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Richard Alfred was vice president for finance planning and management at New
York City Community College in 1975, when the Big Apple itself, the source
of 90% of the college’s revenue, was teetering on the brink of insolvency.
“We lost over a third of our operating budget in 18 months,” he recalls. “The executive team had to manage downsizing enrollment by 30% and switching the college from city funding to state funding so we could survive. It was sink or swim; you had to learn everything on your own. That’s where my interest in strategy came from.”
What he could have used then, and what he founded in 1986 after joining the faculty at the University of Michigan School of Education, was the Consortium for Community College Development, a membership organization whose broad array of services and programs provides community colleges with the tools they need to stay ahead of the future.
“Our focus has always been on what the future will look like, and how community colleges need to be organized and perform to meet the needs of the future,” Alfred says. “When I came here, we were doing research on community colleges and writing articles on them but I didn’t feel we were well connected to practice, to the reality of what was happening in the institutions, so we wanted to build an organization that would reverse the normal flow of academic research.”
And build it they did: The consortium has grown from its charter membership of 15 Michigan colleges to a roster of 150 institutions in 31 states and two Canadian provinces. There’s a simple reason for its spectacular success: it not only works, but there really isn’t anything else like it.
“Those folks do the very best sort of work in thinking about what community colleges ought to be planning and doing around culture change and planning for the future and thinking strategically,” says David Hartleb, president of Northern Essex Community College (NECC), Haverhill, Mass., and a CCCD client.
He describes NECC as “a sick puppy” when he became its president in 1997. “There were a lot of things wrong with it, a lot of anger and frustration, and Pat (Patricia Carter, executive director of the CCCD since 1991) and Dick did an absolutely fantastic job,” Hartleb says. “It was as much an effort to change our culture as it was to give us a strategic plan. They were very straight-talking, extremely knowledgeable, and their expertise spoke volumes. What they did here was quite remarkable, and I’m happy to tell anybody that.”
Laura Douglas says the opportunity to work with the consortium was one of the reasons she chose U-M for her graduate studies. She’s now vice president, instructional and student services, at Randolph Community College, Asheboro, N.C., and her enthusiasm is unabated. “The consortium helps us learn a lot of techniques that help us be proactive and smarter with our work,” Douglas says. “It has helped me and my institution achieve a much more strategic way of thinking. As college administrators, it’s really easy for us to get bogged down in our day-to-day activities, the fires that need to be put out. The consortium also helps us to step away from our desks and focus on the future.”
Under the leadership of Alfred and Carter, the CCCD has continuously reinvented itself and its offerings, maintaining its own focus on the future, and its reputation for reliability has grown, as one after another of its forecasts have been borne out.
“We were the first organization, back in the early 1990s, to show what the competitive arena would look like in community colleges and who the new competitors would be and what would that mean,” says Alfred. “Some colleges said no, no, it’s not going to work that way, but we were on the mark. We were also very good at getting colleges to realize that student needs were going to change and demands and expectations would accelerate dramatically. And our Strategic Leadership Forum has shown you can learn more in some ways by looking at organizations totally outside of higher education than just by studying yourself.”
The Strategic Leadership Forum is a collaborative learning approach to leadership development. Participant teams from approximately 10 colleges, selected by and including the presidents, form a cohort group for a series of interactive learning experiences designed to prepare leaders for institutions undergoing transition and transformation. The cohorts stay together for three years, and their activities include on-site observations of the systems and processes of non-educational organizations, such as Midwest Express Airlines and the Marriott hotel chain.
One forum participant for the last year has been Randall Van Wagoner, vice president, educational services, at Metropolitan Community College, Omaha, Neb., who changed his major as a graduate student from communications to education after “discovering” the consortium. He says the Strategic Leadership Forum “provides uncommon learning through uncommon experiences. By having a small cohort of community colleges stick together for three years and have shared learning experiences, it provides all the benefits of a learning community that we try to create for our students on campus. The difference is that it's in a professional environment; you just can't find that anywhere else.”
The Summer Institute on Organizational Change and Development in the Community
College is another unique consortium offering. Recognized as the premier conference
in the nation focusing on research and practice in institutional effectiveness
and student success in community colleges, it annually showcases exemplary
practices and programs that have been successfully implemented in two-year
colleges across the country. This year’s institute will be held June
16-18 in Cleveland. Full details are available at the consortium’s web
site, www.umich.edu/~cccd.
Community colleges today are being whipsawed by multiple, and often conflicting, constituencies coupled with diminishing resources. “Today’s fiscal limitations are going to be tomorrow’s fiscal realities,” says Carter, “so it’s a matter of figuring out how we’re going to do it with fewer of the traditional resources.”
Adds Alfred: “We decided last fall that we had to be in position to say to institutions that the decisions you make now about cutting back can be just organizational or designed to position you four or five years out.”
That kind of big-picture, long-term thinking is what distinguishes the consortium and creates value for its customers, as does its philosophy of institutional empowerment.
“We’re getting more successful at putting the membership in touch with each other so that we’re not the sole experts,” says Carter. “If we know a college is doing something well and another college is having difficulty, we try to hook them up. Our biggest objective is to help colleges increase their own capacity. Once a college knows how to do for itself, they’re driving the bus.”
