law school and graduate school and have succeeded at some of the best institutions in the country.”
The college has campuses in Carson City, Fallon and Minden/Gardnerville, as well as four rural centers. Its enrollment is just over 5,000 students.
Lucey said community colleges often focus on students who might be the first in their families to go to college. “Our mission is to help those students make that transition to higher education by providing a lot of TLC,” Lucey said.
Western recently implemented an athletics program with a women’s soccer team and men’s baseball team, both scheduled to begin play in the 2005-2006 school year. They will compete under the division I Scenic West Athletic Conference. Both teams are funded entirely by philanthropy, Lucey said. The college also started a surgical technology program, which offers a certificate after one year of training. “This program trains people to assist in operating rooms, freeing up nurses for bedside duties, so it assists with the nursing shortage,” Lucey said.
Despite the challenges Nevada college and university presidents have keeping up with ever-increasing student enrollment, Harter said Nevada has something that most states don’t: an entrepreneurial spirit. “The entrepreneurial spirit here makes it possible to develop a whole variety of new programs and activities very rapidly and very successfully,” Harter said. “It’s just a greatly positive environment. There are no obstacles.”
Carpenter agreed, saying, “In most places I’ve been, when you talk about trying something, people say, ‘Oh no, we tried that. That won’t work.’ Here it’s, ‘Let’s give it a shot.’ It’s more receptive to change, to different ideas.”
Rogers said he is excited about the university system’s future and he thinks the public should be as well. “If I were the public I’d be watching this and saying, ‘Wow, look at these exciting things they are doing in the system,’” Rogers said.
Education Extra:
MBA Programs Model Real-World Experience
Today’s business leaders are facing some thought-provoking issues, from regulatory compliance and global outsourcing, to maximizing shareholder value. MBA programs are tasked with preparing executives for these and other real-world challenges, and the best way to do that is not through theoretical concepts, but through experience in scenarios that are as real as schools can make them.
For example, University of Phoenix has a program called Next-Generation MBA, which focuses on management and leadership challenges. Several simulations are woven into the curriculum to allow students to make real-time decisions, just as they would in the workplace. Working in teams, they are confronted with real-world problems such as communication difficulties, ethical issues and human resources challenges.
“The complex issues confronting managers require more than experience and technical expertise to resolve,” said Brian Lindquist, associate vice president of academic affairs and dean of the College of Graduate Business and Management at University of Phoenix. “Above all, managers must have keen judgment and exceptional problem-solving capabilities.”
Regis University, a Jesuit institution based in Denver, trains its MBA students to run a business through a type of software known as a “responsive model.” The computer simulation puts students in charge of a virtual company in which the decisions they make affect the company’s balance sheet, cash flow, market share and stock price.
Classes are divided into teams who are put in charge of a fictional sneaker company. Students work together to make decisions that eventually affect the many divisions of their firm. The computer software shows them how each choice has ripple effects throughout the organization.
Michael Goess, chairman of Regis’ division of business graduate programs, said, “Everything you do in the classroom is analyzing what someone else has already done, or what someone else thinks should be done. You don’t get to put your ideas into play. But there is no better experience than actually doing, rather than watching.”
